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.

The only curry I recall consuming in the 70s came in a box : Vesta boil in the bag curry with white rice.
All other meals were quite bland compared to the Vesta curry.
Sundays consisted of a roast with Yorkshire pudding.
Saturday night was chips from the local chip shop with fish, pie or sausages.
Diets were quite bland back then and not very adventurous.

My mum cooked beef casseroles, steak and kidney pie, stuffed hearts, liver and bacon, quiches, roast beef/chicken/ lamb, spag bol , fish and chips etc. Veggies were seasonal like today - potatoes, carrots, parsnip, swede, greens, cabbage etc. We used lard for frying and had steam puddings, lemon meringue pie, trifle, jelly, instant whip, stewed prunes and custard etc.

My grandparents and mum emigrated to the UK in 1959 from India. They really struggled to get the ingredients they needed, but were adventurous cookers and eaters. Mum appreciated Delia when she got married and always cooked from scratch until crispy pancakes came along to give her a night off.

By the time I arrived in the 80s my grandparents and DM were regularly going to London for spices and supplies. And I'd get a samosa in the pushchair . We always knew when they'd been as okra and vegetable drumsticks would be in the curry that night. Those weren't available in the supermarket back then - infact I still can't get vegetable drumsticks very easily.

I now love a bit of Delia too, and very unadventurous DH follows her recipes to the letter.

@DinosApple

Never heard of Vegetable Drumsticks, tell me more!

My mum grew up with rationing and wasn't allowed to learn to cook at home in case she spoiled the food. She first cooked on a French exchange, so I guess her cooking was more varied than most. She is 88 now and still friends with her exchange partner - when I cooked something a few years ago, when the French friend was visiting, she said, "Oh I taught your mum that in the 50s!"

Meanwhile a friend's dad (80s rather than 70s) wouldn't eat pizza as it was foreign food. The same friend used to make jewellery out of painted pasta (like penne), which greatly puzzled another friend, who had only come across pasta in tins.

Your Mam sounds like mine, including the curry sultanas - that's just taken me back years - the blue spaghetti wrapping..... and of course, wholemeal unsliced bread, living in the East End of London at the time that branded us as hippies

Basically British cooking home cooking , however we had currys in the 60s as my mum worked as a health worker with the large Bangladeshi, Pakistani community in Birmingham, and as she was a very good cook anyway she loved to try things out. In the 70s we had pizzas , and spaghetti. We had loads of Indian food, takeaways and restaurants and Chinese, French, Italian. I grew up in the 70s, teen years through to 20 so went out with friends all the time. Birmingham the home of the Balti!!

I do remember in the mid 60s at a works children's Xmas party sitting next to a girl, black hair so maybe Italian or Spanish in her family? who stank, she seemed very nice I recall, but it was hard to talk to her because of the smell on her breath. Years later I realised it was GARLIC!!! We have it in about 80% of our meals now....
Hope this helps with your research:)

@PyongyangKipperbang

I've just googled, thinking maybe that's just what we called them, but no - its proper name is Moringa oleifera - aka the drumstick plant.

They are shaped like a drumstick- chop to manageable lengths to add to your vegetable or beef curry. The outside is hard and fibrous but the inside is very much like okra - a little bit slimey with bigger seed pods. You break them open (lengthways) with your fingers and put it in your mouth and run the soft side against your bottom teeth to get the soft fleshy but out. Drumsticks take on the flavour of the curry and are delicious for flavour and texture.

(I always eat them like that but I'm sure it can be done more elegantly )

Our town had a Fine Fare and a Co-op - the Co-op was my first experience of self service, but the shop is now a newsagent and looks so small. Mum did most of her grocery shopping there, but not bread, meat or greengrocery, and we had a doorstep delivery for milk. The nearby larger town had a Safeway, very American and light and white and definitely a cut above the rest. No Tesco but a Sainsbury's which was dark and crowded.

