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 barely remember the 70s. Tbh us kids were on free school meals, so we got a hot meal at school and tea was usually what I'd do for dinner now (dinner being mid-day, tea being evening, proper working class!). We had proper butchers available then for meat though, none of this supermarket watery plastic stuff wrapped in plastic. My parents were fond of meat and ate it fairly regularly from what I remember, as old-fashioned meat and two-veg cooking (mostly potatoes and carrots). Some was kept special for my dad as he was the all-important male. Having a freezer definitely made a difference. I can still remember the first time I came across herbs, courtesy of my posh secondary school, they were a total revelation.

I was born in 1980....but my parents came to the UK in the early 70's from Iraq. My poor mum had a shock at the lack of food variety that was here back then. She was given a fab cookbook by Marguerite Patten (the "everyday cookbook") which taught her "English" recipes.....but she'd have spices and middle eastern/asian foods ordered in for her. We were lucky, in that Mum knew how to cook Chinese/Indian/Thai food (learned from friends in Iraq), so we grew up eating that. For her, it was learning the traditional English fare that took time. :D

She made her own bread, and bought butter rather than margarine. She used a lot of beans/pulses etc anyway, and as a rule we didn't eat much meat at all (and definitely not during Lent). She used to love Delia Smith's shows as she was pleased to see that Delia would promote new types of food and new cuisines to people. When she got here, the local greengrocer told her there was no such thing as red, green or yellow peppers; he didn't know what a mango, a kiwi fruit or a pomegranate was, and he thought my mum was joking with him when she asked for okra and courgette!!

Around 1975/6, I had my first serious boyfriend and I was often invited for Sunday lunch. Always roast beef. But they ate it the very traditional way, with a starter of Yorkshire pudding filled with onion gravy. It was amazing.

I can distinctly remember a conversation between my Mum and Grandma on what meat to have for Easter and they decided on chicken as it was more special than beef

As a primary aged child in the 70's I know I was the only one in school that went abroad and we ate out at restaurants (though not at home). Going out to eat was for my parents on special occasions

For desserts DM used to make triffle or chocolate mousse with raw eggs. Or peach flan.

We ate meat regularly and we were very poor. My dad invented a vegetarian chilli for when we were running out of money.
We also ate curries and chinese food which my dad made, usually as weekend treats. Spag bol was also a weekend treat. My dad was very interested in cooking though and an excellent cook.

Standard (non weekend) main meals I remember were cod cooked in a bag (gross!), liver, chicken liver, home made beef burgers, sausages, campbells tinned meat balls, Frays bentos steak pie in a tin. Corned beef in a tin. Chips (home made). Smash (powdered mashed potato).

Oooh deserts, birds trifle, greens chocolate cake (from a packet), angel delight (lime flavour was best), home made Eve's pudding, home made rice pudding, those sponges that come in tins that you heat in water.

Nearest we got to foreign food was a frozen lasagne but I suspect that was the 80s rather than 70s. My mum was one of those 'can't do foreign food' types but would happily sit in Pizzaland with a calzone!

I do remember some kind of box which was either curry or maybe Chinese with a dried noodle you fried in oil and it puffed up. I used to love that. That was definitely the nearest we go to foreign food!

I think it depends on your parents and where you lived. I was born in South London in the late 1950s to a German born mother who had been educated in various different countries in Europe. She also had a Cordon Bleu diploma which she achieved while living in Paris.

As a result, we ate foods from all around Europe, but also Indian and Chinese food (although I doubt that it was very authentic). We had a Polish deli in town where she bought fresh ravioli, Polish sausage, sauerkraut and various other food items. We always had yogurt. Eden Vale at first, then Ski yogurts. We always had olive oil in the house for salad dressing.

Fish was much cheaper than meat back then, but smoked salmon was an expensive delicacy.

My parents are European so we had a reputation in the neighbourhood for terribly exotic food because we'd eat salami and olives and dress our salads rather than serve them dry with salad dressing.

That pretty much describes my childhood @Porcupineintherough. I remember going out for a proper Italian pizza for my birthday in 1973, and eating my first proper Indian meal at an Indian restaurant when I was 19, and my first Turkish meal at a Turkish restaurant at 19. This would have been in the late 1970s.

