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.

Yes we had the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book as well, happy memories . And a Mary Berry one years before she became a TV personality.

Well I want a Findus Crispy Pancake now!

Agree that meat was expensive.

We used to have a lot of liver (definitely not lovely calves liver) and tongue. Stuffed hearts were a special Sunday treat. Also Brains Faggots - I dread to think what was in them.

Sunday tea was "salad" which usually involved some definitely not naice ham, lettuce leaves and half a tomato with Salad Cream which is an abomination. Dessert was tinned fruit salad or tinned cling peaches with evaporated milk.

My brother, who was at Uni in London bought us a tin of Lychees one Christmas. This caused consternation on a par with aliens landing in the town square.

@DynamoKev Sally Moreland was one of the first "supermarkets" although I don't think that was what they were called then as the term supermarket came later I think.
It was a chain that sprang up (across the Midlands certainly) in the late 60s and early 70s.
It was a "pile em high, sell em cheap" sort of place, could have even been the precursor to Aldi...

I was a child in the 70s and remember being fed really basic food - lots of stews, chips made in a chip pan, liver, sausages. No takeaways just fish and chips. No 'convenience' food apart from fish fingers (a tub of instant mash as bought for some reason in the mid 70s where it sat in the cupboard for about ten years).

Any sort of fruit juice was a very rare treat (although there was always plenty of apples, oranges and bananas in the house). No freezer until 1977, just had the ice box in the fridge big enough for a small bag of peas and a small box of fish fingers

So jealous of the comments here about “mum being an excellent cook” or knowing how to cook cheaper cuts of meat long and slow for flavour. Not in our house! My mum wasn’t a great cook.

Typical late 70s / early 80s meals:

• liver and onions, with mash and tinned processed peas
• cauliflower cheese
• sausage and homemade chips (of course in a house fire hazard open oil chip pan!) and don’t be getting any ideas about today’s farmer’s markets sausages! These were cheap and nasty
• mince, mash and those godawful tinned processed peas again. And when I say mince: brown the mince. Chop in an onion maybe. Make up an oxo cube with water. Let it stew until it’s even worse than it sounds
• we did embrace spaghetti bolognaise earlier on, but as above - mince, oxo, onion if lucky, and a tin of tomatoes. Don’t get any idea about garlic or herbs!
• homemade curry and rice, which I think was chicken. Also with sultanas!

We never had Indian or Chinese, but we couldn’t afford it, rather than it not being available as a takeaway. Fish and chips was extremely rare and very welcome!

Pudding was bananas or tinned fruit and custard. Bird’s custard powder. Winter suppers instead of tea if we had been out late (like swimming club or Brownies, mum helped at both for discount) would be semolina with a spoonful of jam.

We actually did have meat (mince / sausage / liver) most evening meals I think - but you’d never get something like chicken in a sandwich at lunch. Cheese, jam, sandwich spread I think.

oh spam fritters and Echo margarine - the memories (not together though) My mum used marg for baking - she'd do a huge bake once a month - jam tarts, coconut cakes, sponge, curd tarts - they where locked in Tupperware and had to last a month! Only treats we had .

I introduced my 3 to Spam last year - it was a huge hit.

My DM was a school cook and my DF is traditional. I never has lasagne, spaghetti bolognese, curry or any new exciting dishes to try. Home Economics class was traditional too, sausage rolls and pineapple upside down pudding.

My DM once tried to make pizza, using tinned tomatoes, it was soggy and grim.

I never tasted curry until I was 17 when I met my first boyfriend and his parents enjoyed dining out and would treat us.

Forgot say it was mid 80s when I experienced different foods.

In the 70s I remember eating hearts, liver and rabbit. Cheap food.

I was 12 at the end of the 70s. Spag bol and home made pizza was as exotic as it got
We would havr proper Chinese takeaway once a month but there was no attempt to cook it.
My mum was an early adopter of the flaccid oven chip. We had things like beefburgers and sausages and mash. Sometimes beef casserole.
Roast beef every Sunday with Apple crumble. But that was our only pudding of the week.
A bottle of coke was bought for birthday parties. Fruit was Apple's, oranges and the odd banana
Would say we were pretty average

Also most of her dishes are European-did you cook Indian/Chinese food in the 1970s?

My mother was cooking Indian and Chinese influenced food in the 1960s. I've been unsuccessfully trying to recreate the taste of her chicken fried rice for years.

God, just remembered sandwich spread. Blurgh

Also most of her dishes are European-did you cook Indian/Chinese food in the 1970s?