Breakfast was cereal (cornflakes, Ricicles, Sugar Smacks, Frosties, Weetabix) or toast and marmalade and a cooked breakfast on Sundays. The main meal was meat (or various fish) and vegetables and always potatoes, followed by a pudding, often with custard. Everything was made from scratch. Evening meal was usually sandwiches but frequently salad or something on toast followed by homemade cakes. Always tea and never coffee. No eating between meals although I took a piece of fruit for afternoon break at school. Lots of sugar, fat, salt but no pre-prepared things, loads of veg and masses of exercise, walking and cycling.

Then in the 70s we discovered Angel Delight and Dream Topping.

We tended to have the cheaper cuts of meat, such as shin beef, mince, lamb shoulder, sausage and bacon plus liver and kidney. However we would have a roast on Sunday, but a smallish joint was padded out with lots of veg and potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. Any left overs were used the next day. On the occasions we had a roast chicken, there was no waste - the carcass was used to make chicken broth. If we had beef, any dripping was spread on bread, with a sprinkle of salt - delicious.
We had fresh fish either Tuesday or Friday, depending which day Mum went to town for the fish and veg stalls.
Ready meals were pretty much non existent in our household, though occasionally Mum bought a vesta Chinese meal or the findus savoury pancakes when they came out for me and my brother to have after school, but Dad always had home cooked fare, and the main meal was worked around which shift he was on.
Home made stews and home made mince beef pie were regular meals as they were relatively cheap but very nutritious and we often had a pudding to follow. Mum also did delicious home Baking - bought cakes were an occasional treat as they were too expensive to purchase regularly - home baked goodies were more economical (and better, to be honest).
Back then, though, Mum, like quite a lot of women,was a SAHM, this meant she could go to the local shops daily to get essentials such as milk and bread, and do all the cooking and baking. We didn't have a fridge or freezer for quite some time, and perishables needed to be bought daily and kept in the cold pantry. The good old days!!
Despite all this, we never went hungry and were well fed.

@Gabbianni
Sultanas in Curry YES!
@Boysgrownbutstillathome
Stuffed Heart Yes, loved it. I still love liver & bacon with loads of onion gravy, comfort food . Lemon meringue my fav. Your menu sounds exactly like mine, right down to the stewed prunes. are you my sister? On seasonal veg, we had an apple tree and my Dad would wrap excess apples in newspaper and put them in those fruit boxes with little indentations for each fruit, from the greengrocers, and store them in the loft. The skins would be wrinkly, my (now grown) kids would have turned their noses up at them if I'd have given them apples like that!!

My Grandparents lived in Handsworth so we grew up with all the colourful and fragrant shops, open on a SUNDAY too, and loved the little meringue animals from the Asian shop over the road at Easter.

We had the Vestas when we went on holiday so mum didn't have to cook from scratch, loved them. I also love yorkshire pudding with golden syrup for puddng, something my London friends find weird. Part of my family is from Lancs where this was normal

@DinosApple

Thank you!

Ex is Jamaican and although his mum liked okra neither of us like it due to the texture, so I dont think I would like drumsticks! I am loving all the memories and new info I am learning from this thread!

People talking about frozen mousses....I am so jealous! My mother was as tight as a ducks arse, I think it was a fear thing, she was never brought up in poverty so I dont where it came from but even now she has a fear of someone getting one over on her. As a result they have £££££££ in savings and never spend a penny of it :(

She would never dream of buying such a luxury of those mousses and my sister and I were desperate to try them. We never had any sort of bought pudding, I was well into my twenties before I tried Angel Delight.

People talking about how chickens genuinely did last 3 or 4 meals was because of portion size I think. I remember always wishing I could have more meat with dinner. If we had chicken my sister and I would get a small slice of breast meat and a wing, well into our teens. My dad would get a whole leg and ma would usually have a thigh. That left loads for pie and soup or a curry.

