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.

Now feeling all nostalgic about my grandparents who enjoyed pig's trotters. Oh my God, just looked them up. Must have been too young to realise they were actual feet.

I always tell people who ask that if you ever want to know how awful British food generally was before people like Delia, Gary Rhodes, The Galloping Gourmet and Keith Floyd showed us on tv how to cook properly, then all you have to remember is that it was seen as perfectly acceptable for a reasonably decent restaurant to offer half a grapefruit, with a glacé cherry in the centre, or a small glass of tinned orange juice as a starter. And if you didn’t like that there was usually soup (cue Julie Walters!)

I was born in 1958 and the following culinary "delights" were forced on me:
Vesta curries and Chinese meals
Shippams meat and fish paste
Liver sausage (I quite liked that)
Beef dripping sandwiches on a Sunday night
Thick sliced gammon, studded with cloves and topped with a slice of tinned pineapple
Toad in the hole
Fish and chips on a Friday night
Rice pudding
Arctic roll
Had the odd Chinese takeaway in the seventies, but they were always too sweet (my mum, dad and sister all had a sweet tooth)

You should be able to find shin beef in your morrisons

They definitely sell it in ours.

Hi OP, I was a teenager living in the Midlands countryside in the 1970s. Vegetarian cooking was becoming popular to a small extent - in a hippy type of way. A wholefood warehouse opened up near us selling things from big hessian sacks, and we used to go there for pulses, brown rice and dried fruit as I was into healthy eating. Rose Elliot was the vegetarian cookery writer I remember - my mum sent me off to university with one of her books, Not Just A Load of Old Lentils I think it was called. No way did anyone I know cook Indian or Chinese food - there were one of each type of restaurant/takeaway in our nearest town and that was it and they'd also offer English dishes. We had chicken curry at school sometimes but it was very much an English curry with raisins and a pinch of curry powder. Our family dinners were trad English: meat or fish with potatoes, pies or stews every day, and if I didn't want it I mostly just had vegetables with cheese on top or maybe Mum would make a quiche or macaroni cheese with me in mind. Her cakes and puddings were amazing and massively varied but main courses were pretty staid.

My mum always baked and cooked everything from scatch. Sunday roast, meat pies, stews, homemade fish and chips, homemade puddings with custard. We didn't eat Pasta rice etc untill mid 80s.

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.

In my experience, most people predominantly ate traditionally British food with occasional foray into packet foods. Hippies and other weirdos ate whole foods and they were definitely not a significant segment of 1970s society. Not numerically, anyway.

I lived in Newcastle and we certainly had Chinese and Indian restaurants and takeaways in the '70s, and a few white English people I knew did cook curries etc at home, though probably not terribly authentic. We also had pizzaland, which we loved.
As for meat at home, I was one of a family of 7, we had a 3 pound chicken or a shoulder of lamb on Sunday , other meals would be a pound of mince or stewing steak in gravy, or one large tin of corned beef with mashed potato.
My Mum did make lovely cakes and pies, so it made up for the boring dinners.

I am a Londoner, born in the early 60s. Even then, more exotic and ethnic ingredients were available.

In the 1970s we made curries every week, as my parents had learned to cook them in East Africa, and my paternal grandparents had learned in colonial India. We ate spaghetti Bolognese (yes, v long spaghetti only) and Middle Eastern dishes. My parents use to bring decent olive oil home from driving holidays in Italy and I remember being asked by my mum to buy a garlic press on a school trip to France...

I remember my definitely-not-Italian mother making home-made ravioli by stretching home-made pasta on the dining room table.

There was one greengrocer near us who sold avocados, aubergines, and similar exotica.

Delia Smith was considered a cook of naice, white, somewhat middle-class boring dishes by most people we knew.

This thread is fascinating. I was born in the mid 70s so don't have that much recollection of these things so it's astonishing to see how far we've progressed in such a relatively short space of time.

The 70s really were the dark ages in a lot of ways, which makes me feel unfeasibly old!

My mum was what used to be called 'a good plain cook', very much trad English fare with stews, hotpots, roasts, stodgy puddings galore. She loved bread and dripping! In the 80s she got fancy and started making quiches.

However, my dad was in the RN and had seen and experienced the world and all its spicy foods, so we would have curries etc. too. But he would have to make them himself .

We had a lot of offal in the 70s. It was disgusting but we weren't allowed to leave the table until it was gone. Heart is vile and sticks to the top of your mouth. Liver is also rank and the smell makes you heave. Belly pork that was almost entirely fat. Blurgh!

The only foreign food I remember was boil in the bag curry and rice. I had spaghetti once at a friends house and thought it was food of the gods. Never had it at home. We didn't even have pizza!

I was a child/teenager in the 70s. I remember the food of the time quite fondly, school meals were really excellent in those days.

My parents had a smallholding so we ate a lot of fruit and veg; you could always tell what was in season because it would appear at almost every meal as my mother attempted to prepare it in various different ways to disguise it. Curry powder made an appearance quite often. There was always a huge 56lb sack of potatoes in the porch.

My parents were not well off but we ate pretty good food and always had a home made pudding or cake to follow. Leaving food was unacceptable waste though. I do think portions were much smaller then than now and I do remember sometimes getting up from dinner still feeling hungry but it would never have occurred to me to ask for more.

We kept chickens so always had eggs. Meat was bought cheaply in bulk from the local farmer (eg half a pig), chopped up by my dad and frozen in our vast chest freezer. We ate meat fairly often but again much smaller portions.

I don't ever remember having salmon, but we did have white fish sometimes. We never ate out, not did anyone we knew. We did have fish and chips sometimes though.

