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.

We would always have iceberg lettuce for salads but I think it was late seventies. I think they were an American variety and much more popular in the states. I don't remember having any other types of lettuce before.

Salad was always iceberg, coleslaw, beetroot, tinned sweetcorn, tomatoes, cucumber, radishes, pickles and a protein source :- half a hardboiled egg, smoked fish, canned tuna, corned beef, slice of ham, chicken leg or thigh, tinned prawns, cheese chunks, cottage cheese or luncheon meat.

The dressing would be homemade salad cream or very rarely mayonnaise. I don't think we used french dressing at all.

I remember when different kinds of lettuce, ready washed in a bag, became widely available in the early to mid 80s.

What I came here to post, reminded by the talk of jelly, was to ask if anyone else remembers having milk jelly in the 70s? Basically jelly made up with evaporated milk so it was like mousse? I was fascinated by jelly making and we had some great kids' jelly moulds.

Cress played a pivotal role in school salads too

We had home grown cress. I'd forgotten all about that - always on the half egg. I think we started growing mustard cress seeds later on in the seventies. And potato salad and also sliced fresh peppers in the early eighties.

@IstandwithJackieWeaver

I remember when different kinds of lettuce, ready washed in a bag, became widely available in the early to mid 80s.

What I came here to post, reminded by the talk of jelly, was to ask if anyone else remembers having milk jelly in the 70s? Basically jelly made up with evaporated milk so it was like mousse? I was fascinated by jelly making and we had some great kids' jelly moulds.

I remember milk jello, I made it for my kids too.

I remember radishes tatef very hot at the time. Now they taste milc. That just might be my palate though.

@KatherineJaneway

I remember radishes tatef very hot at the time. Now they taste milc. That just might be my palate though.

DH and I said this exact thing last week.

@IstandwithJackieWeaver

I remember when different kinds of lettuce, ready washed in a bag, became widely available in the early to mid 80s.

What I came here to post, reminded by the talk of jelly, was to ask if anyone else remembers having milk jelly in the 70s? Basically jelly made up with evaporated milk so it was like mousse? I was fascinated by jelly making and we had some great kids' jelly moulds.

We made that in cookery class at school; they called it honeycomb mould. You made up the jelly with half the water, and whisked in the evaporated milk; the finished product was half smooth and half bubbly.

My parents gave supper parties and served lasagne. My father went to Italy on business quite regularly so he brought the sheets back with him. They had to be boiled before the lasagne was assembled.

We lived on a cul de sac and all the Mums stayed at home except one. They were also the only family with a freezer. During the bread strike they defrosted their frozen loaves on the roof of the car on the drive. I think we must have hot one shortly afterwards because DM started serving baby onions in white sauce a lot which came frozen.

I remember lots of mince, sausages, etc. We didn't have chicken as my DF didn't like poultry. Children had a high tea then milk and a biscuit before bed, my parents ate dinner (chops, steaks etc) later together at the table, or even on their laps on trays if there was something they wanted to watch on tv.

On Friday nights after swimming lessons we would stop at the only Chinese takeaway for miles on the way home. DM would have chicken Maryland which came with a fried banana.

I remember the first time I tasted mascarpone it reminded me of tinned UHT cream. I also remember tinned potato salad and vegetable salad.

We always took the skin off potatoes. Was that a 70s thing? Peeling old potatoes but literally scraping the flaky skin off jersey royals so they were bare before cooking. It seems so weird now. Except Jacket Potatoes of course, which we ate on bonfire night.

We only had jacket potato rarely. I think it was due to the 'don’t have the oven on unnecessarily'.

I remember Spud-U-Like but think that is an 80's memory, not that we ever ate there.

I used to live the little frozen onions in white sauce. Can you still get them?

love
My mum always scraped new potatoes as well. What a faff.

cooker you ca buy bags of frozen Pearl onions in Tesco in their finest range. I used them in stews. Yummy!

Same here about jacket potatoes, we didnt eat them regularly until the microwave oven became a thing (80s). No way was my mum having the oven on for over an hour just to cook potatoes.

Same here about jacket potatoes, we didnt eat them regularly until the microwave oven became a thing

Those of us in houses with a Rayburn/Aga did.

We did scrub new potatoes, not to remove the skin so much, as to remove any soil, because they were usually straight out of the garden.

Oh I bloody loved milk jelly. I wonder if it's one of those things that needs to stay in the nostalgic past or whether I could try it out on my children?

My grandmother made a cheesecake-style, but not cheesecake (as no cheese involved) desert which had a biscuit base and deep filled firmish raspberry mousse filling.

None of us can quite remember what it consisted of and the recipe unfortunately hasn't survived. I feel like it was almost a posh milk jelly but made with real raspberries and the most amazing deep pink colour.

@sleepyhead - I would guess that the filling was a bavarois type mixture - double cream, sugar, gelatine and the crushed raspberries. My mother made something similar. In fact hers also had evaporated milk in it which gave it a bit of a different taste - it was lovely!

@MagicSummer Ooh - I will experiment this summer. If I can recreate it I will be so happy!! (Off to Google bavarois)

@sleepyhead - was it anything like this? (I'm on the hunt for my mother's raspberry mousse recipe now!).

www.bakingmad.com/recipes/mixed-berry-mousse-cake

You know it could be! It was a staple Sunday lunch pudding in raspberry season so it's likely to be a fairly simple thing.

My grandmother was a cook par excellence, but she didn't really do particularly fancy recipes, just incredibly tasty food.

It took me decades to realise that the amazing bread we'd have with cheese and homemade pickles was just fresh soda bread but it was utterly delicious.

@Atalune

cooker you ca buy bags of frozen Pearl onions in Tesco in their finest range. I used them in stews. Yummy!

Picard do them - Ocado stock them. Fab for stews as there's no peeling necessary.

We had milk jelly or "mousse" a lot, whisked up jelly with evaporated milk as I didn't like plain jelly very much, as a child. I do remember the rabbit on the green grass jelly for parties, that must have been very popular. We had a large tupperware jelly mould, that you could change the middle bit to have different shapes e.g. star, Christmas tree etc. We had lots of tupperware, actually, including a green salad bowl with a kind of spiky bottom piece, I think to drain away any liquid to kerp it Crisp.

No idea why that's capitalised, *crisp.

Milk pudding was made using rennet which set the milk after heating to a warm temp, flavouring added - rennet liquid was some sort of enzyme from calves stomachs (wiki).

Rennet is what they use to set cheese (non-vegetarian). I think we had a children's recipe for using rennet for that CrunchyBiscs.