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.

If anyone else is a nostalgia junkie like me then YouTube is your friend! Search for 70's or 80's ads. There are hours of them on there. As a now 47 year old its wonderful to feel 7 again!

Bring back Ben!

Born in the 1950’s, I was a student in the 70’s. We cooked Indian, Chinese and Indonesian food regularly in our student flat. DH’s Dutch mum was raised in the Dutch East Indies, and his family lived in India for several years too, so he was no stranger to “foreign” food.
My parents, by contrast, regarded mushrooms as exotic and garlic as a foreign abomination. On seeing me open a container of garam masala, they enquired angrily whether it was “drugs”!
It was often hard to source ingredients in the 70’s, especially in the provinces. We had to go to shops in the small Asian area of town to find things like aubergines or powdered cumin, which are now in every supermarket.

Well you are all vair vair posh to have had asparagus

Portsmouth in the 70s was not exactly a hotbed of culinary delights!

I think in the 80s at least we had tinned asparagus.

My mother's dinner party menu (a constant) was;

tinned asparagus soup
steak on mustard crouton
chocolate cheesecake with tinned mandarin segments.

Sometimes she would make curried seafood pancakes.

I am feeling a yearning in my soul for this food! Maybe this weekend. :)

Oh my FIL had a host of things he couldn't eat: including pasta, mushrooms, garlic, chicken. He once told me garlic was an abomination and was horrified to be told that every meal he had eaten for the last five days had included it!

@Scrumbleton

Born in the 60s - first tried pasta in 1975, chilli in 1984, first restaurant curry 1985, first Chinese food 1973. We had lots of chops, stews, mince, shepherds pie ( still a favourite), smoked fish in milk, with roast chicken occasionally on a Sunday. Roast lamb was an Easter treat. Desert with most meals - jelly, tinned cream, angel delight, tinned sponge, custard, sweet corn flour, semolina, farola, stewed fruit. Most meals cooked from scratch with the exception being findus crispy pancakes and fray bentos pies. My mum baked lots - jam buns, coffee and walnut cake ( made with camp coffee) , lemon drizzle cake, chocolate cake, Dundee cake, cherry and almond cake and tray bakes galore. Yum yum. My mum became more adventurous in the 80s and also made spag Bol and curry. School packed lunches were a bit grim but I did like sandwich pickle and Sardines in tomato sauce.

I still use my Mum's recipe for coffee walnut cake-it's the only thing I use Camp coffee for.

We always used Camp coffee for cakes, but never as a drink.

We had New Zealand butter which was very yellow until Lurpak became available which I adored. At my grandma's in Wales the butter was very yellow and salty in a round pat with a Swan on the paper.

My parents drank ground coffee on a Sunday, I still have and use the Moulinex coffee grinder they had. It was brewed in a stainless steel percolator. Served in Portmeirion Totem coffee set (which I also still have).

In the late sixties and early seventies there was almost always a plate of bread and butter on the table, doing the bread and butter and laying the table were children's jobs. We used the fish knives and forks even for fish fingers. There was a lot on the table, as we had tablecloth, mats, cloth napkins rolled in our own napkin rings, a cruet and later pepper mill and tomato sauce and HP unless there was gravy or it was curry etc.

With spaghetti bolognese or tomato soup there was a grater and cheddar cheese on the table. We also had the chopped banana, desiccated coconut in little dishes to sprinkle on curry.

I used to love tomato sauce sandwiches. Also there was a dark chocolate spread which came in a red and white tub.

My grandma always had a bag of sweets in her handbag or tucked behind a cushion on her chair. We also made fudge and treacle toffee, peppermint creams and coconut ice. The last two I made from the recipe in "Something To Do", a pink Puffin paperback with things to do for each month of the year.

Camp coffee, that’s taken me back!
My cousin is gay and I remember at a family party his boyfriend ask for a coffee. My mum popped her head out of the kitchen “camp?” Whilst everyone looked both awkward and smiling.
Like something out of are you being served?!

@snowspider

We had New Zealand butter which was very yellow until Lurpak became available which I adored. At my grandma's in Wales the butter was very yellow and salty in a round pat with a Swan on the paper

That's because there are two types of butter - sweetcream, which is the NZ/yellow stuff, and lactic, which is Lurpak and other butters usually packed in silver.

