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.

@BertieBotts hahahhaha!

I remember Berni Inns for birthday meals, eating out was such a special occasion - none of this "we'll have a takeaway. I can't be bothered to cook tonight" - and I am as guilty as the next person about doing that now. I remember a week's camping holiday in the rain ... on the final night after eating inside our tent every night my parents relented and got takeaway fish and chips - an unheard of luxury .

@tinkywinkyshandbag not far - East Lancashire. Must be a northern thing.

I read these threads and 😮 at the things people think weren't available

The differences in availability across the country were huge though - much bigger than now. Now, probably 90% of the UK population can get Italian/Indian/Chinese cooking ingredients within half an hour's drive of home. For most people, they will be readily available at their nearest big supermarket. When I was a child, our nearest source of most spices or 'exotic' vegetables (red peppers!) would have been London, 3 hours away.

@Havanananana - we always finished off a meal with a slice of bread in the gravy. I sometimes used to enjoy that more than the actual meal!

“I read these threads and 😮 at the things people think weren't available.”

HilaryThorpe, likewise! I grew up in the NE in the 70s and we ate a lot of the things you describe at home - Mum was a Home Economics teacher though, which helped! I remember her buying exotic fruit & veg like lychees and avocados. There was a great deli I remember in Redcar which had fascinating foods in it from brands like Epicure (sure I can remember marvelling at tinned escargots!). We also had a lovely student lodger up from Brixton who would cook things like plantain whenever she came back from a visit home. I can still remember the smell of that 45 years on and being desperate to try it!

Convenience foods like Dalesteaks and Vesta Curries (not a patch on her own!) were for special treats only - Mum cooked from scratch despite working full time and I use her recipes to this day.

We travelled extensively in Europe during the 60's and 70's so my parents were very familiar with European foods. We ate out a lot as children so experienced Chinese food (with wonderful crispy noodles) as well as French, Italian and Greek. Living near a touristy town helped as there were lots of good restaurants. We always had a roast dinner on Sundays and lots of stews and casseroles (all meat based) during the week. We had a big chest freezer in the 1970s and our meat was bought from farming friends - half a lamb, quarter of a bullock etc. so we always had lots of the poor cuts along with the steaks etc. We grew our own vegetables and fruit, some of which was quite exotic and my father regularly came home with all sorts of fish and seafood from the local fishermen. Ready-made meals were unheard of and we ate extremely well - I wish I had such a good diet now but I have got lazy in my old age!

Great to read a positive friendly Mumsnet thread. I think my Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook is up in the attic. Some other posters have mentioned Shippams meat sandwich paste, I used to like the salmon one. Mum was from the Western Isles and used to occasionally make caragheen seaweed pudding which was quite tasty, a bit like milky jelly. I started a part time job at school in 6th year in a deli which was a complete eye opener, I’d never heard of pate, salami, foreign sauces or salad dressing that wasn’t salad cream. I remember eating a lot of stew in my childhood (stewed sausage was a regular on the menu) In fact stew sums up a lot of my 60s and 70s diet
A previous poster also mentioned being given rosehip syrup to “keep healthy”. I remember it being quite tasty but as it was a commercial product not homemade, was a sugar fest. I didn’t like my Mum’s cooking much as a small child and I was taken to the doctor as I wouldn’t eat many of the meals prepared. Doctor recommended lots of Lucozade as it was “healthy” and a good alternative when I didn’t eat.

I was brought up in Scotland, the most exotic food my Granny made was macaroni pie. We ate fresh fish at least 3 times a week, Sunday lunch was whatever meat was in season, venison being the favourite, left overs were used until they were gone. If we were hungry between meals we were given a slice of white bread buttered with sugar sprinkled on top commonly know as a sugar piece. As we didn't have a fridge we would be sent to the ice cream van with a dish to get x amount of scoops to go with a tin of fruit cocktail as a treat. Wine was allowed only at Christmas. We were all well feed, a healthy weight and very few had food allergies.

Another recollection was the long hot summer of 1976. I think we had a bbq almost every night! Steaks, lobster, prawns and fish or anything really that could be cooked on the grill and accompanied by home-grown salad and jersey royals! Globe artichokes in butter were always a favourite too.

Now off to cook as I am making myself hungry just thinking about it!

Rosehip syrup, good grief. It came in little bottles the same shape as Zoflora bottles. My poor brother had a ‘dinky’ as we called it which was like a dummy but with a small bottle attached always filled with diluted rosehip syrup. Amazingly he still has all his teeth 56 years later.

Always, always fish for tea on a Friday too. We weren’t Catholic but I think it must have been a thing in Welsh Chapels too. My mother still insists on it.

@BMW6

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!

Putting fruit into curries was very comon, usually sultanas and apple chopped up. We made curries in the 70s, living near Bradford the ingredients and good advice were on the doorstep, we didn't do much much pasta.

@BestIsWest

Always, always fish for tea on a Friday too. We weren’t Catholic but I think it must have been a thing in Welsh Chapels too. My mother still insists on it.

My mother wouldn't have meat on Good Friday and she wasn't what you'd call religious so I don't know why! That was in the NW of England.

