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 remember Danish open sandwiches being on the afternoon tea menu at the John Lewis silver service restaurant. They were the most expensive item by far, twice the price of everything else, so we weren't allowed to order them. TBF, as exotic and exciting as they sounded to us, they were still less enticing than the chocolate eclairs so we didn't really care

The other item that fascinated us was the mysterious "hors d'oeuvres"on the lunch menu. We knew what they were from an Enid Blyton story where the children begged to be allowed to order them in a restaurant so they sounded very alluring. They too were eye-wateringly expensive compared to the other starters (the ubiquitous soup of the day or orange juice) so we never got to order them. They were probably just a devilled egg, something on a piece of melba toast and devils on horseback or something else equally uninspiring and of the era.

My other memory of lunches with my DGPs there is that the waitresses always seemed to look scandalised that we were allowed to order from the adult menu as small children. They clearly thought we were spoilt. The children's menu wasn't designed for fussy eaters, it was more a case that steak and salmon were too good for children. The children's menu was the same as the adult menu (with smaller portions) but it only had the cheapest options.

On reflection, the whole idea of going out for lunch or dinner at a formal restaurant in a department store seems rather bizarre now. It really was incredibly formal, with starched white linen and heavy cutlery, the manager in a morning suit and waitresses in black dresses with lace caps. I suppose going to a "proper" restaurant wasn't suitable for children but JL was family friendly.

That all changed in the 80s, as did the JL restaurant. We thought it was rather exciting when they swapped it for a self service food court with a creperie and soda fountain. My DGPs didn't feel the same way

Mince was served with Pearl barley (which I didn't like) to make it go further

You would have hated the WWII recipe I saw the other day for “barley mince”, which was pearl barley, flavoured and coloured with gravy browning and Oxo to make an unconvincing imitation mince.

We had a lot more vegetarian meals like cheese dishes such as macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese, Welsh Rabbit/rarebit and egg dishes like Spanish Omelettes, souffles, quiches and jam omelettes.

There were more pastry bakes like sausage or fish flan, boiled bacon rolls, tuna fish or bacon and sausage meat pie, fish pasties, curried fish pasties, mince meat pie. Lots of dumplings and cobblers. We had home made pizzas but with a scone base.

I also remember powdered orange that you made into juice by adding water.

Is it really bad that my main cookbook (the only one that actually lives in the kitchen) is a copy of my mums favourite from the 1970s?

Held my first dinner party (!) in 1983 using a book published at the end of the 70s. It had a recipe for every day of the year and was actually pretty seasonable in its approach.
I cooked steak au poivre with a creamy sauce and then a kind of grand looking parfait (also creamy!) for pudding. Starters was grilled grapefruit with brown sugar: straight outta the seventies!
I was in sixth form and mostly what I remember is the huge amount of nasty Mateus and Blue Nun that we all drank.

I remember the grilled grapefruit with brown sugar! I really liked those but we had them for breakfast.

Melon slices with ground ginger sprinkled on top was a regular starter at home.

with the glace cherry?

My experience was a little different as I’m Danish. There are lots of similarities, of course, in traditional Danish dishes, to British cooking. Maybe more of a focus on pork in DK. I was a child of the 70s so really my main early memories of food I remember from the early to mid 80s.

What struck me most when watching Delia’s old cookery shows is when she cooked with peppers and encouraged everyone to ask their local grocers for them so that they would become eventually become more widely available. And things like garlic/olive oil/etc being still quite alien in some regions.

I don’t actually think the 70s were the ‘dark ages’ - I think they probably had more things right than we do now (although that’s a discussion for another day...) But it is nice to have easy access to so many ‘exotic’ foods, ingredients and culinary experiences now.

My favourite meal when I was a young child was roast chicken - we didn’t have it all that often as it was expensive compared to pork and beef. My mum was very much a hippy and was really into all sorts of ‘worthy’ food. So I generally preferred the food my grandmother made.😉 We’ve recently started buying organic chicken from local producers and it tastes exactly like that very delicious chicken I remember having at my grandparents’ house, with much more flavour to it and the most wonderful, unctuous skin!

Many of my happy memories of childhood are centred around really delicious food. Yes, it might have been simple and on the blander side and not all that ‘excitingk, but there was plenty of tasty food. To this day the nutty smell of butter heating in the pan and frying meatballs/pork chops/whatever, takes me right back to my grandmother’s fantastic cooking.❤️

My age group, after I left school (1972) and we all worked in London, would invite people to dinner and serve dishes like prawn cocktail, stuffed peppers, spag bol, bortsch, etc. I can remember never having come across stuffed peppers before (we never had anything like that at home). If we met out for a meal it would be pizza/italian usually.

