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.

Oh and of course the craze for self sufficiency, so wonderfully dealt with in the sitcom “the Good Life.”

she actually knew how to cook so we never ate baked beans, Bisto or any English food

Pretty rude. My mother was an excellent cook who also used all those things.

I was brought up in an unusual 70s household, I think. Parents both British but they both cooked and were interested in cooking different foods from travelling to or having friends from different parts of the world. If they didn't recognise an ingredient, my mum's strategy was to buy it and try cooking with it (no internet then, so despite a load of cookery books, things went wrong). When she got a garlic crusher in the 1960s, she had to import it from France... (strange, exotic object).

There were plenty of places to buy supplies - we shopped at Punjabi shops, Polish, Greek or West Indian supermarkets, Jewish bakeries (that was just in our local area in Yorkshire).

Anyone remember the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook?

I've still got ours!

We did eat a lot of British and Irish food as well - my parents' interest in food didn't put them off rice pudding, potato cakes or roast beef.

I have a couple of my Mum's old recipe books from the 1970s. There is a lot of offal in there - things like heart as well as the more standard liver.

Although meat and fish were expensive, there weren't very many recipes that didn't include them, even if the recipe just specified some leftover roast meat. The only vegetarian options seemed to be based on eggs, cheese or potatoes.

I was born in the early 60s. My parents had lived on the continent, and my DF had travelled widely elsewhere, so we had lots of garlic, Italian etc at home, plus Cranks type wholefood, a whole range. Plus the local Polish deli counter in the Co-op was a favourite, as there were lots of Polish immigrants where we lived.

But I'm reminded of when Leicester Forest East motorway service station opened a restaurant on the bridge - it was a proper restaurant, with waiters, napkins etc, and we even used to book when we went. We took a French friend in the late 1960s! The food was awful, but then it was such a novel experience!

@iklboo

Anyone remember the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook?

I've still got ours!

Yep, I have this, and an updated version from the 90s.

I remembered something about Indian food. I was born late 70s and remember in the 80s my Mum used to make a chicken curry that was very yellow and had sultanas in it.

@1dayatatime

I saw a 1970s cookery show can't remember which one but the presenter was cooking spaghetti bolonese and kindly explained what spaghetti was and how it could be bought from specialist food stores 😀

I can remember a school trip to the Ideal Home Show in the mid sixties (girls grammar school but they had very limited expectations of our possible career paths) and coming home with a packet of spaghetti. Very very long spaghetti, the real deal, not the short spaghetti you commonly get now. My mum was an experienced and capable cook, but it completely foxed us. It was so long, was it ok to break it? how long to cook it for? What to eat it with? I think we ended up cooking it to a pulp and eating it with a tin of mince poured over it. Sorry Italy.

The most exotic things ever cooked in our house were vesta ready meals, which I used to sometimes cook, (make rather, no cooking skills required, ) for myself and feel very cosmopolitan.

I think a lot depends on where you were brought up too. DH is a 'southerner' and his DM was always an adventurous cook as she had access to ingredients which would never have been available in my home town in North Wales.
My DP's were not adventurous with food. My DF didn't knowingly touch garlic ever and he was of the firm belief that curry was something you made to hide the taste of meat that had gone off.

@PinkyParrot

In the 70s I'm sure stewing steak was the cheaper tougher cuts, but also more flavourful and did require slow cooking over an hour or more. Now it's better quality but less taste. Shin of beef (3 hours cooking) is delist but not so easy to find and takes a lot of trimming.

You should be able to find shin beef in your morrisons, seems to be one of the only places that sell it. That or a proper butcher.

Oh and don't forget that olive oil could be purchased in tiny bottles from most chemists. Probably enough for one dish in a bottle.

I was a child then not an adult, but yes meat was expensive, as it should be now. Cheap meat is an absolute disgrace.
My mother made curries, but the only not-typically-British food that we ate was Chinese from a takeaway, there were no other takeaways locally, apart from a fish and chip shop.

We had pasta in the 1970s (and 1960s) but my mother had lived in Italy in the 1940s. We never called it pasta though. It was either spaghetti (the long stuff others have mentioned), or macaroni, which we had in two forms - the small bits we mainly have now, which was used for macaroni cheese or as a milk pudding, and also much fatter pieces about 6 inches long.

We ate roast every Sunday, either chicken or lamb, and fish every Saturday - either plaice or dabs, usually cooked in a parsley sauce.