I have horrible memories of things called "Surprise Peas")

And beans @C8H10N4O2. My mum used to buy them. We didn’t have a car so she had to carry the shopping home on the bus.

I still have a very scruffy and much thumbed copy of Marguerite Patten's Perfect Cooking, and a Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery. They are brilliant for the basics like pancakes, egg custard etc.

Brown Windsor soup anyone?

@TheSpottedZebra

The UK was also rather struggling in the 70s, with frequent power cuts, recessions, layoffs, strikes. So you absolutely would not 'waste' the oven by putting it on for a small thing. My mum still cooks like this she'll only have the oven on once or twice a week and will oven all that she needs to then, and use the hob mostly.

I do this. I wasn't born in the 70s! I must be just tight 😊 I'm enjoying this thread :)

I think I was on another planet. Yes meat was expensive but as far as I remember the chicken being expensive and a Christmas treat was the 60s not the 70s.

My kids loved lasagne, spag bol, couscous with a Moroccan stew.

Food is cheaper now but not that different.

My mum was an amazing cook so we had great food in the 70s. The main difference was that the diet was more creamy, buttery, meat heavy. (Don''t eat red meat at all now).

We used to have a lot of French and Italian stuff, Greek, roasts at the weekend.

My favourite food memories from the 70s are pheasant Normande (ie apples, cream and Calvados) with jerusalem artichokes; roast chicken with watercress & lemon zest stuffing; smoked haddock mousse with lumpfish roe; roast ham with Oxford sauce (brown sugar, mustard, orange zest); seafood spaghetti; ratatouille; home-made taramasalata & mushrooms a la greque; moussaka; creme brulee; pavlova; galettes with chestnuts, chantilly & grand marnier; lemon sorbet.

It was more European & less Asian, generally Indian or Chinese food was something you would go to a restaurant for - I do remember when the Madhur Jaffrey cookbook came out - the thrill of home-made curries.

Eating out in the UK in the 70s - the food was generally quite dire.

Even Spaghetti Bolognaise was deemed ’foreign muck’ by my dad

I once went into a Tesco outside Cardiff that had an aisle labelled "Foreign Food', containing such exotic delicacies as ... dried spaghetti.

And this was circa 2000

I grew up in the 60s and was in my teens in the 70s.
My mother thought she was daring putting a teaspoon of curry powder into a casserole.
We ate liver and onions.to.
Cakes were only home made, I don't know whether you could buy them but I guess we couldn't afford
Pudding was almost always home made fruit pie or crumble and custard. There was no such thing as bought desserts and I never had yoghurt as a child.
She definitely did the mumsnet chicken (or beef). Hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, minced and in a pie on Wednesday.

The first time I went to a restaurant I was 18 and we had prawn cocktail and steak and chips with a bottle of Mateus Rose.
I thought about that when my DC were in restaurants in high chairs.

When I first left home I experimented with pulses, chick peas etc but they were hard to get hold of.
I still have my first Delia book.

@Watchingbehindmyhands

Nearest we got to foreign food was a frozen lasagne but I suspect that was the 80s rather than 70s. My mum was one of those 'can't do foreign food' types but would happily sit in Pizzaland with a calzone!

I do remember some kind of box which was either curry or maybe Chinese with a dried noodle you fried in oil and it puffed up. I used to love that. That was definitely the nearest we go to foreign food!

That was the Vesta Chow Mein. There were 2 packs of noodles; one to stir into the Chow Mein and one to fry.

Vesta has a lot to answer for

Re Delia Smith - we always regarded her as a boring English cook. She got better latterly with her amaretti chocolate truffle torte, delicious Cranberry relish, roast fennel. But that wasn't until the 80s.

We had Larousse Gastronomique, Elizabeth David, Katie Stewart, Jane Grigson, Robert Le Carrier, Good Housekeeping for the basics.

In summer we ate a lot of salads (salad being lettuce, cucumber, tomato, grated carrot) with left over chicken, or left over ham, or left over lamb - there never seemed to be much meat. Or salad with tinned sardines. Or salad with cottage cheese and pineapple (tinned). Or salad with tinned peaches and grated cheese.

