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.

@HilaryThorpe

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.

Thanks @HilaryThorpe - it is mind-blowing to see how times have changed re: our consumption of meat.

@MrWendel

People had smaller portions of meat, I think, but most people ate some form of meat most days. A lot more offal, ham, tongue, chops, and leftovers rehashed. We had a roast at weekends, then the leftovers for a couple of days in the week.
We also had fish a couple of times a week. We lived in coastal Scotland and (local) fish was much cheaper then. Salmon wasn’t farmed at that stage so it was a big treat, and smoked salmon was only for Christmas. We seemed to eat a lot of kippers.
Chicken didn’t come ready jointed (breasts, thighs, etc) so you had to have a whole chicken, very often frozen.

Thanks @Pogostemon. This whole thread is really opening my eyes - we think nothing of buying smoked salmon on a whim for packed sandwiches nowadays. I don't think there are many foods now which have that sense of eagerly anticipated 'special occasion' food, as you describe for Christmas smoked salmon.

My DF worked in central London, and I still remember him buying some ‘exotic’ things for me to take to school for the Harvest Festival display. One item was a green pepper - what a weird thing! And it smelt so funny! This would have been in the mid 1950s though.

One thing I notice about old cookery books - I still have a couple - is that quantities were smaller. A sponge cake recipe was for a 6-7 inch cake tin (hardly worth bothering IMO), ditto the GH lemon meringue pie recipe (made from scratch) that I still use - I always make at least double - just not worth all the faff otherwise. People always rave about the result, though, and it uses all of the eggs, and the juice and zest of the lemons.

I know it’s at least partly down to people walking more - far fewer cars - but you hardly ever saw a really fat person.

@iklboo

Was your Mum Papa Lazarou?

@1dayatatime spaghetti was one pasta shape that we did buy in the 1970s in Sainsbury

we even had tohe spoof April fool about spaghetti trees - if it was that uncommon and specialised the BBC wouldn't have done it as people wouldn't have known what spaghetti was

Except for maybe baked beans, there was never any processed food in our house. I was born too early for anything like Findus Crispy Pancakes, but I don’t suppose my DM would ever have bought them anyway - would have been too expensive for 4 dcs.

As a student in the very late 60s, my great treat for myself when I was feeling marginally less skint than usual, was a Vesta Paella!

Other stuff I remember:

• no freezer until the 1980s.
• no fridge until mid 60s, then only a second hand one after the woman next door.
• ice cream in a block wrapped in newspaper.

-, strawberries being a real treat: only available for a few weeks in summer.

• seeing quiche for the first time in 1978.
• ditto cheesecake.

One thing I can't seem to get hold of these days is scrag of lamb to make cawl (a lamb/leek soup).

Salad was a treat comprising a couple lettuce leaves, a tomato and a bit of cucumber.

There was no such thing as salmon outside a tin.

@BIWI I’d think you were my sister except my mum could cook Yorkshires exceptionally well.

She made beef olives, a sweet made of evap milk and tinned pineapple, Texas jambalaya (not Texan or A jambalaya but very tasty). Vegetables were lightly boiled and served with butter. I remember her telling me she’d been out for lunch and had a roasted carrot. Mind blown. We had them a lot.

My mum lost interest in cooking after 4 kids and in the 80s (I was born 1967) turned to M&S ready meals with a kind of holy devotion. We ate really quite exotic stuff then.

My mum was an adult in the 70's, she had had a more adventurous time with food, I suppose partly due to growing up in east London and partly due to her parents being the first to try things out.
She was taken to an Indian restaurant in the early 60's, and her first chicken curry had a boiled egg in it!

Meals at home did consist of a lot of offal though, it was cheap and nutritious. And, due to the cheap and often, tough meat would have to be stewed or in a casserole.
My nan, although not an adventurous cook, did enjoy trying new foods and would often order the strangest thing on the menu when eating out. I'm not sure if it's from the lack of food during the war, but she would eat virtually anything, her only real dislike was mince and sweetcorn. Also, she never wasted a thing, so a roast on Sunday would last until Tuesday with leftovers and dripping etc.

My go to cookery books were, and still are: Elizabeth David, Rose Elliott, Delia, an M&S compilation c1977?, followed by lots of 99p paperbacks, a Readers Digest Year of food with recipes for seasonal food, and latterly Niger Slater.

My horror meal of the 60's and 70's was cold roast meat and mash with a vegetable and pickle. I recall it with unappetising horror and whilst roast lamb is our favourite, there is nothing worse than cold, roast lamb.

Bacon grill, I really want some bacon grill, we had that quite a lot........

Perhaps this is a silly question but how was Sunday roast stored so you can use it for a few days without a fridge? Nowadays we panic if the chicken was left out overnight.

amberee meat often went into the larder and domestic homes were much cooler than nowadays.

I really remember Delia’s complete cookery course sitting on our kitchen shelves! But I remember her being thought of as a good basic guide rather than anything exotic.

