Cooking in the 1970s

[ambereeree]

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.

I think pps are being a little unkind about British traditional cooking

Very much so, regional traditional cooking was as good in the UK as in other places. Most peasant cooking in France or Spain or India was not full of exotic things from far away and more than in the UK. Up until recently people ate locally and seasonally. And the really poor have always eaten poorly, everywhere.

British cooking did suffer due to war rationing, and then people coming out of it were suddenly inundated with packaged foods, at the same time lifestyles were beginning to change. Manufactured food was seen as modern, and then as women began to work more and there were other social changes, a certain cooking skills and traditions were, not wholly lost, maybe, but compromised.

That being said, curries were common even in Victorian cookbooks, as well as dishes inspired by other British colonial traditions, so it's not wholly new to have that kind of introduction from abroad. Spag bol and appreciation for pasta generally came from soldiers who had been in Italy. But because shipping meant the same products were not available they tended to be adapted to local ingredients.

I do find it amusing though that with all the fussing some younger people make about older people not living in an environmentally sustainable way, the same young people tend to be rather superior about the global trade and travel that means their diets as a whole are much more varied.

@CounsellorTroi

I also remember when you could only get olive oil from the chemist for medicinal purposes. Nobody cooked with it.

I'm so pleased you've said that as I had the same recollection and then thought maybe it was just my family where that happened!

Was Graham Kerr the one who introduced micro-wave cooking? my then old Father adopted m-w cooking as he was then by himself. He became an enthusiast. M-W were small, we as a family of 4 followed much later.

So disappointed to find I can only watch back in time for tea if I pay for it on amazon!

Love this thread!

My dad had lived in India and my mum had lived in Italy so we had very varied and, I suppose, sophisticated food at home in the 60"s. My parents were both great cooks. Spaghetti came wrapped in blue paper and was very long. My Dads curries were amazing, often big prawns which were probably unusual too. My friends used to love to eat at our house. We'd have smoked salmon often, lots of fish like Dover sole, rib of beef and always herbs and spices.
Obviously it was normal to us, but looking back they definitely were before their time.
Friends had simpler meals like stew or bought ham and a very plain salad.....I actually really enjoyed that as it wasn't something we ate at home.

@TitOfTheIceberg

Anyone remember this book? My mum's milkman used to sell copies.

Still have and regularly use my copy

Also have the Schwartz book of exotic food (the spice / herb company trying to explain what to do with their products)

The Delia book I love best is Frugal Food
(I'm on my second copy)

@muckypaws we used to bring olive oil back from Spain. Then it would have to be ecked out til next time we went or to when family came to visit us. They'd bring us olive oil and chorizo and we'd send them back with Birds custard powder.

@ambereeree, thanks for this thread, nostalgia on a winter afternoon, just what I need today.

My parents had moved out of London, so we're used to more "exotic" foods. We did have a Chinese takeaway regularly and they grew lots of their own fruits and vegetables, including more Mediterranean courgettes, aubergines, peppers and tomatoes in a greenhouse I remember my dad building. There was definitely less "foreign" foods available and I really disliked the curry my mum made with apples and sultanas . My parents did cook with offal but with more of a French twist eg kidneys in red wine, which I didn't like either. I remember not much liking a lot of meat, but looking back it wasn't nice: 70s pink sausages, tinned ham, breakfast slice... We ate quite a bit of fish, cod was cheap, kipper, smoked haddock, trout for a treat, sometimes boil in a bag sometimes from the fishmonger. Also, quite a lot of tinned fish like sardines and pilchards on toast for tea on days we had school dinners. Both my parents were pretty good cooks, but there was just much less choice.

I can remember a Bejam's opening and getting a chest freezer, there were suddenly much more to choose from.

Remember Sunday tea was cockles, mussels, shrimps, wells, winkles bread and butter followed by packet birds trifle.

i was a teen mid 70s born mid fifties and my mom cooked us very traditional foods like stews, shepherds pies, roast chicken, meat pies, she also used a lot more offal type meats liver, kidneys , braised oxtail and pigs trotters , the most exotic meal in our house was vesta beef curries (packet ones) i got married 1974 and i was probably the one who was more adventurous with cooking as more exotic (to us) foods came into the supermarkets by watching programs like delia and god help us all fanny craddock

My mum is a good cook, & my parents were adventurous, but we mostly had old-fashioned food then, things like shepherd's pie, fish pie (with coley steak from the fish man because it was cheaper than cod). We didn't have a lot of money. We didn't have a microwave oven until late 1980s, & only had the tiny ice box of the freezer for the occasional block of ice cream, & ice cubes.

There were more local shops like butcher, baker, greengrocer so I remember walking with mum a few times a week to buy food when I was very little. Dad had the car for work so supermarket trips were for weekends.

I think how they shopped & their food storage & income impacted on what they cooked.

