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.

A quick Google tells me it was also known as junket or curds and whey (as in Miss Muffet).

I think the term milk pudding was also used more generally for rice pudding, semolina, tapioca etc. too.

We had milk puddings quite often. Rice pudding - sometimes homemade, sometimes Ambrosia tins. Semolina - I think that may also have been available in a tin, but mostly as far as I recall my Mum made it, possibly with a beaten egg stirred through and baked in a dish. We never had sago or tapioca at home (sometimes for school dinners), but we did occasionally have tinned macaroni pudding, which I loved. Very similar to rice pudding. Also junket, milk jelly, creme caramel from a packet, cheesecake from a packet (Green's, IIRC). Never, ever did we have yoghourt. Even today my parents don't eat it.

Oh, also blancmange (packet mix for the colour and flavourings, I assume, as it's just milk thickened with cornflour and sweetened). And custard! My Mum made it with evaporated milk (not condensed), sugar and Bird's custard powder.

Yes, all these milk puddings were regulars for us in the 70s / 80s.

I loved semolina with a spoonful of golden syrup or jam stirred through it.

I've got a bag in the cupboard which Ive always meant to try. I suspect the dcs will turn up their noses.

Also, Sweetheart, which came in a tin - pieces of fruit and probably a bit of juice in a very sweet syrup, which you whisked up with milk to make a kind of mousse. We probably had that more than Angel Delight or Instant Whip. Looking back, what a lot of milk or milk products we were eating! Not sure how much dairy there was in Wall's ice cream or Viennetta, which were also regulars.

I absolutely hate yoghurt! Horrible stuff.
Someone once tried to give me one of those Yakult things - I was nearly sick! Why would anyone swallow that stuff?

Did anyone else have tinned pilchards in tomato sauce on toast.I used to love them.

Yes! I did. Yummy
And DH tells me he lived on pilchard curry at university. Glad I didn't know him then!

I was a brownie leader and they loved lime milk jelly on a butter biscuit base as a lime pie. Also tinned peaches and evaporated milk. It's just a matter of familiarity I think.

I remember kippers and bread and butter or smoked haddock and poached egg for Sunday breakfast. Roast for lunch then afternoon tea with crumpets on a long fork by the fire. Weekly bath then bed.

I had a birthday party at home and DM did pilchards on toast fingers: my favourite. Loads of the guests didn't like it and she ended up sending to the shop for more bread to make a stack of jam sandwiches. I didn't find that out for years!

I believe the filling puddings - rice, tapioca etc - were encouraged after the war to fatten children up after rationing, hence them being regulars for school dinners.

Oh, yes, tinned pilchards on toast - lovely. Milk jellies, which l made for my own children occasionally and we all enjoyed them. Banana sandwiches were a treat too. Strawberry Sweetheart, I'd totally forgotten that one and scraping new potatoes - a thankless, pointless chore. All that is needed is to rinse off any remaining soil. Thankfully, l no longer have to face blancmange, custard, rice pudding, tapioca, or, worst of all, semolina. They are, actually, very nutritious. I also remember macaroni as a pudding in a tin. On the whole, l think most of us still had a traditional, rather plain diet. Those of us who were children at the time had parents who had grown up with rationing and who wanted to give us the best they could to give us a healthy start but with more variety of food, including lots of fresh fruit, and, yes, more sugar than we let our own children have. It was also full cream milk and butter. They wanted to give us what they didn't have themselves. Looking back, I think we were a lucky generation. What a lovely thread this has been.

Oh I LOVE pilchards on toast! When I've offered some to any of the kids they've looked at me like I had offered them a dog shit sandwich!

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).

Things like blancmange, if not out of a packet, were usually set with gelatine, which is a pork product. Comes as a powder or in leaves, which you dissolve in water.

The rice pudding, tapioca, semolina thing was part of my childhood in the fifties, not something I made for my children in the seventies though. Tapioca at school was vile and always known as frog spawn.
I remember learning to use leaf gelatine in the early seventies and making chocolate mousse and lemon mousse for special occasions. For my own children in the seventies I did things like stewed apples, baked apples, banana custard, fruit salad and cream and jellies for parties. I think we slso had Ski fruit yoghurts by then.

Tapioca at school was vile and always known as frog spawn.