Vivid memories of the complete Vesta range (chow mien, paella, was there a risotto?), Frey Bentos tinned meat pies, findus crispy pancakes, mince and boiled potatoes, artic roll, tinned Nestle cream and Swiss roll...weird mousse, ski black cherry yoghurt.
But then my mum bought ‘the cookery year’ and everything went up a notch...but like others, restaurant meals were a once a year treat at the local Chinese restaurant, and a meal out at the Wimpy on holiday. I still remember my first spaghetti boglonese cooked by a friend at university around 1980 - she started cooking the pasta before the sauce...put me off for a while!

I can probably count on one hand the meals out we had when I was a child. Most memorable was a birthday diner and the Golf Hotel which was gross and my mum got very drunk and fell off her chair.
I had banana split and thought it was all very jolly! My brother remembers my dad being furious with my mum for getting drunk.

Mind you I lived in India for a while when I was a child, so I did get to taste a whole different world of cuisines then!

@user1485813778 Yes, beef risotto; you still see it occasionally in cheap shops. They also did chicken supreme, beef curry, beef italienne; and for a while tacos and tostadas.

I've no idea what this Vesta thing is. We were not allowed any processed food - Findus, Bird's Eye, Frey Bentos, alphabet potatoes, tinned fruit, Angel Delight, Smash, spam etc. No McDonald's either, although we were allowed to go to the Hard Rock Café or Tootsie's for burgers.

Although we did have quite a lot of cold meat - garlic sausage, salami mortadella - no-one worried about nitrites in the 70s, not even my mum.

Hard Rock Cafe! Wowee!

Nothing like that here either, TatianaBis. But no cold meats as my mum thought that was the mark of poor housewifery. Meals out were rare, and definitely no fast food, ever, except when my lovely aunt and uncle and cousins visited from the other side of the country, and they always stopped at the local chipper and brought delicious fish and chips with them for us all to tuck in. Mum had a bee in her bonnet about so many things. She was right about some things but for the wrong reasons.

Dad grew vegetables and fruits - so many different items we never had to buy any, or any jam.

• An exception was fish fingers, which I tasted at the house of a friend and insisted on for breakfast from then on - fish fingers between two slices of buttered toast with a squirt of lemon juice...

@user1485813778

This one?

@mathanxiety

Those were the days that dads spent on vegetable patches.

Mine grew blackcurrants, redcurrants & gooseberries. We also had 2 apples and a pear tree - the fruit of which was fairly dire. Veg was spinach, runner beans & broad beans and some strange cucumbers.

The cold meat was a European thing I think - you couldn't really buy it in supermarkets - other than ham, tongue or pork pie - my mum bought it from delis.

@SparkysMagicPiano

That must be where our smoked haddock mousse came from! Page 102.

We used to have that at Christmas.

[quote SparkysMagicPiano]@user1485813778

This one?[/quote]
That's the one that had my steak au poivre in it!

We had half of a sizeable garden under fruit and veg. Beans (broad, French) carrots, purple sprouting broccoli, artichokes, white asparagus (grown under upturned buckets), new potatoes, peas, spinach, cauliflower, onions that would be tied in plaits to dry in the shed, rhubarb, currants of all kinds, gooseberries, pears, Bramley pippins, Victoria and greengage plums, raspberries, loganberries, Alpine strawberries which ran amok, rosemary, parsley. Also a beautiful array of flowers front and back. We used to set out jars of beer to drown slugs in

There was so much work involved, but the garden was dad's pride and joy. When he had a stroke, mum couldn't keep it all up so bit by bit it almost all returned to grass. She still keeps all the fruit trees in good nick, and the loganberries are indestructible.

You could get sliced ham and chicken in delis in Ireland (or at least the specific part of the Dublin area where I lived) in the 70s. I had both in friend's houses. Mum was very heavily invested in doing everything by hand (hippie approach) including making all our clothes, clothes, knitting, baking and cooking, and disapproved of everything ready made.

We got potatoes from relatives down the country, and eggs from an aunt who had an egg producing farm. At Christmas another aunt always sent a turkey, which had to be hung for a while, followed by cleaning out remaining lights, etc, removal of its feet and head, and some plucking to clean it up. One year I was sent out to the shed to get an onion from the onion plait a few days before Christmas, and when I opened the door, there in the dark was an upside-down dead turkey staring balefully at me. I can't remember if I managed to reach around him to get the onion.

So basically your father ran a little private greengrocers!

Mine just had a patch in a London garden - we did have rhubarb - I forgot about that - homemade rhubarb fool was so good.

We were once given a pheasant at Christmas and my parents left it in the cellar too long - it exploded!

My mum was a keen gardener as well @mathanxiety. We also had a fruit cage. Unfortunately she grew a lot of things that she loved and that the rest of us were not so fond of.

She grew masses of spinach, rhubarb, gooseberries and red, white and black currants. Fortunately she also grew other things we did like such as strawberries and raspberries.

Summer pudding was a frequent dessert in our house, but my mum never put enough sugar in it, and we all used to have to get the sugar out to add it to make it palatable.