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.

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

Me too and that's a good point. We had some ingredients which would only have been available in cities with the population to demand them. And family/friends returning with olive oil rather than buy a tiny bottle in the chemist is definitely something I remember

My parents cooked very good Indian and Chinese food in the 60s, they had both travelled widely in India, the Middle East and Malaysia. Also we lived in London and they knew where to get all the ingredients. But some foods that are available everywhere now didn't seem to be "invented " - I never saw avocados or broccoli, for example.

There was a vegetarian restaurant chain called Cranks which was full of what I would call worthy vegetarian food

The only vegetarians I knew were creative types. Several worked for the BBC. That could be why the producers of the Back in Time programme had a skewed view of 1970s dietary divisions.

I think it depended on where you lived and living in London, in the 70s, I was lucky to have a Dad who loved to cook and we'd also benefit from local restaurants, Indian, Turkish, Chinese, some supermarkets carried a range of unusual foodstuffs and also have access to Jewish foods and some street foods, in markets such as East Street, Petticoat Lane, Roman Road and Leather Lane, where you started to see more adventurous ingredients pop in. Dad made curries from scratch, using what spices you could get and we'd have proper pasta, with homemade sauces and very often meals with no meat, so potato maccaroni (still a real favourite), vegetables stews or fish, which was easier to buy in the many wet fish shops, including some interesting shell fish at the time. A real treat was a visit to the Polish Deli, at Peckham and bought many an interest food stuff from there. So we had a really varied range of foods and practically nothing from a box, other than dried ingredients, such as split peas and pearl barley. A very varied and interest diet and Delia works great for puds and basics, so if you want a scone to rise follow her method, but no, we had a great range of foods from which to choose from. However, visiting relatives in Northumberland in the 70s, a little different!

Back in time for dinner.

I was a teen at the end of the 70's. We never had steak too expensive, but always had a Suday roast (Chicken beef or Pork) and then the same meat for tea on Monday.
Ate things like Shepherds pies, stews and casseroles.
Mum had a pressure cooker throughout the 70's and made Scouse. My favorite with crusty bread. She also made spaghetti bolognase from scratch.
Grandma catered large parties for a living and so was a wonderful cook. She'd put on huge party spreads for us all at Christmas with a whole massive crab as the centerpiece.
We did eat meat. But were given a lot smaller portion of it at mealtimes. Most of the plate was potatoes and veg.

I was newly married in the 70s, and an enthusiastic cook. I wasn't much of a Delia fan, I preferred Elizabeth David or Robert Carrier, with Ken Hom for a taste of the exotic!

My enthusiasm was kept in check by my then husband, who was quite a bit older than me, and a meat-&-two-veg man, who only reluctantly ate my experimental dishes such as mushroom risotto ("There's no meat in this") or moussaka ("Has this got garlic in it?").

I cooked everything from scratch, as it is quaintly known these days, but back then was just "cooking"! As mentioned, we ate offal frequently, liver and kidneys probably every week, but I didn't buy Findus pancakes or similar as I wasn't interested in cooking them.

I was a teenager when we first tried courgettes, bought in Soho. My Mother blanched them, then dipped in beaten egg then breadcrumbs, before shallow frying them till golden. We were so thrilled with them that we had them as a separate course with mayonnaise!

My 70s childhood involved homemade rosehip syrup, stinging nettle soup, dandelion root 'coffee', and all sorts of other foraged stuff. Also lots of tinned sardines, and liver and tongue were the main meats. Oh, and the 'slow cooker' was a pan heated on the hob, then put in a cardboard box full of straw and left all day in the airing cupboard. Oven went on once a week, for Sunday roast, pudding, and cake to last the week. This was a pretty affluent commuter-belt, private-school kind of family. I remember the thrill of discovering 'exotic' things like avocado, tuna, kiwi and tortellini as a teenager. Took me a lot longer to get comfortable with spicy food.

@TitOfTheIceberg

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

Yes, we had that! And also slightly later the Dairy Book of Home Management, which I afterwards discovered was edited by Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys.

We had 2 takeaways to choose from - fish and chips or Chinese. When we had the Chinese, my mum used to take oven dishes with her and get them to put the food straight into them, instead of their foil containers, so that it could all go in the oven when she got back home, to make sure it was still hot when we ate it.

In 1974 this Italian restaurant opened and so we started to eat out there - usually on a Friday after school (parents were teachers) but we were only ever allowed to choose either pizza or pasta because the other meals were too expensive.

My mum was a good cook, but limited in terms of time, so we ate a lot of chips - all home-made using a chip pan. We had curry occasionally, also served with dishes of desiccated coconut, slices of tomato and slices of banana - and of course sultanas cooked in the (not very hot) curry.