We ate a lot of offal: mainly liver and kidneys but heart sometimes, which none of us (children) liked, and sweetbreads. We also had rabbit (my mother used to put it in a pie and pretend it was chicken, but we always knew, because we never had chicken pie unless we'd had roast chicken the day before).

We also ate lamb quite a lot, as chops or in stew with dumplings. If we had it roast there would be leftovers minced up and used to stuff marrow. I don't think we ever had beef, except as steak and kidney pie or pudding, and the only pork I remember eating was sausages or roast gammon.

We also had things like toad in the hole and cauliflower cheese.

My father discovered curries in the 1970s and started cooking them (from scratch, not Vesta).

We had a lot of fresh fruit from the garden in season: apples, plums, rhubarb, gooseberries and raspberries, and a freezer from the early 1970s, which was packed with surplus produce and blackberries taken from local hedgerows.

Meat was expensive and we ate far smaller portions. Mum used to buy half a pig and have it butchered as it was cheaper that way. It included the head and trotters and she made brawn with that.

Always fish on a Friday, something like sausages and mash on Saturday. I remember her making chilli con carne and we all thought it horrible.

Cheese was also very expensive and she used to grate a very small amount on to a sandwich.

She NEVER put the oven on for one thing, often making a cake or pie for another day while it was on. This is something I have got from her and feel guilty if I don't!

@iklboo

Yep - they gave oven ready chicken away as BINGO PRIZES in the early 70s. It was a big treat when nana won one.

I live near a social club that still does a meat raffle

I remember my mum trying to make dull food fun - (we were fairly hard up - single parent family) - so we had hedgehog mash (mash with pea eyes and sausage spikes), Titanic Mash (a sea of green peas with pea portholes and sausage funnels) and my favourite - volcano potato (think the mash mountain from Close Encounters, with a fried egg on top that ran down the sides when cracked) - god my mum was mad!

@stopringingme

Vesta boil in the bag curry was the most exciting my Mum went - but my Dad would not touch it, he was and still is a meat and two veg man ! Otherwise it was traditional fare such as sausages, crispy pancakes etc. Sunday was roast dinner - usually lamb as that seemed to be the cheaper option. And when we got a microwave in the 80's a jacket potato.

I could have written that OP :-)

Mum and I loved the Vesta curries with the plastic rice and dehydrated chicken or beef, but it was more than likely just 'tvp' - textured vegetable protein. Nothing like curry at all, but exotic for those days. Crispy pancakes were yum! Dad too is still a meat and 5 veg person, hating anything 'foreign' though he strangely loves hummous. Sunday nights were usually boiled eggs and then later, when sandwich makers came along - cheese and onion toasted sarnies.

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

If you lived alone that's maybe why you could afford meat more regularly. It was much more difficult to feed a family on (usually) one wage, with lots of people only working a three day week - paying the rent on houses rather than flats, bills, food, clothes, shoes etc for growing kids. A lot of meat like steak, chicken etc was just too expensive for a family.

Lots of crap freezer food like fish fingers, crispy pancakes.
Mince and mash potatoes with a HUGE dollop of brown sauce. It was revolting. I hated it.

Macaroni cheese. Fish mornay. Spaghetti Bolognese as I got older. As we got older mum
Went out to work and so there was a bit more money to spend. Loved doing the “big shop” on a Saturday morning with my mum.

My Mum used to make this hot potato salad in a white béchamel sauce with salad cream added in with fresh parsley. It was so good.

Hone made soup from a bone from the butchers.

Anyone remember this book? My mum's milkman used to sell copies.

We had beef in casseroles a lot, probably because beef was cheaper than chicken. I can't remember anything chicken that we had but we had beef 'curry', casserole with vegetables chopped up very small. We had brussel sprouts (vile things) boiled to within an inch of their life with a piece of white meat, I think it might have been pork. Sometimes we had roast lamb. Dessert at most meals I think, usually bread and butter pudding. No foreign food (My parents still will not at anything at all foreign).

We didn't get a fridge until 1977 and a freezer in 1983. I still have the freezer and it's still going although I doubt it's efficient.

We had meat delivered from a van three times a week if we wanted it although we tended to buy a joint and live off it the best part of the week. Chicken was very expensive.

I didn't eat a steak until i left home at the age of seventeen and a date bought me one in a pub. I had no idea meat could taste like that as we must have lived on crap quality stuff.

The height of sophistication was orange juice or prawn cocktail for starter, steak, chips and peas and black forest gateu for pudding.

Oooh yes, meat raffles.

They still do something similar here in France, but you are more likely to get boar or venison but I doubt they also have a stripper on