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 was born in 1969 but all through her life, my mum cooked very similar to how her mum would have done. Always meat. We had stuffed hearts, fried soft roe, lamb chops, pork strips, stewed eels and roast dinners. She never cooked anything not traditionally English, like Curry, Pizza, Spaghetti Bolognaise, Chilli etc, although her sisters did a little. If the oven went on for anything that cooked slow, like Braised Steak, then she'd do Rice Pudding and "not waste the oven being on for so long". My dad was a quite successful business man so they weren't hard up but her cooking never changed. Also, we'd only have lamb or beef for Sunday dinner and never chicken. We might have roast chicken on a weeknight, but never Sunday.

Reading this thread brings back so many memories.
Looking back, my mum was a pretty good cook. Most meals were prepared from scratch. For years the only freezer we had was a tiny compartment at the top of the fridge. Big enough for an ice cube tray, a bag of frozen peas and that was about all. When we got a chest freezer it was a huge event, very exciting. Mum had a mincer that clamped to the tabletop, she'd buy cuts of meat and mince them by hand. We'd have shepherd's pie (with a mashed potato topping hand-piped by mum in little rosettes from her piping bag), Duchesse potatoes again hand-piped, steak and kidney pie, liver (eugh!), home-made fish cakes in breadcrumbs, lamb chops (with mint sauce), pork chops, fish and chips (mum made the batter and she had a deep fat fryer bubbling away which we were massively scared of). Lots of potatoes, in the winter mashed, in the summer boiled. She made a delicious sort of pork stew "pork in cider" chunks of pork in a creamy cider sauce with tiny button mushrooms. A roast dinner every Sunday. Lots of home made puddings, steamed jam or syrup pudding, magic lemon pudding, home made pies and crumbles, lemon meringue pie. Or we would have tinned fruit with evaporated milk, we always had loads of tins of fruit in the cupboard.
We didn't have much "foreign food" but mum would cook spaghetti Bolognese and she also made chicken curry, using hot curry powder, and it would be served with a little dish of sliced banana and another of diced cucumber.
Every weekend we would bake cakes or biscuits, we had a dog-eared copy of "The dairy book of home cookery" with loads of handwritten recipes tucked inside the covers. I loved that book so much I bought myself a modern edition.
Mum was quite into wholefoods and many Saturday mornings were spent visiting "the health food shop" to buy lentils, dried beans or brown rice. She also made her own bread by hand, there would always be a big bowl of dough proving in the airing cupboard, or two loaves of wholemeal bread cooling fresh from the oven.
I remember our local supermarket was Sainsbury's and in the 70s the slogan was "it's clean, it's fresh at Sainsbury's" (presumably to convince us that the produce was not dirty and stale!)

Supermarkets - which one(s) did your family patronise?

As mentioned above, in my family it was Safeway for many years, from the mid 60s to the mid 70s. Then we moved over to Asda, with occasional forays to Morrison's for top up shopping. Sainsbury's didn't operate in Leeds at that time as far as I know. Neither did Waitrose. No memory of a Tesco until I moved to London. I don't recall a Co-op either, but there must have been some dotted around the place.

Local grocer's shops started signing up to Spar or Londis or similar in an effort to get access to reasonably cheap stock they could sell for not much more than the supermarkets did. Their big selling point, then as now, was that they were local, so if you suddenly realised you were running out of butter or bread, you could walk down the road to the local shop, or send a child.

When we first moved to Leeds, the local grocer's was run by a local chap, but eventually he sold out to an Asian family who I assume had not long arrived from Uganda after Idi Amin expelled all the Asian expats. Many of them had professional qualifications or high level business experience which they couldn't put to good use in the UK because of prejudice and lack of recognition of their training, so they bought corner shops, capitalising on the despair of many shopkeepers who couldn't see how to compete with the supermarkets. The new breed of shopkeepers worked incredibly hard, keeping their shops open long hours with the help of every family member, and introducing many British people to novel ingredients like unusual pulses, cumin, coriander etc (as opposed to the mass produced curry powder which had been around since Victorian times).

In small town Canada all I can remember is Safeway. They have closed most of them where I live now.

The first supermarket I remember was Grandways, in Chapel Allerton @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g. Then I think there was a Laws store, also in Chapel Allerton.

Tesco on the road towards Harehills and Safeway in Oakwood, and Sainsbury's opened in Moortown some time in the 80s, I think.

My Mum shopped at the Co-op, Fine Fare and local independent greengrocers, fishmongers etc in the 70s.

On the Kent Coast we had:

A FineFare that turned into an International then a Spar I think.

Next to school, I recall a Waitress being built which my mother wasn't very taken with saying it was all own brand and v expensive for what it was.