My father always had bread and dripping as a late night snack on a Sunday.
We rarely had fresh veg in the week
Standard dinner for me and my sisters might be a couple of slices of spam, beans or spaghetti hoops and chips. (We had school dinners).
We had dessert only on Sundays
I did not know Chinese takeaway existed until I was about 15.
We rarely had chocolate in the house, but on a Saturday night we might be given a tangerine, some maltesers and a glass of lemonade as a treat, after our (weekly) bath and hair wash.

Saturday lunch was always taken at the pie mash and liquor store! Jellied eels for Nan.
And Sunday morning's highlight was a warm sarsaparilla from a stall in the street market.
Not hard to guess where my roots lie!

I can remember standing at the stove with my Mum slowly putting spaghetti into the boiling water just like Delia had shown us how to .

My mum used to bake a pig shank, encased in a flour and water pastry. This must have been a hangover from when before tinfoil was common. It kept all the meat juices in and stoppe it drying out. Once baked, the pastry crust was meant to be throw away. but it was delicious!

@Wotsitsarecheesy

Anyone remember the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook?

I too still have my copy. Learned to cook from it, and there are recipies in there that I still use, and that were my kids' first forays into proper cooking.

In the 70s I remember cheap cuts of meat (including pigs trotters), quite a few meat/fish and 2 veg meals, shepherds pies, and lots and lots of stews. Saving/eating every bit of food. We grew veg, regularly went to buy things directly from the farm (not a shop, parents would send us up to ask the farmer by knocking on his door), and lots of trekking round individual shops with my mum, as there weren't any local supermarkets. Although I do remember some dodgy food introductions - being able to buy 'processed cheese' in blocks (basically a big block of the cheese that's in cheese slices) - which as a child I though was a wonderful treat!

I remember the chinese takaway opening - very exotic! But mostly it was all staple, traditional home cooked food. Vesta dishes and findus crispy pancakes were a new, exciting but very occasional thing. Much later, I remember eating this new fish (tuna) at a cousins house.

But thinking back, what strikes me is the 3 proper meals a day, with very limited convenience food, and so much walking! We walked miles to visit a friend or go to the next village where the shops were (and pulled it back in a trolley). It was just normal and what people did. When I was old enough, an evening out pub crawl generally took in 2 villages and about 5 miles of walking in total. No wonder I was fit and thin back then!

It's sitting on the shelf at the moment, I don't use it much though. I also have the 'cards' from the Yporkshire Farmhouse Kitchen prgramme, a woman called Dorothy Sleighthwaite, her recipe for Yorkshire parkin is second to none!

When I was a student in the late 70s there was a little back street corner shop, like a converted front room of a house. The ancient couple who ran it would sell you a single rasher of bacon and one egg.

It was an anachronism even then and a hangover from when times were even harder.

@AdaColeman

I was newly married in the 70s, and an enthusiastic cook. I wasn't much of a Delia fan, I preferred Elizabeth David or Robert Carrier, with Ken Hom for a taste of the exotic!

My enthusiasm was kept in check by my then husband, who was quite a bit older than me, and a meat-&-two-veg man, who only reluctantly ate my experimental dishes such as mushroom risotto ("There's no meat in this") or moussaka ("Has this got garlic in it?").

I cooked everything from scratch, as it is quaintly known these days, but back then was just "cooking"! As mentioned, we ate offal frequently, liver and kidneys probably every week, but I didn't buy Findus pancakes or similar as I wasn't interested in cooking them.

I was a teenager when we first tried courgettes, bought in Soho. My Mother blanched them, then dipped in beaten egg then breadcrumbs, before shallow frying them till golden. We were so thrilled with them that we had them as a separate course with mayonnaise!

Your then OH reminds me of my late husband, I once did asparagus rolled in slices of ham, baked in a cheese sauce, he commented how good it tasted and it must be cheap because it had no real meat in it! Our first married Christmas, we were still students, he got me the Robert Carrier Cookery cards, most of the ingredients I'd never heard of. They never really got used, by the time we could afford some of them they were out of fashion. I can still recall the whole lemon stuffed with a pilchardy concoction, about all we could have afforded had we been able to face it.

My mum made an amazing chicken curry with mango chutney in the 70s. Fray bentos pie between 5 of us. Goblin hamburgers in a tin with gravy. Spag bol, chicken n bacon pie, liver, kidneys, jacket potatoes. Sausage n mash. Frozen veg. Boil in the bag fish with parsley sauce which I loved.
No takeaways or McDonald's.
I didn't have proper Indian or Chinese food until adulthood. I didn't try salmon, avocado until my twenties.

I forgot about Ken Hom! The rice wine! The excitement of getting a wok.

Great thread OP.
I was growing up in 70s. In my teens Chinese restaurants were a trendy thing.
My DM would think I was really sophisticated when I started eating Vesta curries and even yogurt? She'd buy them specially for me even though no-one else in our 7 strong household ate them. I think she felt posh 🤣🤣

Isn't Ken Hom more of a 1980s TV chef?
I met him at a book signing in 1984. He was lovely.