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.

@EBearhug I really thought you might be one of my cousins until you mentioned where you lived. It's all so familiar!

whizzed up in the blender bit of the Kenwood Chef that I still have, over 50 years on
So do I

I have my mums original Kenwood

The Dairy Book of Home Management!!!

My mum was given a copy as a wedding present (actually, might have been a pre-wedding gift from her Passss-Agg Aunt....) and there is a specific bequest to me of that book in her will. It will partner my Dairy Book of Home Cookery which was a boot sale find that weirdly mum didnt have despite apparently owning every cook book published between 1965 and 1985 but never bloody used :o

My favourite is the hair and make up tips!

I own a copy of the Hamlyn cookery book that Mary Berry contributed to, cant think of the name off the top of my head but it was very popular. The servings styles were very.....shall we say "bright"?! Whenever I look through it it always makes me think of a Margot Leadbetter style dinner party!

[quote TheNemesisOfLame]**@Ragwort* @AmadeustheAlpaca*
Still use my grubby copy. First cookbook my mum gave me when I moved in with my boyfriend. Probably to make up for the fact she loathed cooking [/quote]
Thats the damned book!!!

Although I know that there were several editions, mine has a brown cover.

I have a couple of books on household management from the Edwardian era. There are hints on how to manage the servants, set up a room for an infectious illness and all sorts of gems.

I forgot my Mum's chips - big wedges of potato, deep-fried in fat, which was probably lard. (We weren't allowed too close to the cooking process, in case it spat and burned us.) Cooking oil was a radical new development from the '80s.

My mum was a good and adventurous cook in the 70s but did often add a sachet of powdered flavouring for some reason; spaghetti bolognese and even avocado dip being sachets I remember.

Weirdly, beef burgers were quite rare in our house. I think people got them ready made frozen and we only had a freezer compartment in the fridge. My mum didn't really like fried food as low fat was the order of the day. My parents would have thought burgers were kids foods.

Incidentally, in Chinese restaurants in the 70s prawn crackers were often dyed pastel coloured!

My dad didn’t like “foreign” food so we had a very British diet - chips 3 times a week, roast on a Sunday, fry-ups, pies, etc. Hardly ever eat that stuff now.

PyongyangKipperbang: I remember clearly Mum skimming the fat off cooked (possibly boiled) mince and saving it up for frying things at a future date. And the school milk sitting outside school for hours after it was delivered; in winter it would be half frozen when you went to drink it, in summer it would be starting to curdle. No fridges in my country primary school in the 60s. I still have one of Mum’s old wartime cookbooks which includes a recipe for milk salad dressing. All you need is a tin of condensed milk, vinegar and seasoning. There’s also a spinach savoury which is made from spinach, marrowbone and grilled cheese on top, to be served with bread and margarine. Apologies for digressing from the 70s theme.

Ice cream came as a rectanglur block in a cardboard box wrapped in newspaper for insulation. There was only vanilla, strawberry or chocolate, or if you were being posh, Neapolitan (a stripe of all three.) Or very rarely, mint chocolate chip.

TheNemesisofLame: I have the red Hamlyn cookbook, some of the the recipes were pretty good and have withstood the test of time.

We had the 'Marguerite Patten' cookbook.

My mother used to fry cod roe, I never liked it.
We also had 'Sputniks', her own recipe I think, which was like a hamburger with a thick slice of onion in the middle.
Every day had it's own meal which never varied.
If we had chicken, it came in a glass jar with jelly.
Mince, liver and onions, beef stew, stovies, fish on Friday, pork chops.
For dessert, my favourite was Green's Creme caramels. Or jelly whipped up with carnation milk and mandarin oranges.

@MrsMop1964

oh yes, like *@Pogostemon* we had the Dairy Book of Home Management. For some reason I was really fascinated by it and mum would say 'are you reading your bible again?' Sadly all that reading was wasted because I turmed out to be a rubbish housewife

Just imagine how bad you might have been if you hadn't read it!

Oh loved Marguerite Patten. Took one of her books to university with me. Still have it.

