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 had the full set of Good Cooking magazines, which was a partwork series (a ridiculous way to get you to part with huge amounts of money!). I used to really look forward to this arriving each week or month.

Unfortunately when I was having a clear out a few years ago, I got rid of it and I've bitterly regretted it ever since. Not so much for the recipes - I never used them, hence deciding I could chuck them - but for the 1970s nostalgia. The photographs were amazing, and often the dishes were shown in the appropriate contexts, so lots of pictures of people at parties or propped with crockery/glassware.

I think the green Neopolitan ice cream was mint Neopolitan. I also remember Tutti Frutti and Rum and Raisin being very popular.

I was a student in Leeds in the late 80s/early 90s and Salvo's in Headingley was going strong then. It was the place my parents used to take me to when they came up to visit.

We had a split level oven with a rotisserie too. The rest of the kitchen was very basic, with sliding chipboard doors, until we had an extension and new kitchen in the 80s.

We certainly had tinned fruit with evaporated milk quite a bit. Our kenwood had a cream maker to turn butter and milk into "cream" (no wonder I didn't really like cream, that and that horrible fake, sweet cream that used to be used.

These were my mum's that she passed on to me. My mum and grandmother used to make amazing cakes for our birthdays. They had done a Cordon Bleu Patisserie course when they were still in London.

I was born in 1968 so this thread has been a wonderfully nostalgic read of my 1970s childhood.

I remember Farmhouse Kitchen and Houseparty but mum also used to buy Home & Freezer Digest every month with Mary Berry in it as we had a massive chest freezer. Mum spent all of her time blanching vegetables from our allotment and buying freezer bags and ties to store everything.

Dad was a meat and two veg man and when mum made spag bol he insisted on having potatoes with his because he wouldn't eat spaghetti.

Most kids in my road were Indian so I was basically brought up on very hot home-made curries as I'd be invited in to eat with them. I still love very spicy food to this day and have very fond memories of making chapati and helping to stir curries in their kitchens. Mum would always complain that I smelled of curry when I got home. I used to love going into the Indian corner shops and seeing all the spices and fresh ginger that we didn't eat at home.

Most kids in my road were Indian so I was basically brought up on very hot home-made curries as I'd be invited in to eat with them. I still love very spicy food to this day and have very fond memories of making chapati and helping to stir curries in their kitchens. Mum would always complain that I smelled of curry when I got home. I used to love going into the Indian corner shops and seeing all the spices and fresh ginger that we didn't eat at home

So different from my childhood - there was one non-white child in my school in England, and one in my school in France (not the same child ). I did visit more ethnically-mixed areas regularly because we had family in London and near Marseille, but most people at my schools probably only met a handful of non-white people during their entire childhood. It must have been incredibly difficult for the tiny number of non-white people who did live locally.

I grew up in the 1970
My mum made spag bol, and my dad had a special dish of sweet and sour pork chops which was very exotic.

But most meals were meat and 2 veg. We ate lamb chops and pork chops a lot, chicken was a roast on sunday treat and you couldn't buy chicken breasts the way you do now. So we'd eat roast on Sunday and then most other chicken dishes were made with the let over roast.
We ate more beef and mince too.

Many veg that we get now were unavailble in the supermarkets.
peppers, aubergines, avocados, sweet potatoes and all squashes - unheard of.

My mum was a good cook though so we never had boiled mince or over cooked cabbage

@quirkychick, Salvo's was still going strong when I was in Leeds for a school reunion a few years ago. Hope it's survived the last year.

Many veg that we get now were unavailble in the supermarkets.
peppers, aubergines, avocados, sweet potatoes and all squashes - unheard of

They might not have been as common produce as they are now but they certainly weren't unheard of & a local green grocer would sell aubergine, avocados, peppers - there were many more butchers (52 butchers 1972 in the town I grew up in and now there are 2) and grocer shops than there are now.

It's so lovely reading this thread.

It's also very reassuring to find that there are a number of us who are "of a certain age"

The poster mentioning the Corona van has me racking my brains to think of the powdered stuff in a tin that made a sort of cream soda-type drink - I think there may have been a polar bear as part of the logo.

Ring any bells? Cremola maybe?

@steppemum DH and I were growing courgettes, aubergines and peppers in our garden in Sheffield in the 70s. Definitely avocados in the shops too. You didn't get the variety of squashes but plenty of marrows and pumpkins. We used to make our own ratatouille.
We were considered eccentric because we dug up our front garden to plant vegetables à la Good Life. 😂

Toasted sandwiches became a thing in the seventies on our uni campus there was an amazing cafe with an outdoor terrace that specialised in them which opened in 1976 I think.

My school introduced Danish open sandwiches as a lunch option in 1969 but only for sixth formers. My older sister used to make me jealous about them.

I worked in a pretty French cafe called The Fleur de Lys as a Saturday job in 71/72 and their speciality was Pan Bagnat which was French bread split and rubbed with garlic, soaked with olive oil and crushed fresh tomato and filled with a salad of radish, olives, sliced egg, anchovies, cucumber, lettuce and either tuna or the posh version, prawns. Steve Heighway (Liverpool player) was a customer.

@SparkysMagicPiano Cremola Foam, loved the orange one hated the raspberry one.

My parents had an extension built in 1973/4 and had Hygena units fitted and a cooker with a ceramic top - this was very revolutionary at the time. They also got a freezer around then and freezer centres suddenly started opening up around us. There was one near us that was huge and people came from miles around. We were happy as arctic roll and little frozen mousses became a regular thing in our house.