Mother always said Tesco was cheap and common, "pile it high and sell it cheap" - not that I remember one.

In the village we had as well as the supermarket: butchers, bakers, a poulterer, a pork butcher, a delicatessen and another butcher that also sold meat and fruit pies and greengrocers.

My grandparents had a house in London and I recall the Army & Navy food Hall (and Danish pastries and really nifty coffee with a stacked filter - the name will come to me) and Danish open sandwiches in the food hall and a small sainsburys on Victoria Street which my grandma liked very much.

In Yorkshire we shopped at Hillards or Asda when supermarkets first became popular.

Someone mentioned MacFisheries. We used to shop there when I was young, and it used to have this awful piped music as you went round the supermarket. Apparently if it was busy, they used to play faster tunes to speed up the shoppers.

School lunch salad. One leaf of curled round lettuce, on which were arranged: one slice of tomato, one slice of cucumber, one slice of egg. It was served with either: two boiled egg halves, a tablespoon of mousetrap or corned horse with the compulsory addition of a scoop of lumpy mash from which the eyes gave you the side eye and a dollop of salad cream thinned with vinegar.

You have forgotten the beetroot. 1cm cubes of watery cold beetroot, which bore no resemblance to Mum's pickled beetroot (which I could eat by the jar,) nor to real fresh beetroot, which I eventually dared to try as an adult, still scarred by the experience of diced school beetroot - and it turns out real beetroot is scrummy. God knows what they did to the school stuff.

We had Tesco, and... was it Liptons? You got green shield stamps there. I can't remember which supermarket it was. We got a Waitrose in the early '80s, and then Tesco moved out of town to a new site in 1991. But as well as Tesco, there was the market every Wednesday, and town also had a proper fishmonger (with a tank of live fish in the wall,) a couple of proper butchers, a wholefood shop (still there) and a small grocer where they ground the coffee themselves, which smelt great. I think there were a couple of bakeries, too. I think M&S still had food then, but we never went there for food. Just St Michael knickers and vests.

We used to shop in a place calledGateways bab I think. It was green branding? This is west of Scotland, and then presto which changed to Safeway. There was a really crap place that was like a shit lidl, basically just open shelving with lots of cardboard boxes. It had blue branding. Can’t recall the name though. .

I was born in 1967. As a child we never ate ‘foreign’ food, as my parents and all the adults I knew called it. It was mainly meat and 2 veg and quite repetitive but we did have plenty of veg as dad had a veg patch and grew loads. We lived in a small town, meat came from the butcher and bread from the bakery. Nearly everything was of good quality. No beans or lentils, apart from baked beans. Lots of basic salad in season from the veg patch, green lettuce, spring onions, carrots, shallots, tomatoes, not a lot else! I didn’t eat a curry until I was a teenager at a friends house. I first ate pasta after cooking it in home economics. Mum and Dad wouldn’t try it. I remember 2 small supermarkets when I was young, then a big (nowadays you’d say it was small) Sainsbury’s opened when I was 8, I remember going to it when it opened, it was quite an occasion. Mum did start buying more and more there, but always continued to go to the independent butchers and bakers.

MIL still swears that macaroni isn't pasta!

We didn't live near any shops so we had to live with powered milk 🤮 It was 'cheaper

I was going to say school salad had beetroot! The purple liquid covered the salad and our salad cream was so thin it was like white water. I though I didn't like lettuce for years, because it was covered in pinky purple bettroot juice and watery school salad cream - yuck.

I had forgotten powdered milk, we always had some in the cupboard.

We had a small Safeway in our local shops, along with a greengrocer, greek owned bakery - very good, especially the coffee éclairs, butchers too. We had a French Carrefour hypermarket too, a drive away, it had a fabulous wet fish counter. You could park your trolley in the trolley park in the middle of the shop and go upstairs to the cafeteria. We would all have scampi with chips and my dad would have a curry and rice with a poppadum on top. It later changed to a Gateway.

@FreekStar

In Yorkshire we shopped at Hillards or Asda when supermarkets first became popular.

I used to get walked to a Hillards every Friday with an aunt. Pushed there in a buggy and walked back with a week's shopping in the buggy!

