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.

Anyone else have corned beef fritters? Made by dipping slices of corned beef into a batter then frying? My Mum did the same with luncheon meat.
We had belly pork as well although I'm not sure how she made that. I went veggie as soon as I left home!!
She made 'mousse' by beating a tin of evaporated milk with a hand whisk where you turned a handle to turn the beaters. Then she did the same with unset jelly then mixed the two and left it all to set as 'mousse'. Quite nice that was.

I remember so many of these things already mentioned. I’m surprised no one has mentionedSmash though? My mother never mixed the powder in properly. She never made potatoes again once it was invented and we seemed to have it for most meals...

I went youth hosteling for a week when I was a teenager. I took a rucksack of Vesta curries and lived off them all week. They were dehydrated lumps of meat in a pouch, astronaut style. I absolutely loved them. You just added boiling water and that was it!

M&S prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches. Wow! Must have been late '70s/early 80s.

Must have been '80s. The first pre-packed sandwiches were produced by M&S in 1980, and it would have taken a little while longer to spread from London to other parts of the country.

Things i can just about remember: Findus crispy pancakes, tough stewing beef, chicken kievs, tinned veg, lambs liver, edam cheese 🤢 fish x 1 a week, Fray Bentos pies in a tin 🤢, rum babas, black forest gateau - major treat, tinned spam, tinned corned beef on a weekend with salad, R White's lemonade.

Frozen ready meals were creeping in but the freezer was expensive to run. The post war era meat and two veg was the main dinnertime routine followed by cake or yoghurt. American style foods were getting cheaper to buy and very trendy.I remember being taken to a new out of town supermarket which was hailed as the new American way to shop.

I watched Delia's series in the first lockdown on iplayer, for the nostalgia. It was great she got the nation changing habits but now I've tried and cooked real ethnically diverse dishes, hers are odd and tame in comparison.

She reminds me of my mum and actually got mums old dog eared copy of her book used to make stuff out of as a teen.

I did a couple of the recipes, but found them all quite stodgy unfortunately.

I grew up in the 70s and remember much of this. We did have meat most days but in far smaller portions than nowadays. Chicken was a rare treat though we did have roast beef or lamb fairly often. And fish, other than cod or haddock was almost unheard of. I think I was probably at University before I realised that salmon didn't only come in a tin!
We didn't have a freezer until the 80s but in the mid 70s we got a fridge with a tiny freezer compartment and I was very excited by the prospect of freezing our own ice pops in the Summer! Before that all ice cream or lollies came fro the ice cream van. They sold family blocks of ice cream sl sometimes we'd have one of those, if the van came at roughly the right time. We had cooked desserts like fruit pies or sponge puddings most nights though. My Mum was a fabulous cook. She never did anything fancy - and certainly nothing "foreign" - but it was always beautiful. I could kill for one of her steamed soonge puddings now, they were beautiful.
It must have been really hard work for her though. I didn't really appreciate that at the time. She walked to the local shops on an almost daily basis and of course had hardly any labour saving devices. Almost everything was cooked fresh and completely from first principles. I look back on my childhood as being fairly idyllic but as I grew up I realised that a lot of it was pretty shitty for my Mum.

Loving this thread in a bout of insomnia!

Bringing back fond memories of my childhood food. I was born 75. My favourites were mince, onion, tinned tomatoes and an oxo (it would be an insult to call it bolognese!) Served with rice until pasta shells were discovered circa 1987. Chicken in sauce (homepride) served with mash. Mums shepherds pie, which was whatever red meat we had sunday, minced up, a tin of plum tomatoes mixed in and mash with onion mixed into that. Completely topsy turvy way of making it and utter mush, no teeth needed but I loved it. We had a lot of sausage and chips (homemade and in the the open chip pan until they bought a fryer later) a roast every weekend and many meat and 2 veg dinners.