My parents used to grow tomatoes & courgettes & we often had Ratatouille. They also made courgette wine.

@snowspider

I worked in a pretty French cafe called The Fleur de Lys as a Saturday job in 71/72 and their speciality was Pan Bagnat which was French bread split and rubbed with garlic, soaked with olive oil and crushed fresh tomato and filled with a salad of radish, olives, sliced egg, anchovies, cucumber, lettuce and either tuna or the posh version, prawns. Steve Heighway (Liverpool player) was a customer.

That sounds marvellous, @snowspider. I had a Saturday job in a self-service restaurant in the centre of Leeds that specialised in Danish open sandwiches. No idea how authentic they were, but they were very tasty and a little bit exotic. My favourite involved a lettuce leaf, a slice of pâté, a slice of ham too IIRC, garnish of fried mushrooms, possibly other elements too.

Oh God yes, marrows. They were more frequently served than any reasonable person would want.

I had forgotten tutti frutti ice cream.

I expect experiences differed, according to where you lived. We never had exotic urban things like Corona bottle deliveries- they were a treat on rare trips to the fish & chip shop (and money back on the bottle saced from last time.) We did have an Indian restaurant in town, but I don't remember anyone non-white st school until about age 10, and this was (is?) probably common in small towns and rural areas. I suspect shops in such places were slower to get exciting exotic fruits and other ingredients than places like London and other cities. There are still regional differences in what supermarkets stock, but there's much more homogeneity than back in the '70s. I remember in the early '80s our local Tesco having leaflets on exotic fruits as they started to stock things like Chinese gooseberries/kiwi fruit. My mother wasn't as keen on trying these things as I was (because of price more than anything else,) so we didn't often get them.

I remember my father's marrows! My mum used to stuff them with bolognese sauce with parmesan or grated emmental.

@SparkysMagicPiano Creamola Foam.

I don't think there was a polar bear, another brand of pop, Cresta, had a polar bear.

Gasp0de, so glad to hear Salvo's was going strong, I remember the eccentric pizza chef!

My parents made ratatouille (though my dB and I didn't like it) from veg grown in the greenhouse, also a moussaka but with beef mince. Also goulash and "Hungarian" pork chops with French mustard, honey and tomato puree.

I remember not liking a lot of meat, but quite a lot was quite gristly at the time. I discovered proper butcher's sausages years later and good (not wet) ham on holiday in France.

Fizzy pop was pre-ordered from the milkman, as was gold top milk, for Christmas and birthdays.

@1moreglassplease

I was born in 1968 so this thread has been a wonderfully nostalgic read of my 1970s childhood.

I remember Farmhouse Kitchen and Houseparty but mum also used to buy Home & Freezer Digest every month with Mary Berry in it as we had a massive chest freezer. Mum spent all of her time blanching vegetables from our allotment and buying freezer bags and ties to store everything.

Dad was a meat and two veg man and when mum made spag bol he insisted on having potatoes with his because he wouldn't eat spaghetti.

Most kids in my road were Indian so I was basically brought up on very hot home-made curries as I'd be invited in to eat with them. I still love very spicy food to this day and have very fond memories of making chapati and helping to stir curries in their kitchens. Mum would always complain that I smelled of curry when I got home. I used to love going into the Indian corner shops and seeing all the spices and fresh ginger that we didn't eat at home.

I'm older than you, born in 1961 and Home and Freezer Digest was a staple in our house too.

My family background is Irish so most of the food in our house was very bland - , sausages, meat and two veg, fish on Friday etc. We were also very poor so we ate a LOT of offal. I love stuffed hearts and liver even now although I now hate kidneys.

When I was 13 my parents bought their first house. Our new neighbours on either side were both from India and it opened my eyes to a new world of food. I particularly enjoyed the big family parties when they would cook on big hobs in the garden and would pass over plates and bowls of delicious curries and breads.

I still love most traditional foods of my youth but I also love trying and cooking foods from around the world too.

In, I think, 1976, I started a Saturday job at Safeway in Oakwood (Leeds). It was one of the first supermarkets (other than Grandways, which was in Chapelallerton and so not as close to home). They were renowned for selling more exotic fruit and vegetables, and as cashiers we all had lots of training about how to recognise them (as we had to weigh/price them at our checkouts).

We were also taught a sort of 'touch typing' approach to using the tills. In the days when they had rows of buttons that you had to push manually. I can still remember some of the finger configurations! A bag of granulated sugar was 21.5p, and a box of loose tea was 9.5p.

My Mum had the Rose Elliott and Jane Grigson books, also the Sunday Times World Cooking book, and the Good Housekeeping Step by Step, a later version of which I also have. It's my most used cookbook. I also have the Marks and Spencer's Children's Party book (possibly 1980) which is a joy to leaf through.

My mum was vegetarian and shopped a lot in small health food stores. She made hummous and tabouleh, grew some veg, made her own bread and later dabbled in Indian cooking, including indian ice cream. But we as kids still got things like cottage pie, rice pudding etc. I don't remember her cooking pasta til much later but we did go to an Italian restaurant for birthdays.

@quirkychick

Ah the milkman! I loathed milk but on school holidays or if off sick we were allowed to order crab sticks & Mr Kiplings from him.

French Fancies or Almond Slices were my fav. Only recently realised you can still buy French Fancies - I thought we'd left them behind in the 70s.

Safeway was a great chain. We shopped at one in Scotland before we moved to Leeds and when I was first in London as a student I was pleased to find them dotted about here too. Taken over by Morrison's in the end.