This is bringing back some memories.My df had a good job but they was six or seven mouths to feed so dm used to buy a whole lamb to freeze.They were real foodies who went to the local farm or orchard for fruit and veg.dm went to eve class and learnt how to make chilli which I thought was awful and spicy.Then she made mackerel pate and strawberry ice cream.
I remember the vesta curries so well.
Food was seasonal then so you looked forward to what you could buy.Fruit baskets containing a pineapple as gifts or something to take a patient in hospital !
Not forgetting a rabbit shaped jelly or blancmange.😂

I lived in a small village with two pubs (then) a post office/shop and another shop. I remember the Post Office use to sell some meat and cheese and they had one of those big circular cutting things that they used to cut bacon rashers & cooked ham, it was never cleaned between orders!
We also had a bakers van that used to come round once a week, always remember that the day nearest to good Friday they would have hot cross buns and the smell filled the whole of the van. Back then, they were a once-a-year treat.
Local farmers used to leave a couple of swedes outside every house when they were harvesting them for cattle feed, and there was an unwritten understanding that you could help your self to a bucket of spuds from a field, but no one would dare take a sack to fill.
During the summer it was fruit-picking time, and the whole family would climb onto the back of a trailer pulled by a tractor to go and pick. Strawberries, broad beans, peas, raspberries, black currants and later on apples were all picked by hand. You'd get 50p for picking a 20 lb tray of black currants, which would take ages to gather as a kid. It was also understood that every family would take some fruit/veg home with them after each day.
Dad would buy the Sunday joint each Saturday after he finished work, not my mum. Everything else was picked up on a weekly shop in the nearest town - if you forgot something then you'd have to do without.

On portion sizes I remember in the early 1980s DM bought a tin of ravioli - we had that with boiled veg for tea - a quarter of a tin each.... tuna salad - one tin between 4 of us mashed up with salad cream. Served on a couple of lettuce leaves with tomato and 4 slices of cucumber - lettuce and tomato from the garden but DM could never get cucumber to grow so it was eked out over a few meals.

Sainsburys wouldn't open in south Wales until the M4 was extended so if we visited my grandparents in London we came home with their butter and half a suitcase of their red label tea.

I wasn’t an adult in the 1970s but I remember the food growing up well. We ate meat for dinner every evening except for the day we had fish.

A Typical week’s dinners:
M: Beef mince & mashed potatoes; T: pork chops & apple sauce & boiled potatoes;
W: grilled haddock & chips; Th: gammon steak & pineapple & chips; F: butcher’s cold roast beef on rolls with tinned soup (my mum worked all week and this was a night off); Sat: steak & chips (onions & mushrooms optional). Sun: roast chicken & gravy, roast & boiled potatoes & turnip. Dessert was only occasional- apple crumble or rice pudding or Ice cream.

Occasionally if we ate without my parents we would get kids’ food out of the freezer: fish fingers, crispy pancakes or beef burgers(no bun) or sausages & tinned spaghetti hoops.

My mum has never enjoyed cooking and never cooked us anything of foreign origin. When my sister brought home the macaroni cheese she cooked at school it was like the alien landing!

In the mid-80s, when a Chinese take-away opened in our village, I thought all my Christmas’s had come at once. It was delicious! We only got a couple of takeaways a year but it was one of the most exciting things I can remember about my childhood.
That and the occasional Vesta Curry out a sachet if I was to eat alone. I loved that!

My friend next door’s mum used to cook spaghetti Bolognese which seemed outrageously exotic to me

Oh, tea, yes. From a very young age. Teabags were not in regular use in most homes until the mid to late seventies - l think they were probably more expensive than loose tea, which was used with a tea strainer. Always cups and saucers too - no mugs. Mugs were for coffee or hot chocolate. Making a pot (and it was always a pot) of tea was a rite of passage for the seventies child (born in the sixties, l was definitely one of these!). Although kettles that cut off at boiling point had been invented, l did not know anyone in the seventies that had one, so it was quite an art waiting for the kettle to boil. They were big and heavy too. Coffee was usually made with hot milk, always instant, and usually brands such as Mellow Birds or Nescafé. My grandfather liked Camp. There was very little variety of tea or coffee compared with today.

Oh Camp coffee....it was vile! Coffee and Chicory mix I believe.

I was a child in the 70's and we had tea eveyr morning with breakfast as my mother had a thing about not having squash (also Quosh brand that a PP mentioned) with breakfast, no idea why! We couldnt have milk as that used it up too quickly. We would get two pints a day delivered, and I would say that 98% of that went into cups of tea!

Someone mentioned wine earlier, I remember a line from The Good Life that has stayed with me in recent years. Jerry says that he and Margot are having....[insert 70's posh meal] ..... for dinner with "a rather drinkable Hock" and I love that as Hock is VILE. I wouldnt use it to clean that drains!

When I was 30 ish my friends decided to throw a 70's style dinner party. The prawn cocktail was ok, the steak and chips was nice, the frozen black forest gateau not so much but the blue nun was undrinkable! We gave up and hit the Pinot!

Ha ha when I was 30 it was all Chardonnay. Pilot took another 15 years and now it's all picpoul