We are a lot of meat, but that did include mine stuff like shepherds pie. My parents ate an awful lot of chops (do people eat them anymore??) I think only one or two days a week would have been meat free - pasta, cauliflower cheese, baked potatoes, lentil soup.

My mother cooked non UK food - Euro dishes like chicken paprika. Goulash, pasta. She was a HUGE fan of garlic. My family was middle class, and I think at least for some of the middle class food had opened up a lot by the 70s. We only had Chinese and Indian takeaways in our area in the 80s, we loved them.

@rosesandhellebores thank you.

@ambereeree

Perhaps this is a silly question but how was Sunday roast stored so you can use it for a few days without a fridge? Nowadays we panic if the chicken was left out overnight.

I am pretty sure most people had a fridge by the 70s didn’t they?

We had a massive trunk freezer in the garage as well, we were rural so it wasn’t that unusual (and cheaper because you could buy a whole lamb from the farm etc) - but overall they were probably less common than now.

Yes, my parents certainly had a fridge from the 1950s, if not earlier. Thinking about it, we had chicken paprika & goulash too. My mum used to go to cookery evening classes so we had quite a few "exotic" meals from them. There were a lot of chops though, something my children have never had!

I was born abroad where my Dad was working in 1955 , it was North Africa but there were a lot of Italians there so my Mum cooked (her version of) spaghetti bolognaise and curry quite frequently. She also made kebabs using knitting needles as skewers a few times.

I did O level Food and Nutrition in 1971 and A level Home Economics in 1973 so maybe I was more adventurous than many in the 70s. I was vegetarian for most of that decade so I used a lot of pulses, I never realised at the time they were thought of as a 'new food', they had actually been used for centuries.

Chickens were a treat and were expensive because they were all free range until battery chickens became freely available. I would still rather eat a free range chicken as a treat than use battery chicken.

Most milk (delivered by the milkman) was full fat so cream was expensive. I remember trying a Bel Cream Maker at school, it was supposed to turn butter and milk into cream so I presume butter was fairly cheap to make it worth while. It was pretty disgusting though.

@ambereeree

Perhaps this is a silly question but how was Sunday roast stored so you can use it for a few days without a fridge? Nowadays we panic if the chicken was left out overnight.

You will notice on this kind of thread that its the younger posters who panic, the older people just say sniff it to see if it's OK.

@LoveFall

Diet for a Small Planet was first published in 1971. I read it and incorporated a lot of the ideas about eating less or no meat, and protein combining. We had a bit of a "health food" craze where I live and I remember making lots of homemade granola.

I have a recipe card box from the seventies where I collected all kinds of recipes, including Moussaka and other "ethnic" foods. I remember eating at many Greek themed pizza places as a student, and trying things at home.

As I recall, my Mum made spaghetti the first time in the 1960s, at which time it was indeed exotic.

I've still got my set of cards! They were the ones where they sent you a pack every month. I don't use them all, but some of them are my favourite recipes. @snowspider. I'm Brightonian, and Infinity Foods is still going strong.

As babies, our first food was the same as Mum & Dad's, whizzed up in the blender bit of the Kenwood Chef that I still have, over 50 years on

This is how we were fed and how I fed my own children for the most part. They had they same range of foods we ate, just slightly modulated - so not the hottest or richest but largely our food. I'm not sure when the notion of "children's food" and "children's menu" became a thing in the UK.

My go to cookery books were, and still are: Elizabeth David, Rose Elliott, Delia [...]

Rose Elliot's original three books were on nearly every student shelf as I recall. Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson were also popular for basics along with this little gem which I was given by the mother of a then boyfriend. The book has outlasted the relationship by more than 35 years so far.

Agreed, Captain, and it helped that there was no central heating! Houses tended to be extremely cold in the winter outside the sitting room, which was often oppressively hot, if you were near the fire, anyway. You needed to steel yourself to get up and leave the warmth to go through the icy hall, up the stairs and into the glacial bathroom to go to the loo. At bedtime you'd take a hot water bottle with you to your freezer-like bedroom.

@BIWI, we went to the Flying Pizza too, for special occasions! I wonder if we were ever there at the same time. IIRC, it belonged to a Jewish family back then. We also used to go to Salvo's in Headingley.

What a great thread. I've enjoyed it immensely. Little to add, except that I liked Surprise dehydrated peas and green beans. They came in a packet. I can't remember whether they had to be cooked or just placed in a bowl of hot water to revive, but there was a pleasing chewiness about the result I liked. We also often had tinned carrots (working mother, she used a lot of shortcuts, and quite right too). Not so keen on the carrots. Mum made a white sauce to cover them and the whole thing was unpleasantly sweet, soft and bland for my tastes.

... although now I've googled, I think I must have got that wrong about the Flying Pizza, or I've misremembered and it was another restaurant. Oops.

@HilaryThorpe

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.

I married in 1975, and chicken cost something like 16p a pound. I always used to say it was a penny an ounce! Does anyone remember when Neapolitan ice-cream had a green stripe instead of the vanilla?