At ours too

It really has been a lovely thread. Recognise some many things from a wc childhood. Even though we lived within 10 miles of a major city, local food shops were so limited and no car. As it was, a “big shop” involved mum and 2 dcs carrying it all back on 2 buses. Even now, in very deprived areas, it’s not unusual (certainly for young people) to have never left the estate they live in, if their school is within it. Food access is limited to the couple if shops on the estate.

My dgms (born early 1900s) were both experts at making the most delicious, and nutritious, food on a really basic budget. Slow-cooked stews, bread and cakes all home-baked. Pretty much everyone we knew of that age grew basic veg/fruit - at least tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, spuds and apples/rhubarb for pies and soft fruit in summer. Thus was part of everyday life, not seen as a hobby- would love to see this return.

My DM, as a low-wage worker in the 70’s and 80’s, hated cooking and the work/time involved. There was an element of it reminding her of being a child in wartime , and being poor. It was her happiest day when freezer food became easily available and we had a big chest freezer 😀

The posters exhibiting shock that we all couldn’t access garlic/herbs/mangoes etc in the 70’s ... this is still the case in lots of rural and poorer areas. On holiday in a fairly dodgy part of North Wales about 6 years ago, it was Pancake Day while we were away, and had planned classic lemon juice and sugar. After trying 7-8 small-medium local shops unsuccessfully (“You mean a fresh lemon? shopkeeper sucking teeth and shaking head in confusion), I ended up driving 10 miles to nearest big supermarket to get one. One of the small shops did proffer a Jif Lemon, which was slightly out of date...

Junket was flavored and sweetened and made using rennet whilst curds and whey was made with lemon juice in my family. They weren't quite the same but very similar.

Garlic was dried and powdered or dried cloves, herbs were mostly dried or the main ones were grown in the garden - mint, parsely, marjoram, hyssop, lovage, dill, cecily, sage, thyme and rosemary.

A lot more people grew stuff in their gardens or had allotments. People also went out hunting for hares, pheasants etc or bred rabbits. A neighbour used to go fishing every weekend and sell his fish.

I used to use quite a lot of fresh herbs in my cooking during the 70s, some from my garden and others that I bought, I was certainly able to buy fresh garlic.

I remember being thrilled to find a garlic crusher in the newly opened Habitat in a nearby town!

If you were an interested enthusiastic cook, it was an exciting time as new ingredients began to become available. Camembert with a glass of drinkable red wine suddenly became a favourite lunch! My Elizabeth David cookery books became much more battered and stained!

We had fresh herbs from the garden and garlic from the supermarket or market in the 70s.

A lot more people grew stuff in their gardens or had allotments. In the 70s? My mother believed things that I grew were poisoned for lack of chemicals. The waiting lists for allotments have never been higher than they are now - many have given up and closed the lists, while they can offer no hope of getting to the top for over 15 years.

Things like blancmange, if not out of a packet, were usually set with gelatine I thought blancmange was just the posh name for "cornflour mould" which, as its name suggests, is set with cornflour.

I'm realising how much my basic cooking was set in the 60s and 70s. I still have a rabbit jelly mould. I thought I was just being lazy not scraping new potatoes, had no idea it was now normal practice. And are people not making custard from Birds custard powder any more? Although I am aware I'm probably the only person who still makes junket.

Milk jelly/honeycomb jelly - my aunt used to make this. We all called it "fluffy jelly". I had no idea how to make it, so thanks for the recipe - I had a hankering to make it to see if it was as uninspiring as I remember.

@PandemicAtTheDisco

Junket was flavored and sweetened and made using rennet whilst curds and whey was made with lemon juice in my family. They weren't quite the same but very similar.

I make a thing out of the NT puddings book called "lemon solid", which is sweetened cream to which you add the juice of a lemon, which sets it into a creamy mass with a sort of cheesecake texture. Presumably your "curds and whey" is my lemon solid made with milk not cream.

Junket is exactly the same, except using rennet, and using milk, so the texture is much lighter. As a child I used to love holding lumps of it in my mouth and pushing my tongue through them to break them into two lumps.

Both lemon and rennet can be used to separate the milk into curds and whey. We used to make cottage cheese using lemon. More recently I've been buying Portuguese cheeses which have been set with thistle flowers rather than rennet.

@MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes Gardens were larger in the 60s and 70s, and people with a reasonable sized garden very often set aside an area for vegetables. So the demand led by the current revival in interest in vegetable growing has been augmented by the greater number of people with small gardens given over entirely to leisure, and the fact that so many allotment sites have been taken over for other purposes.