Typical mid-week dishes would be things like egg and chips, liver and onions (and chips!), smoked haddock with mashed potato and a poached egg, cauliflower cheese, eggs mornay. Very occasionally a rice-type dish, sort of a risotto (very sort of!) made from long grain rice with onions and peppers and tinned hot dogs cut up and added, along with a splash of tomato ketchup. (I loved that and used to make it for my DC when they were little!). Occasionally we'd have vol-au-vents, filled with prawns in a cheese or mushroom sauce or just with mushrooms and mushroom sauce - I think she used tins of Campbells condensed soups for those.

We didn't have Sunday roasts very often as we were usually all out doing something and my mum clearly didn't want to spend all day in the kitchen. Although she was a good cook, one thing she really couldn't make with any success was Yorkshire Puddings. But I always remember, when we did have a roast, her making the gravy with the juices in the roasting tin, water from cooking the veg and Bisto Gravy Browning Powder.

We did eat pasta, which as PP have said, came in long blue packets, and was usually spaghetti, sometimes macaroni. But you couldn't get fresh Parmesan, so it was always the little drums of dried stuff that smelt disgusting!

We had a lot of puddings - tinned fruit and evaporated milk, sliced Swiss roll with custard, and occasionally Angel Delight or ice-cream. One of my favourite puddings was a large vol-au-vent, with a dollop of tinned custard at the bottom, then some Morton's cherry pie filling, topped off with some tinned sterilised cream. Sounds disgusting, but it was fantastic.

Yoghurt was a very new-fangled thing, but I remember when Ski yoghurts were launched. We used to get the ones with mandarin. Plain yoghurt was an abomination as it was so sour.

We didn't eat a lot of meat as it was expensive. As a child in the 90s we had a hot lunch at school so DM would give us a glass of milk with a sandwich (usually cheese and tomato) or egg and soldiers plus an apple/banana and a slice of homemade cake for tea. In the winter we might have a jacket potato with cheese or soup and toast. DM and DH ate later and ate a lot of fish - we lived on the coast and mackerel was very cheap as was cod - in those days it was what you fed the cat with. They might have a pork chop one night a week and they always had liver on Thursdays. We had a roast for lunch on Sunday - usually lamb as it was the cheapest and my parents had cold lamb on Monday evenings. On Saturdays we might have omelette or jacket potato or sausages.

When we were older and ate with my parents we had roast on Sunday (cheese on toast for high tea), cold meat on Monday, often shepherds pie with the last of the roast on Tuesday, fish on Wednesday, liver on Thursday, fish on Friday and usually sausages on Saturday as a treat. I was 17 when I had pasta that wasn't spag bog or macaroni cheese - it was an M&S canelloni ready meal with a friend. Shortly afterwards I bought some lasagne and made one for the family.

"as a child in the 70s" - user name should make it clear I was not a child in the 90s.....

We lived on stews and curry’s. Always put lentils and barley in the pot to pad out the meat.
There was always a pot on the go and we just added the left overs to the pot if there were any.
Our house always smelled of stews. I can’t stand the smell. Or we would have potato curry if we had no money.

in the 70s, during term-time, our main meal was school dinner and so we wouldn't have anything cooked at home mon-fri (breakfast was cereal, tea was sandwiches, usually cheese or boiled egg). School dinners were standard English fair, meat & two veg and always a pudding. Friday was always baked fish and mash.
At the weekend, Saturday dinner was usually fried food, sometimes fish and chips if dad was working a 1/2 shift as he would bring it home. Tea was the same as mon-fri.
Sunday was always a roast, usually lamb, sometimes pork or gammon, occasionally a pudding, especially in autumn when apples were about. Chicken was very rare, until mum had a job in a chicken processing factory for a while. Sunday tea was a bit posher as mum would sometimes make a cake.
During school holidays, dinner would usually be a salad in the summer, or beans-on-toast/soup in the winter. Only time we had anything foreign was when an Aunt came to stay and she would take us for a Chinese, and once for a curry.
I had my first 'vegetarian' meal at about 16 at a school-friends house - it was a cheese and onion quiche & chips! I remember this as my friend made a big thing about not eating meat.

@Etulosba

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

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

I don't think home--cooked food was as bad as is often made out. It was mostly quite simple, e.g. pork chops and veg, but nice. Despite the French prejudices about British cooking, I don't remember home cooked food being that different - except the French would usually have a sauce, whereas food was often plainer in the UK. Cliches about vegetables being boiled to destruction in the UK were more true of my grandparents' generation than my parents.

Where there was a massive difference between France and the UK, and between then and now was the quality of food anywhere outside the home, including cafes and schools. Of course, there were some great UK cafes and pubs even then, but - by heck - there were some terrible ones too .