Madhur Jaffrey is one of my favourites, but yes it was the 80s. I went to stay with a friend who was a bit disorganised and I ended up cooking Royal lamb, cauliflower and potato and rice with turmeric, never having seen her recipes before. Just wonderful (and she puts sultanas in lots of her dishes). The original book is hugely spattered and still much used.
I now live in rural Normandy and can't get fresh coriander. 😮
Of later influences, Floyd was great when he came along, Rick Stein's early books were good, and I love Tamasin Day-Lewis, also Moro for Spanish food. Latest favourite is Zaitoun. I love finding new influences. The one thing we don't do much of is French, which is a bit odd as we live here. 😂

There used to be a phrase, "they eat meat every day" which meant a family had money to spare.

We often had chips, sometimes with a fried egg or with a slice of boiled ham.

We were relatively well off but didn't have a freezer until the 1980s. It was a treat to be sent to the shop to buy a packet of fish fingers for tea.

Pudding was only served on a Sunday and consisted of tinned fruit and carnation milk.

I started high school in 1978 and 'domestic science' was compulsory for 3 years. First year (year 7 now) lots of buns and cakes, second year I can't remember but third year was almost entirely mince, cottage pie (mince was ALWAYS beef, I tried to get minced lamb in 1985 and the butcher didn't sell it) plate meat pie, some fancy thing with a pastry base, piped mash round the edge and mince in the middle.

Curry did exist but it was mostly vesta and as my dad can't stand the smell we didn't ever eat it but we had the occasional Chinese, with chips obviously not rice.

Going out for a meal was a real occasion, I would have a long dress and my hair curled (with tongs heated on the gas hob) and dire threats of behaviour because, "It's adult time, adults don't want to hear children squabbling"

My mum's proudest moment was hearing another parent say, "why can't you two behave like those two over there?" my brother and I were probably kicking each other under the table.

We had a Safeway open and it was magical, you could pick your own fruit instead of buying a prepacked 4 apples on a polystyrene tray wrapped in plastic.

I now live in rural Normandy and can't get fresh coriander.

If you can get some seeds, it grows well on a window sill.

///

Yes we grow coriander in and out of the greenhouse sashh, but it is a horror for bolting. We also have to use Amazon for quite a few spices. French cooking is deeply conservative and still very regional. I do like chicken / pork / veal with cider, apples and cream, but not at every meal out. And definitely not tripe and rice pudding, the other local favourites.

Mid 70s meat was once a week roast then leftovers. Fray Bentos, fishfingers, beef burgers - all kept in the little ice compartment on top of the fridge! My parents still don't have a freezer. Chicken was expensive- lamb more usual. For veg we had celery, leeks (both braised), carrots, potatoes. In the 80s things took off and ratatouille appeared!

@HilaryThorpe

I may need to send you a care package.

My brother lives in Cornwall (and for some reason their family holidays are often to Normandy), I'm in Wolverhampton and when my dad visits he calls in with me on the way and I have to send a carrier bag of samosas, proper ones from a sweet centre.

I usually send a few spices too and some more unusual veg.

There are also some Caribbean grocers.

Wolverhampton may not be and ideal place to live but if you are into cooking it could be a lot worse.

Sorry, I haven't read the full thread but I'm wondering - lots of PP have mentioned that meat (and especially chicken) was not eaten everyday due to expense etc.

Does that mean that most weekday meals were vegetarian in nature, or that meat was eaten frequently albeit in smaller quantities/lower quality (manky sausages!)?

@sashh 😂 I usually come home from England with supplies, but no trips to England this year and heaven knows what will be allowed in next time. 😨

Did anyone have the Ladybird childrens' cookbook "We Can Cook"? I was given this in the 70s or early 80s and still make some of the recipes - Eve's Pudding and Pineapple Upside Down Cake are my faves

MrWendel we always had a joint of meat, but made it last for three days. I remember chicken was expensive when I was growing up in the fifties, but not by the seventies. I used to get bacon scraps from the butcher to make quiche as a student. Offal was cheap and things like belly pork and breast of lamb.