We didn't have freezer until v late 80s/early 90s and didnt really eat convenience food when I was younger other than the homepride sauce and a hideous white fish in white sauce that she served with mash - a completely white dinner! And we only went to a tiny town sainsburys and had to carry the shopping across town to car park or an independent place called P&A for big stuff like washing powder which I guess was a precursor of somewhere like Aldi, cheap and cheerful, we had only one car and once a week there was military operation of taking dad to work so she could take the car to do the shopping in town. Mum shopped fresh and daily in the village. She prided herself on us having fresh fruit and veg, even if it was apples,oranges,bananas, carrots and peas from the ice box of the fridge.

By the 90s when we had big supermarkets and a younger indulged sibling we did pizza, burgers, oven chips, bulk buy crisps, sweets etc basically the downward spiral to obesity, waste and packaging we live with now.

I bought the homepride white wine sauce the other day and had it with chicken, it didn't live up to my memories

@feelingverylazytoday we had Pizzaland where I grew up much further south!

I thought it was so sophisticated, there were little bistro tables and chairs outside. I remember my first pizza express too the night my db was born in 84.

So many memories prompted the more I read I doubt I'll go to sleep now even if I get tired!

One of least favourite jobs was being sent to the shed in the dark to get potatoes out for mum to peel for dinner. Had a sack every winter. Tried it as a grownup to save cash but dh and I just didn't eat them quick enough before they went off! Asa child our meals were potato based As an adult my meals are pasta/rice based, only really have potatoes in a roast now we got rid of the chip fryer.

And salmon was posh even in a tin as a kid, now it's a staple.

Never heard of Vegetable Drumsticks, tell me more!

To add to@DinosApple

I first had them at a friend's, her family are tamil so the food was very spicy. Apparently you don't eat drumsticks, you chew them and eat the middle, the fibrous bit is chewed and then left on the side of the plate.

They look a bit like large green vanilla pods,

And I am lucky I can buy them everyday from one of the Indian supermarkets. Along with punjabi tinder, 50 different types of aubergine, gourds and huge bunches of corriander.

Oh @sashh I'm very jealous, I am nowhere near any Indian supermarkets and haven't had drumsticks for about 5 years.

My family are from southern India- the cooking styles are very different to the north. When the craziness ends I want to go to London and eat dosa, vadais and samosa. And head round to my mum's for some proper food .

Bread and dripping
Meatloaf
Stuffed marrow [Dad's marrows filled with mince...]
Going to the freezer shop, once my parents got a huge chest freezer which was in the brick shed.
Eggs from the farm in the village, Cracked eggs cheaper.
Veg from the farm in the next village.

@DinosApple

My brother lives in Cornwall, I send samosas to him with my dad most Xmases. I don't think there is a single sweet centre in the county.

When I left a teaching placement I bought 100 samosas to leave in the staffroom as a thank you to the staff.

I couldn't carry them so asked another student teacher. When I opened the car boot he said, "hang on, these are proper samosas, this is my gig, I'm Asian, what can I bring now?"

If we are allowed out in April the local park hosts a Vaisakhi festival. Loads of good food, music and a funfair.

@AmadeustheAlpaca

Anyone remember the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook? I learned to cook through that book and also through Rose Elliot’s Bean Book. The Hamlyn book had great pictures which showed what your creation should look like when complete, which seemed to be quite innovative at the time. As a student in the late 70s, the meal of choice when entertaining was always spaghetti bolognese or chilli. The more adventurous used Rose Elliott. I did like a Vesta chow mien, though couldn’t get the crispy noodles to puff out properly when frying.

Cooked all through school, with Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook, and I bought myself one last year on eBay, as my mums copy is lost

@Embroideredstars you see I'm watching Delia and thinking I'll cook something English! I love the style of the show-no chatting to guests while she cooks. Everything is broken down and explained. It's like a home economics lesson

**By the 90s when we had big supermarkets and a younger indulged sibling we did pizza, burgers, oven chips, bulk buy crisps, sweets etc basically the downward spiral to obesity, waste and packaging we live with now.

Yep. My parents are shocked when they see me throwing food that was bought but not even opened. Since lockdown I've been cooking more and fewer supermarket trips mean I actually use everything I buy.

I used to love to watch Delia, but then I was a teenage lad when these shows were first on.

Great cookery show too!