My mothers favourite saying was (and is) "Well you dont NEED.. X Y Z" which is why she never bought anything that wasnt absolutely essential, unless she liked it...oddly enough. She could steam through a packet of biscuits in one sitting but my sister and I were rarely allowed them. Pretty fucked up now I think back, she still has food issues and so do we. My sister massively overate for years until illness forced her to sort her diet out, which has been a positive thing. I have an eating disorder too, I eat once every 2 or 3 days usually. Not good.

I grew up in the 60/70 not UK - food was simple, freshly made from local ingredients with very little meat. Both my parents knew starvation as children (Europe).
I remember our first camping holiday to Italy where my parents and we childeren enjoyed the local food. But to get the proper ingredients was expensive, so it was for holidays only.

Such a lovely thread, bringing back loads of memories.

Does anyone else remember Katherine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bedsitter? It was my first cookbook, along with a copy of the City & Guilds textbook, and what I learned came in really useful when we were without a proper kitchen for two months. Got out the two burner camping stove, and that plus a microwave, kept us fed.

We had a FineFare from about 1964, which was then p,a of the Home & Colonial retail empire; it became Argyll, and later took over Safeway in about 1988 until Morrisons

.

I remember the FineFare in Blackpool (which was lovely in the 70's) it was the only place I have ever seen one. I think it was on one of the back streets between north and central piers.

...part of Home & Colonial.... until Morrisons bought it mid-1990s.

As others have said, meat was really expensive in the 70s, chicken was a treat for Sunday dinner, cheaper cuts of beef such as stewing steak were used midweek as they would go a long way in different dishes. Mum complained bitterly when I was cooking Vesta beef curry, she said it stank the kitchen out!
I got Delia's cookery books as a wedding present and they were brilliant. Her recipe for curry with whole spices tastes amazing.

For Sunday roast, it would be a couple of very thinly slices of beef with horseradish, Yorkshire etc., thin slices of pork with apple sauce and breadcrumb stuffing or a single drumstick of chicken again with stuffing to pad out the meal.

@mrshonda - I'd say that's exactly as it is today. The last time I bought a good quality triple rib it was £75, similarly British lamb and free range chicken.

People had big joints in the past and made them last. Often now I will buy a single rib and whip up a roast for 4 with it. Midweek we have mince, chicken thighs, something veggie, salmon steaks (now that is a huge change), stir fry - rather than cold meat on Monday and bog awful rissoles on Tuesday!

I grew up in the 80s and remember my mum boiling the mince to make a shepherd's pie. Looking back now it was gross but you just accept what you are given as a child.

Yes, Argyll took over Home & Colonial and then merged with Safeway and was then taken over by Morrisons.

But Fine Fare was never anything to do with Home & Colonial. It was taken over by Gateway/Somerfield which was then in turn taken over by the Co-op.

Does anyone remember the weekly homemade soup - usually the carcass of the chicken (or whatever meat from the Sunday) stripped and boiled, the resulting broth then cooked with the stripped meat and veg like turnips, swede, carrots, spuds etc and a hand full of barley thrown in to 'thicken it up'. Usually materialised around mid-week and yes you could stand your spoon in it!

I ate green peppers for the first time in 1983. Avocado was disappointing as it can be still. The greengrocer in town was interesting to me as a teenager because they had stuff my gran couldn't grow.

Our spice cupboard included fenugreek and my sister cooked a. Indian rice dish.
We ate veg from my grandmother's garden and the local market garden. My mum bought a sack of potatoes from the potato farm and we didn't have chips all summer.
Spaghetti hoops on toast was a meat free dinner.

Anyone else remember Rise 'n' Shine orange juice powder?

Me. Kellogg's Rise 'n' Shine. I looked for some a couple of years ago but couldn't find any.

They did other flavours too IIRC

I can remember people thinking my famoly was posh/weird because my mother cooked us Coq au vin !