I was a teenager in the late 70s/early 80s, and a lot of my cooking was learnt from Delia. I still have her complete cookery course that I bought at university. When I was a kid we seemed to eat a fair bit of meat, and it used to be stews, roasts, chops. I can remember cooking a spaghetti bolognese when I was about 15, and a lasagna too. These were new to my parents, but they enjoyed them and started to cook them (and to use garlic).
I remember Madhur Jaffrey did an Indian cookery series, and I did a lot of stuff from that. I grew up near Bradford, and it was a revelation to go to Asian grocers and buy all the different herbs and spices. When I went to uni I used to stock up, as Asian ingredients were hard to find in Scotland.
We used to have a Chinese takeaway as a treat when I was at home. Curry was a step too far for my parents though, I only tried that when I started going to restaurants independently. The most exotic thing at home in the 70s was a Vesta meal!

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!

Ah yes, my mother had the Cranks recipe book. There was a lot of wholemeal flour involved. It took about 10 minutes to chew a mouthful of homity pie.

dandelion root 'coffee'

I remember trying to make 'coffee' out of roasted dry carrot. It was absolutely disgusting.

I used to go to tea every Saturday with my best friend who lived down the road. They were a really traditional family, and you could tell the day of the week by what they were eating! Saturday was always salad, and it would consist of some round lettuce leaves, a spring onion, a tomato, pickled beetroot and tinned salmon, which had been mixed with vinegar. All served with the bottle of salad cream.

We had a French student teacher living with us for a year, in around 1971, and she taught us the delights of vinaigrette dressing. In those days, getting hold of olive oil was not easy - as PP said, it used to be sold at the chemist and was a remedy for blocked ears! - so we used to make it with sunflower oil and malt vinegar. Very exotic!

I was a small child then but I remember when people started buying dried pasta in the 70s and we saw it as a new thing. Hard to believe that but that’s how I remember it.

I was born in the 50’s my mum was a traditional cook we had things like shepherds pie, chops ,liver etc it was basically some form of meat potatoes and veg. We always had fish on a Friday and as a treat she would make macaroni cheese on a Saturday that was the only pasta we got apart from Heinz spaghetti!
I never tasted a Chinese meal till I was about 20😂 we never ate out and I don’t remember there being any take-aways when I was a child.

I grew up in the 70s and ate a very british diet I suppose. I remember meat being expensive and always being forced to eat the meat (now I nag my kids to eat the veg and leave the meat!) I also remember a lot of bulking out of meat in meals. So a roast meal would only have a tiny slice of roast meat, and it would be bulked with oatmeal based stuffing (sometimes sausage stuffing) and yorkshire puddings and loads of veg. We would often have meat loaf (mince bulked out with bread), or fish cakes (fish bulked out with potatoes). We would eat a lot of cheap cuts of meat, such as offal, or cheap fish such as herring or mackerel

Rice and pasta were rare. We mainly ate potatoes. I remember macaroni cheese. And spaghetti bolognaise started to appear in the 80s. Pulses were rare too and more to bulk out things like soup. We ate a lot of lentil soup or scotch broth.

Weirdly enough I was looking at a 1970s copy of the Aga Cook Book this morning. I boaked at the thought of Roast Heart.. My Mum said that if like her I'd been alive in WW2 id have eaten it... I replied that I wouldn't!!
My Dad forced me to eat liver one dinnertime and I spent the whole night throwing up. Our cleaning lady came in the next morning and was clucking sympathetically at me. When she heard why I'd been sick she looked at my Dad over her glasses and said "Well you wont be doing that again will you!! 🤣 🤣 🤣

@ambereeree My mum is English, but cooked ''adventurously'' ..Moussaka &c
Samosas were unheard of, and Vesta Curries were considered' a powdery insult to Indian Cuisine....Even so, we had them on camping trips, with sliced banana and added raisins which I wasn't mad on.

She had Elisabeth David cookbooks books and really made an effort.

One day I remember her making a bacon, egg and beans fry up for dad, and he said :
''What's this? a Lorry Driver's dinner?'' and she burst into tears.

This from a man who when he had to look after us one day, tipped a frozen chicken pie into a tin of beans on the stove....

Really he had no idea of how to cook....Apart from Christmas Puddings. He excelled at those.

Everyone was very slim in the 1970's, as snacks and convenience food wasn't that common. People cooked from fresh. {Apart from said camping trips}

@BMW6

My Mum used to cook spag bol and curries in the 70's. The spaghetti came in an extremely long blue paper package. Curries were made with curry powder (I presume a mix of all the usual spices) and came in mild, medium or hot varieties.

For some reason Mum always added sultanas to the curry, but I actually really liked it!

I still add sultanas to curry and I make no apologies for it! Not much different to having a fruit-based chutney surely.