RosesAndHellebores

Oh my FIL had a host of things he couldn't eat: including pasta, mushrooms, garlic, chicken

The whole family of a school friend of mine had a tiny list of things they would/could eat.

Basically:

steak or chicken breast or sausages

with

mashed potatoes or chips

plus

carrots or peas.

No rice, pasta, fish, cheese, other vegetables, salad, tinned anything, sauces, "mucked about"...

Friend and I were sooo excited when McDonald's came to town!
But she had to have a special order or a burger in a bun and nothing else.

Later in life, her brother treated their father to a trip to Australia for the cricket.
Her DF rang Air Sri Lanka to check they wouldn't serve "foreign" food...

Oddly, they were the people who introduced me to Chinese food as a Chinese takeaway (sweet and sour chicken and chow mien) was their Saturday night meal and the only thing they ate that differed from the list above.

Years later my friend proudly told me she now ate pasta...

Plain, on the side of the plate and as a change from the usual potato dish.

I like plain buttered pasta as a side with steak or a burger.

@SparkysMagicPiano

Well you are all vair vair posh to have had asparagus

Portsmouth in the 70s was not exactly a hotbed of culinary delights!

Not necessarily. My mother was brought up in asparagus growing area. We had it every week during the season. We were not posh - grandfather was a labourer

@mellicauli

The good: stews, hearty soups ,roasts, spaghetti bolognese, homemade steak & kidney pies, baked potatoes, quiche, spicy kebabs with rice, pork in soy sauce, with mushrooms, peas & pineapple, chops, fish, meatballs & noodles, pillau, some kind of lasagne which was made with pancakes instead of pasta, served by the slice

The bad: spam fritters, fray bentos steak & kidney pie in a tin, findus mince pancakes, tuna pasta made with campbell mushroom soup & served with grilled cucumber. Yes grillled cucumber!

People thought we were weird because we had yoghurt.

Grilled/roasted cucumber is actually becoming quite 'in' now - it seems to intensify that lovely fresh flavour. Lovely in a fresh baguette with a nice cheese.

I love this thread - I'm late 20s but love food history. I also recognise a lot from my darling Granny's table. She learnt to cook in the 70s and stayed firmly in the 70s all the way through my (90s) childhood. She was completely horrified when I moved to the big smoke and started talking about curry and pasta - even more so when she met my (Nigerian) DH's Granny. They were both as horrified as each other when they started talking about what they'd each had for lunch.

My mum would make spag bol and risotto and we had some Vesta curries but that was as far as it went in terms of something more "exotic". That said, it felt like she was a more adventurous cook than any of my friends' mothers.

The thing that I remember most about 70's food was that apart from Vesta or Angel delight, everything was cooked from scratch and most of it was really good. I don't remember how much eat we ate. I know Friday was definitely a non-meat day - Catholics - but I think there was a fair amount of mince and braised beef.

Cooking from scratch started to vanish in the '80s and as a result, our diet became far less healthy. I look back with fondness at our 70's meals.

@TatianaBis - it was just like a farm.

Dad also used to make wine from various ingredients. The bottles were in the garage and from the breakfast room you could occasionally hear muffled popping sounds as the corks shot off the bottles.

@snowspider

We always used Camp coffee for cakes, but never as a drink.

We had New Zealand butter which was very yellow until Lurpak became available which I adored. At my grandma's in Wales the butter was very yellow and salty in a round pat with a Swan on the paper.

My parents drank ground coffee on a Sunday, I still have and use the Moulinex coffee grinder they had. It was brewed in a stainless steel percolator. Served in Portmeirion Totem coffee set (which I also still have).

In the late sixties and early seventies there was almost always a plate of bread and butter on the table, doing the bread and butter and laying the table were children's jobs. We used the fish knives and forks even for fish fingers. There was a lot on the table, as we had tablecloth, mats, cloth napkins rolled in our own napkin rings, a cruet and later pepper mill and tomato sauce and HP unless there was gravy or it was curry etc.

With spaghetti bolognese or tomato soup there was a grater and cheddar cheese on the table. We also had the chopped banana, desiccated coconut in little dishes to sprinkle on curry.

I used to love tomato sauce sandwiches. Also there was a dark chocolate spread which came in a red and white tub.