The lettuce, tomato and carrot were probably from the garden. There would be a glut, so it was eaten every day.

Sometimes 'Russian salad' if there was left over cooked veg - carrots, peas, potato - in salad dressing.

Dad wouldn't eat anything spicy. He'd had curry when he was on National Service and vowed never to eat it again (to be fair they probably did add spices to cover up the taste of rancid food). So no mustard, no chilli, no herbs, no curry powder, no paprika....

We would have kedgeree which was smoked rice, fish, boiled egg - then everyone added their own amount of Sharwoods mild curry powder (came in the blue tin). My mum had a secret store of things that she added to food and never told Dad about.

My two most hated things were fish in a mushroom béchamel sauce served on rice (think grey, slimy, and a bit fishy) or egg mornay - boiled eggs, halved and flat side down, with cheese sauce on top (probably not much cheese in the sauce) cooked in the oven.

On the bright side, there was Angel Delight!

The only veg I saw in the 70s were potatoes, carrots and cabbages, and rarely cauliflowers. You could get peas, but they had to be shelled by hand. The ubiquitous big bags of frozen peas are a real convenience now. Salads were rabbit food. Fruit was apples and pears, or oranges. Grapes were massively expensive and only for posh people. I can also still remember my first sight of a kiwi fruit, they were plain weird. Puddings were mostly milk, rice or semolina, home-made cakes. I think you could get some mix in a plastic bag that you just added egg to.

@sueelleker I remember that the fried Vesta noodles puffed up excitingly, and then when you ate them they stuck to your tongue!

My Dad wouldn't eat the Vest paella because it had prawns and chicken in it together I loved the paella because it came with a little cellophane bag of saffron strands. Yes, real saffron - I can still tell the smell today!

My DM was ahead of her time, and we had home-cooked curries in the 60s. Made with curry powder though, you couldn't get the individual spices.

We had an Italian lady move into the flat next door and she taught my mum how to make "proper" spaghetti bolognese. It was bloody lovely, and I still make it the same way as my DM did, with the exception of a splosh of wine added to mine. We had roasts, pies, stews, casseroles, hotpots, all home made and up until 1966, when we moved into a flat, we had home-grown veg from the garden. The Sunday roast lasted 3 days though (cold on Monday, made into a pie or something on Tuesday).

My parents were hard up, but there was never any lack of meat in our house. Thursday night's dinner (day before payday, my dad was weekly paid) might have been an omelette, bacon and eggs, or corned beef hash, but we certainly never went hungry. And we had fish and chips from the chippy most Fridays, DF would pick them up on his way home from work, and pop them in the saddle bag of his bike.

Parents came from east africa in the early 70s and they couldn’t even find onions and garlic in all grocers. No bananas. No mangoes. No rice. Or wholewheat flour. No spices. That’s how brands like Tilda, East End, Jalpur and KTC grew - they imported Indian raw ingredients cheaply and would deliver them to you. Same with Jalpur. They grew fast because some elderly people refused to eat anything but raw fruit and veg (grandad was one of them) because they were uncertain if foods were prepared in ways compatible with Islam / Hinduism (especially with meat, yeast, eggs and dairy).

My Dm would make spag Bol and curry (her own versions but still very enjoyable) in the mid 60s - spaghetti was certainly quite easily available then.

Chicken was expensive until the advent of poor battery chickens. A ‘boiling fowl’ (an older bird so tougher) was cheaper than a younger one for roasting.

We still never had them, though. Sunday dinner was nearly always roast beef. My Dm was a pretty good cook - we never had that awful mince that used to be called ‘boiled baby’.

She made her own bread, and bought butter rather than margarine.

My father refused to eat margarine. Said he had been deprived during the war. It was his excuse for lots of indulgences.

I remember the power cuts - we'd light candles and mum would heat up a tin of baked beans on a camping stove and we'd eat them with toast made the old fashioned way with a toasting fork in front of the fire - such a treat. Also, due to coal shortages the school was closed and we used to have to walk in twice a week to pick up work to do at home. Not everything changes..............