We did eat a fair amount of meat in the 70s but it was generally not good quality because it was expensive. I remember tins being used much more. I loved corned beef for example but I don't think I've eaten it for about 40 years. We often had liver ..My mother used to cook "curry" with leftovers from Sunday roast but it was pretty horrible.

By the 90s when we had big supermarkets and a younger indulged sibling we did pizza, burgers, oven chips

I've just remembered, the first time my cousin made oven chips he very carefully laid them out in single file and then half way through cooking carefully turned them all over individually.

@GoLightlyontheEarth

I remember so many of these things already mentioned. I’m surprised no one has mentionedSmash though? My mother never mixed the powder in properly. She never made potatoes again once it was invented and we seemed to have it for most meals...

I think smash still exists. We were given it in school dinners and it was disgusting.

My mum's rice puddings were sliceable - she would always think there wasn't enough rice in the recipe and lob another handful in
I remember my dad getting a microwave (maybe that was the early 80s) and the joy of making a jacket spud in minutes and then just crisping it up in the oven.
I miss the days when no one really thought about sugar consumption and my mum would let us eat Nestlé condensed milk straight out of the tin!

My mum hated cooking but luckily my nan was excellent. Lots of stews, dumplings, suet puddings, baked hams. She used to press a tongue in the fridge and give us tongue sandwiches and bread and dripping. Baked apples stuffed with currants were lovely. One time on boxing day my aunty made a lasagna and none of us had ever seen one before. We all had a tiny bit of it and were mostly in love with the garlic bread which she had made with white rolls and my grandad refused to eat it because garlic made him "repeat".

Mum used to give us findus crispy pancakes and a shit ton of mince . Also instant orange juice which tasted of plastic. The height of luxuary was a Club biscuit.

Because she was a shit cook we had lots of takeaways. Because we lived in a multicultural place we had great curries, chinese and middle eastern food. It was all good, I remember it is being fresher and more full of real veg than the stuff I have now actually which is often bought pre-prepped.
I remember going to our local Harvester inn style place and eating my first burger in the late 70's. Cinema food was kia ora and a choc ice. Wimpy had just popped up.

Aembroideredstars
I've lived in Brighton, Susses all my life, and I think we first got Pizzaland in the late 70's/early 80's. When I was in my teens my American pen-pal sent me a subscription to an American teen magazine. It mentioned pizza, and I had no clue what it was!

I was born in the 1960s and grew up with very uninteresting 1970s food. My Mum did have to scrimp and save to provide for us all and God bless her she was a terrible cook. As a wartime baby she was used to rationing and never ate a curry or Chinese in her life. There was literally no seasoning in our very bland food.

Meat was expensive so it was important that after it's starring role in a Sunday roast all the rest of the meat got used up. Cold meat and salad with fried potatoes on a Monday and anything else would be minced. Mince was served with Pearl barley (which I didn't like) to make it go further. We had things like spam fritters and baked beans, pudding was stewed fruit and custard or 'soap' - jelly and instant whip whipped together. The only vaguely exotic food we had was a lasagne made (strangely) with tagliatelle, white sauce, mince and onions with ketchup on the table to add the tomato flavour. Other meals might include fishfingers or sausages, macaroni cheese.

We went to an Italian restaurant maybe once a year.

The pne thing my mum was great at was cakes - particularly coffee cake and chocolate cake, yum. And she made biscuits and tarts too. All to save money. Her pastry was awful though - thick and grey.

Bless her. She hates garlic or anything else exotic and never cooked with olive oil once.

I had my first pizza at 16, my first curry and my first Chinese at 18.

@GoLightlyontheEarth

I remember so many of these things already mentioned. I’m surprised no one has mentionedSmash though? My mother never mixed the powder in properly. She never made potatoes again once it was invented and we seemed to have it for most meals...

I think PP have mentioned Smash!

I loved it - I much preferred it to my mum's mashed potatoes because there were always lumps in that, whereas Smash was lovely and smooth. My mum made it with milk and butter, so it was really creamy.

Very occasionally I've bought it, usually for making cheese, onion and potato pasties for my DC packed lunches when they were still school age - it works really well and is much easier than having to peel, boil and mash the potatoes.