Mum had cookery books from the 1960s - lots of weird party food ideas that filled me with fascination & horror, like Peas In Aspic, & vegetable terrine with piped Primula cheese spread for a garnish. Luckily we did not get any of that!

Eating out was for high days & holidays only, at the Berni Inn (fruit juice starter, anyone?)

I remember Sundays being special, not just for the roast but we were allowed a hot Welsh cake from the bakers on the way home from church IF (and only if) we had behaved ourselves. As Wales was very chapel eye brows would be raised when DM shut herself in the kitchen with the sherry bottle in order to finish off cooking and serving the roast - which went in the oven before we left for church.

I was born in 67, like many posters I remember lots of meat, potatoes and vegetable meals.
My mum used to make a pea soup made with split peas and bacon ribs.
I also remember having cod with parsley sauce which I hated.
We did have homemade curry and bolognese regularly too.
My gran was a great cook and used to make steak and kidney pies, puddings and a stew called 'tater hash. Sometimes there would be dumplings or a suet crust. Saturday was her baking day, so she would make lots always make a custard tart and an apple pie and sometimes a cake. We always had the apple pie with Carnation evaporated milk.

Camp coffee. Ugh.

I also remember my mum making something called 'pobs' as a treat?
I think it was chunks of bread in warm milk with nutmeg. I only have very faint memories of this though.

You used to be able to tomato juice or a glass of orange juice as a starter in Beefeater / Berni Inns.

I'm from the 1950s, so the 1970s were my teenage and university years.

The main meal of the day for school children like me was the school dinner. I actually enjoyed mine, as the cooks seemed keen to make interesting and tasty food - far nicer than most of the things my mum could manage. This was also a time when my parents would have had their main meal at the factory canteen, and when I started doing holiday jobs in my teens, factory canteen food seemed just to be another version of school dinners.

This meant that the evening meal at home was often just a small one. For example:

• beans on toast,
• Spam/tinned ham with a salad (three soggy lettuce leaves, a tomato and a slice or two of cucumber - nothing exotic like red pepper or coleslaw - topped off with salad cream),
• cold chicken left over from Sunday - with fried mash and veg from Sunday in winter or with the aforementioned salad in summer,
• Fish fingers, potatoes and peas,
• Frozen 'beefburgers' - which were discs of chewy, grey minced gristle frozen together, and which people used to attempt to separate using 'the big knife' which often resulted in a visit to A&E
• Frozen sausages - the pink-ish cousins of the 'beefburgers' and containing just as little meat,
• Fried spam, possibly with a fried egg on top, and potatoes.

Roast meat was only ever eaten on Sunday - sometimes a frozen chicken or a very small piece of beef or lamb. Sometimes lamb chops.

If we were hungry, there was sometimes left-over rice pudding, or if there was any gravy or fat from a pan, it would be mopped from the plate with a slice or two of Sunblest bread.

Items never seen in my mum's 1970s kitchen:

• Spaghetti in blue paper - but gloopy Heinz spaghetti in tomato sauce occasionally put in an appearance, to be eaten on toast as a change from baked beans,
• Fresh salmon - we only ever ate tinned salmon on high days and holidays and I didn't taste fresh salmon until my university graduation ball,
• Rice (except for pudding rice),
• Garlic, red peppers, mushrooms, soy sauce, curry powder, kiwi (first saw one of these at Uni).....

I remember food being quite plain but tasty in the 1970s. I also remember my Dad complaining because my Mum had put garlic in the spaghetti Bolognese. And yes Chinese food was a rare treat, the first Indian meal I ever ate was at university in the early 80s. No ready meals. I also remember the excitement when things like findus crispy pancakes, french bread pizza and vienetta came out.

@BestIsWest

Thursday was shopping day and the best day of the week. DM didn’t drive so would go to the minimarket by bus and do a shop then a big cardboard box would arrive a couple of hours later with her groceries. Tea would be a baguette with banana and a strawberry ski yoghurt and my Jackie magazine would be waiting when I got home from school. (And of course Thursdays meant TOTP to diverge from food)

And Fridays was Ready Steady Go.

I hated Cathy MacGowan, mostly for her hair........

A joint of meat for sunday roast that would be made to stretch til wednesday or thursday and then cakes and sandwiches with cheese and neighbour would bring round 2nd's from her greenhouse, toms, cucumbers.
Sometimes, my mum would make quiches, with bacon and onion, they were devine!

Cooking was a necessity, not a hobby like it seems to have become, there was just a huge shortage of ingredients compared to say the 90s and beyond.

@MrsSlocombesPussy did you grow up in Yorkshire? My Dad loved pobs especially if he was feeling a bit poorly

We had a massive chest freezer in the 80s/90s. In the garage! DSis and I used to scrape ice off the inside and eat it