Grew up in UK, France and US - in rural, unglamorous parts of all three! My memories start from the very late 70s.

You could not get Asian spices anywhere we lived, just a generic curry powder (bright yellow..). Chinese takeaway/takeouts were common in the UK and US, and Vietnamese in France, but I didn't know anyone non-Asian who cooked Chinese/Vietnamese food at home. I didn't eat in an Indian restaurant till I got to Uni, though I'm sure this would have been different if I'd grown up in a big UK town.

In the UK, spag bol, lasagne, ravioli etc were common, nothing more adventurous and most not recognisable to anyone Italian. Only dried pasta was available. Authentic Italian food was much commoner in the US, but usually bought from a deli, rather than home-cooked. France - they were quite into putting pasta into things like soup, but I can't remember having an actual Italian dish at anyone's home.

My mum was an ok cook but my dad wouldn’t eat anything ‘foreign’ so we ate very boring traditional meat and two veg type meals like stewing beef, pork chops, gammon chops, sausages, occasionally a roast with mashed potatoes or roast potatoes and boiled carrots, cabbage and peas. We rarely ate chicken. Dad had dodgy teeth so everything was cooked to mush. We also eat pudding with every dinner, so things like jam roll poly, treacle tart, chocolate sponge pudding and lots of custard made from custard powder.

Lots of people reheated food straight from tins and packets too so it was very unusual amongst families I grew up with for anyone to cook anything remotely exotic. Even Spaghetti Bolognaise was deemed ’foreign muck’ by my dad, although that would have more to do with Italians and WW2.

I had my first Chinese meal as an older teen and my first takeaway curry, in my mid 20’s. Where I grew up was a strong working class coal mining area and there were very few immigrants so you couldn’t easily buy the ingredients to make curry back then.

Nigel Slater’s book ‘Toast’ describes the standards of culinary cuisine in that era very accurately.

I was brought up in the 70s but in Australia and I di not recall meat being expensive, but it was certainly different I think in Australia. My dad for example was billeted on a sheep station when he was doing his teachers training for 2 years and so they had sheep of some sort for 3 meals a day - lamb mince and peas on toast for breakfast for example. But we did have alot of lamb and mutton and rabbit (shot by my father) and also stuffed hearts.

But Delia taught me how to cook when i left home and I was addicted to her books.

The 70s really were the dark ages in a lot of ways,

If you lived through them, they really weren't.

I was a child in the 70s and remember having fresh meat maybe twice a week. My mom used to do lovely roast chicken on a Sunday and in the week we might have had a pork chop or something like that. My dad used to like the pork chops with the kidney still attached. I remember my mom buying a Cannelloni ready meal and we so were so excited. We used to eat meat products like tinned meatballs and Brain's faggots too, usually with boiled spuds and processed peas.-happy days.

@Etulosba

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.

In my experience, most people predominantly ate traditionally British food with occasional foray into packet foods. Hippies and other weirdos ate whole foods and they were definitely not a significant segment of 1970s society. Not numerically, anyway.

There was a vegetarian restaurant chain called Cranks which was full of what I would call worthy vegetarian food that often needed plenty of chewing! Nothing like the lovely colourful, textural imaginative things that Ottolenghi knocks up. Cranks did make interesting salads though which made a change from the standard lettuce, tomato, cucumber, radish arranged on a plate without dressing that was normally what you got. They also had beautiful earthenware crockery. I imagine they lost a lot of it.

Also Delia likes to remind viewers to use the oven widely and not turn it on for one small dish

The early 70s were the time of power cuts, the three day week and tv shutting down early every night to save fuel consumption.

Veg was either seasonal fresh or tinned (or dried, I have horrible memories of things called "Surprise Peas") as imported produce was very expensive and large freezers were not common. I think chicken would still have been expensive at this time - before massed produced factory farm methods made chicken cheap.

I'm another 60s baby but mixed family background so I know we were not wildly representative in what we ate but fuel costs/cuts, price of imports and lack of freezers were near universal experiences.

Delia has a massive free online cookery school. I'm not particular a fan of her food (veggie - not her strong point) but I admire the initiative and her books are like a history of eating in the UK.

[quote jobobpip08]@BMW6 We had curry with sultanas but also a hard boiled egg, sliced in half, on top![/quote]
Now, boiled egg curry actually is a thing. I have several recipes for them and this is in this month's sainsburys magazine

and yes hippies and wierdos ate lentils. (My Daunts x 3!!!)

My dad still cannot tolerate lentils. Although he did manage a decent tarka dhal I made last year.

@Etulosba

The 70s really were the dark ages in a lot of ways,

If you lived through them, they really weren't.

Well they were when the power went out.

@icelollycraving

I was born in the seventies. Mum cooked a roast every Sunday and always hooked from scratch, lots of shepherd pie, liver & bacon, toad in the hole, occasionally a curry or sweet and sour. I remember my parents loved a dinner party, she’d do prawn cocktail, coq au vin and lovely puddings. I’d eat snuggle of it happily now, maybe not the curry or sweet and sour though. Do you remember those vesta curries with the big crispy noodles? Like quavers?!

My DM disapproved of processed foods, everything was home cooked, but she did buy those crispy noodles to use as a garnish. They were amazing. Blue Dragon used to sell them separately but it seems they were discontinued about 10 years ago. I think you can use any rice noodles as an alternative but it's not quite the same... although probably more authentic.

Oh and my mum used to make curried sausages. They were yellow and had sultanas and tinned pineapple and were delicious. Still a favourite of mine when i go home. And we did the bananas with coconut and lemon juice also.

(Plus mum used to do mashed smoked oyster volauvents).