Yes, we had Madhur Jaffrey and Ken Hom for those.

And Smash

My mom had a special recipe for using up the leftover turkey at Christmas which include broccoli and this sauce she made. I was in my late 20s when I realised that it was curry powder that made it so amazing. My mom still has the original jar that she bought in the 60s - she uses it that rarely.

Then there was the time my oldest brother came home from working his summer job at the shipyard. There were lots of non English people that worked there and he had noticed how different their lunches were to his ham rolls. He was all excited that one of the Italian guys had shared their lunch with him which included this strange vegetable - a zucchini! None of us had ever heard of it even under it's French name of courgette! Years later when my mom moved back to a farm she would grow these in vast quantity as we all loved them.

then again - my mom's cooking, while good in a lot of ways, was a bit bizarre as well. I remember her telling me that whenever I wanted to cook sausages i should ensure i thoroughly boiled them for at least 15 minutes to ensure I got rid of most of the cheap grease they contained. Dog only knows where she was getting them from for them to need that kind of treatment.

to be fair though Ken Hom was the 1980's and you couldn't really get your hands on the ingredients for exotic food for most of the 70's

Oh - and she also made spaghetti (never called anything more than that) which included boiling the pasta until very soft and then draining and adding a tin of tomato soup. No wonder my brother was impressed by the Italian's lunch!

I was born dealt 70s but wasn’t the 70s the age of the ready meal and crazy processed food and smash and loads of E numbers and additives?

@ambereeree sadly I don’t think this is available on iplayer but I’m pretty sure the episode that dealt with the 70s gives a really good flavour (pun intended) of the decade in the average British household.

There were also food trends of the decade, like fondue parties!

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05nc5tv

*i was born in early 80s bloody autocorrect.

I don't recognise any of what you say @ambereeree.

I was an adult in the 1970s, working and living on my own.

I bought meat and ate it.

@garlictwist

I was not alive in the 70s but I remember watching that "Back in Time for Dinner" programme - it said there were two types of diet in the 70s: one that embraced the new fangled convenience foods in packets, and then another side that railed against it and were all about lentils and whole foods.

And there were normal people who ate traditional foods which in my family included egg and chips, sausage and mash, roast chicken (not beef or lamb, we weren't millionaires), boiled bacon and cabbage, mince, stews, and casseroles. Nearly every meal was accompanied by boiled potatoes. The only things approaching convenience food were baked beans, fish fingers and tinned spaghetti hoops. Mum and Dad were quite trendy and so they occasionally had rice with a curry made with Orange all purpose curry powder or 'proper' spaghetti but they were sophisticated adults only treats. The spaghetti used to come in long blue paper packets and it was eaten so seldom that a packet might sit in the larder for a year or so.

lots of e numbers in the brightly coloured pop and new fangled ready meals I'm sure but most of us couldn't afford them - my mum would never buy cakes or instant stuff when it was cheaper to cook from scratch - she went to university in 1982 and that was when we saw things like crispy pancakes etc - but she'd still do a lot of batch cooking - her first purchase from her grant was a fridge freezer.

This comparison does seem to show prices in real terms were very similar for most foodstuffs . I think the difference is the greater variety we have today and more processed and convenience food

Nobody cooked Chinese food until Ken Hom's Cookery Course or Indian food until Madhur Jaffrey.

My mum was Danish @Porcupineintherough it might have been me! Everyone looked at my school lunch box as if it was from Mars

It was only when I joined Mumsnet that I realised just how different my childhood food was - she actually knew how to cook so we never ate baked beans, Bisto or any English food. She did buy cheap offal from the market and I remember stuffed hearts being a favourite as meat was very expensive. There was a lot of mince.

I had a very wealthy great aunt who took me to one of the first Pizza Express restaurants and it was incredibly glamourous. We also had an avocado courtesy of her at the Royal Opera House restaurant. My DF didn't like it and so they were avoided until the 2010s.

Delia was mandatory viewing in our house, she was making food edible. Sadly not in DH's house where MIL still incinerates meat and boils veg into a pulp.

I was a child in the seventies. I don’t remember not having much meat, we regularly had beef, lamb, pork and chicken, didn’t really eat fish other than fish fingers or fish cakes. I think we just about started to eat Italian cuisine by the 80s, not really anything else, there were “Chinese chippies” but they pretty much did the same as a non Chinese chippy, other than the one near my school which did half chips, half rice and gravy. Yum.