My grandma always had a bag of sweets in her handbag or tucked behind a cushion on her chair. We also made fudge and treacle toffee, peppermint creams and coconut ice. The last two I made from the recipe in "Something To Do", a pink Puffin paperback with things to do for each month of the year.

I loved that book! It was a Christmas present. ('Something to do' and have often used ideas from it over the years.) Your culinery memories certainly chime with me.

@mathanxiety I think your dad and my dad would have got on.

I'm American but the overall tone of the thread is familiar to me! I was a child in the 70s. Two things we had regularly but I can't imagine eating now were chicken and biscuits chicken casserole made from a very old hen (so cheap). Meat was poached and torn apart and put into a white floury sauce. My father wanted the skin in too, which was disgusting, having been boiled. Served over biscuits (a bit like very plain savory scones). I was required to eat whatever was on offer and chicken and biscuits was something that made me cry. The other thing was chicken gizzards I think they're the crop? It's a muscly organ. My mother would fry them in a pan and serve with salt and pepper. Potatoes and some canned or frozen vegetable on the side.

Well you are all vair vair posh to have had asparagus
Not at all. We were in the country, the neighbour who gave us asparagus was proud that the plants he grew were ones he 'liberated' in WW2 from Belgium.
By today's standards, every house in the village had quite large gardens, the front was dedicated to flowers and the back to vegetables that kept the family going. The idea of having a lawn, or any other 'wasted' space was beyond comprehension.
In the late 60s there were still families squatting in ex-military buildings, rationing only ended in the mid 50s, plenty of people were raising children with that still in their memories and experiences.

I don't think I tasted asparagus until the 1980s when I remember having tinned asparagus used as a garnish on a steak dish in a restaurant. I don't think the menu stated it was tinned, but it was September, so I think it was. We didn't grow vegetables (or fruit) at home so back in the 1970s we'd have had to buy it from the greengrocer or supermarket, and I doubt my parents would have felt they could afford it.

There's an outside possibility we had it at my grandparents' house when I was very young, as my grandpa was a gardener for a wealthy family and grew lots of fruit and veg for the big house. He and my granny were allowed to have some for themselves. I remember going to the vegetable garden with him to dig up some new potatoes which we would have been eating under an hour later. Lovely.

I think I only had Campbell's Cream of Asparagus soup in the 70s. My parents grew lots of their own fruit and veg, though.

We had a Berni Inn which had a theme, all the tables were inside little stone huts with thatch roofs and a river running through the restaurant! It seemed so magical as a child, another themed restaurant nearby was railway carriages with overhead luggage racks. I suppose it was to make up for the food, though we loved it at the time.

I remember cheap wholesome meals such as ham shank and peas; broth with a little meat, barley and dumplings; liver and onions; meat and potato pie cooked in a deep pot in the oven topped with with a thick crust which would be crusty on the surface and soggy underneath served with sliced pickled onions; Findus crispy pancakes also was a regular feature. We always had sliced bread and butter with a meal to fill us up.
We didn't have meals out but my parents and their friends would take turns at cooking a lovely meal and all the kids would play together while the grown ups chatted. It was so nice. Food was bought locally too.
I remember as a teenager, my parents started experimenting with Chinese dishes.
Such happy memories of simpler times.

Oh yes, potatoes just dug up had the most wonderful flavour! My parents had a very large vegetable garden and it was my job to go and harvest what we were going to eat for dinner in the summer. I loved digging up the potatoes - finding those little nuggets under the earth! Then I chose from carrots, french, runner and broad beans, courgettes, broccoli (in season) and loads of fruit. Such happy, happy times. Now I have a couple of Veg Trugs which never seem to produce a good crop!

@PyongyangKipperbang

If anyone else is a nostalgia junkie like me then YouTube is your friend! Search for 70's or 80's ads. There are hours of them on there. As a now 47 year old its wonderful to feel 7 again!

On to it now! Thank you!

Every summer since I can remember, and going back well into the 70s, I have grown tomatoes. My Mum canned tomatoes every year, and we all helped. We used them for pasta sauces, and oddly enough she used to make a tomato side dish with the canned tomatoes and soda crackers.

She also made a tomato based relish we ate with roast beef.

I still grow tomatoes, the cherry variety, on my balcony.