Cooking in the 1970s

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I've been watching Delia Smith cookery shows from the 1970s and some things really stood out so if you were an adult then please enlighten me.
Delia introduces dried beans and lentils as a food of the future because meat is expensive and scarce and we'll all be eating more plant based substitutes. Of course we all know now meat is cheap and not great quality but people eat loads. What was it like in the 1970s?
Also most of her dishes are European-did you cook Indian/Chinese food in the 1970s?
I was born at the end of the 70s and am not ethnically English so always had non English food. I remember my mum making Indian savoury snacks and taking them into an mainly white English primary school and the teachers all excitedly gathering to have a taste of spicy foods.

Also Delia likes to remind viewers to use the oven widely and not turn it on for one small dish

Meat might be relatively cheap now but it was very expensive in the 70s, especially chicken. That was a Christmas-only treat when I was a child. We did have meat but not at every meal.

And no, fancy foreign foods were rarely cooked at home. Hell, we rarely went to restaurants at all. I remember my first visit to a Chinese restaurant as a child, that’s what such a rare treat it was. Also etched into my mind was the first time I had fresh salmon, asparagus and avocado

We were so excited by Delia's programme. It made cooking interesting and accessible. The books came out in three volumes and we were so excited when they were published. Her all in one sponge was a game changer. I still use her recipes as I love so many of them. I occasionally cooked Indian, but no ready made sauces then so I had a collection of spices. Some were really hard to find. Chinese was very difficult from scratch which was the only way. It was easier to buy from the Chinese restaurant where lurid colours were used. Obviously there were no ready meals unless you count Frey Bentos tinned pies. We cooked pasta, but not pizza. I made steak and kidney pies and puddings. Steak, chops, gammon steaks and macaroni cheese. I didn't use herbs or garlic. I didn't eat a mushroom until I was an adult. There were no courgettes or aubergines available out of London. We were expected to be SAHMs so we had the time for shopping and cooking. I got my first freezer on the day my first baby was born. It arrived as I went into labour!

@ismellphantoms I'm really enjoying the shows! Delia has a nice way of explaining her techniques.

I saw a 1970s cookery show can't remember which one but the presenter was cooking spaghetti bolonese and kindly explained what spaghetti was and how it could be bought from specialist food stores 😀

@BitterAndOnlySlightlyTwisted was beef popular and cheaper than chicken? On Delias show she talks about beef dripping and what goes well with it.

I think it's difficult to imagine what a difference widespread ownership of freezers made to the purchase and storage of perishable products (e.g meat).

We didn't get a freezer until the early 80s and going to somewhere like Farmfoods/Iceland to stock up on cheap burgers & Findus crispy pancakes etc was the equivalent to an Ikea opening up near your town in the 90s.

In the 70s our meat consumption was almost exclusively mince or sausages and a roast dinner on a Sunday was a treat with leftovers eaked out.

@1dayatatime I have a 89 year old neighbour who's never eaten spaghetti or pasta because foreign food doesn't agree with her!

Meat was expensive in the 70s. My parents used to buy frozen chicken because it was more affordable. They still paid a couple of quid or more for it. Things like steak and salmon were special occasion only for many people.

Yep - they gave oven ready chicken away as BINGO PRIZES in the early 70s. It was a big treat when nana won one.

OP where can I find these old Delia programs please? They sound amazing

I had all her books and she really taught me to cook. I remember chicken as a rare treat as was a tin of salmon that had pride of place on the table christmas night. Vesta curry was the only foreign food we had. The only takeaway was fish and chips and there was no snacking between meals unless it was an orange or an apple. There were 4 in our family and mum always bought 12 ounces of meat between all of us.we were a very thin family! I also remember cream in a tin, it was disgusting and had a metallic taste. I loved fray bentos, one small pie divided into 4....

We ate more offal too, lots of liver, kidneys and stuffed hearts. Dead cheap and healthy.

DM was a really good and adventurous cook, and my father grew up in Asia, so we had a really varied diet. If I turned into our street and smelled curry, I knew it was my mother's, because almost no one else I knew ate it.

Quite a lot of people were starting to cook things like spagbol, but often not very well.

We had a roast almost every Sunday, ate a lot of of trad things like liver and bacon, and had salmon almost never.

@TheFuckingDogs on BBC i player. Loads of old cookery shows.

My mum used to cook Indian and Chinese in the early 70's, but we had to trek to southall in London to get the spices!
Living in west London lots of great shops popped up where you could get spices and exotic vegetables. We did have meat a few times a week. But nothing like how much we eat now. We also had a Chinese takeaway which was a very special treat

I was not alive in the 70s but I remember watching that "Back in Time for Dinner" programme - it said there were two types of diet in the 70s: one that embraced the new fangled convenience foods in packets, and then another side that railed against it and were all about lentils and whole foods.

My Mum used to cook spag bol and curries in the 70's. The spaghetti came in an extremely long blue paper package.
Curries were made with curry powder (I presume a mix of all the usual spices) and came in mild, medium or hot varieties.

For some reason Mum always added sultanas to the curry, but I actually really liked it!

And yes, we ate a lot of beef as mince, stewing steak or braising steak.

I remember when my mum read an article in the paper about some shortcut for spaghetti bolognese on a pressure cooker, which involved adding the raw spaghetti to the sauce.

It took a lot of hp sauce to get that meal eaten! And I've only just remembered that we put hp sauce on spag bol 🤭

I wasn't an adult then but I was born in 67 so had plenty to eat in the 70's lol. We heard of Chinese food in the 70's so my mum decided to try it, she got a Vesta meal, my sister and I just stared at it, it was not a good introduction at all, so Mum gave up. We all love chinese now, so we just blame Vesta for it's poor attempt.

We mostly ate meat and 2 veg or chips and crispy pancakes etc. Meat was expensive though, so we'd maybe start with soup to fill us up and bread and butter was out for every meal without fail.

I was a student from the mid 70s. I dont recall meat being exlensive but I used the market and was buying things like mince rather than steaks!! I cooked some international dishes - italian, greek and curries. Not chinese that was for take aways and restaurants if my (non student) boyfriend was paying!!

Vesta boil in the bag curry was the most exciting my Mum went - but my Dad would not touch it, he was and still is a meat and two veg man !
Otherwise it was traditional fare such as sausages, crispy pancakes etc. Sunday was roast dinner - usually lamb as that seemed to be the cheaper option.
And when we got a microwave in the 80's a jacket potato.

Spag Bol was considered exotic food - we didn't eat a lot of 'foreign' food - it was meat and spuds mainly - lots of cheap cuts and stews - or Scouse - and my mum did actually do the MN chicken - roast on Sunday - butties Sunday night, chicken supreme Monday (with a tin of Campbells mushroom soup!) and then soup!

We did eat Chinese takeaway as our local chippies where generally owned by Chinese families who did fish/chips/Chinese food - my favourite was curry sauce with half/half - half chips half rice!

Oh yes - when mum / nana cooked mince for cottage pie or mince & barley step one was:

Boil mince in water (no seasoning) for 30 mins, drain off scummy fat-filled water . It ended up grey & chewy.

I was born in the seventies. Mum cooked a roast every Sunday and always hooked from scratch, lots of shepherd pie, liver & bacon, toad in the hole, occasionally a curry or sweet and sour.
I remember my parents loved a dinner party, she’d do prawn cocktail, coq au vin and lovely puddings. I’d eat snuggle of it happily now, maybe not the curry or sweet and sour though.
Do you remember those vesta curries with the big crispy noodles? Like quavers?!