MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Me and my better half got into a discussion with the kids about the food that we had when we were their age. Crispy Pancakes, Rissoles, Beef Paste Sandwiches, Smash and Angel Delight, which we described as “A future space pudding from the1970s”. Naturally the kids we intrigued.
So 59p and 300ml of milk later we were away with a sachet of Butterscotch flavoured chemicals. I was amazed that the stuff was a) Still available b) Only 59p and c) Could set faster than postcrete.
For sweets I used to like space dust.
I used to also like space dust in the 90s :]
Angel delight, love it!!!
Toast toppers, lived on them at college in the 70's. Can you still get them?
Vesta curries. My first experience of Indian food!
Used to go round my girlfriends house every Sunday and she would "cook" one of these.
Ice magic.
Splicers.
Old English Spangles.
Tapioca.
Those strawberry mousses from Bejam that came stacked 10 high in a long plastic bag.
Shippams meat paste. The jar had to be prised open with the edge of a coin.
Heinz Sandwich Spread.
Pacers. A solid block of toothpaste masquerading as a sweet,
Curly Wurlys that were eighteen inches long.
Wagon Wheels that were six inches across and came two to a pack.
Used to have this with proper homemade chips; cooked in lard in a chip pan and beans.
Arctic Roll and Vientta (sp?).
Vesta curries. My first experience of Indian food!
That was my first thought too. Except they were vile, always contained ****ing raisins for some unfathomable reason, and as a result put me off of 'Indian' food for many years.
South Asian food is now my absolute favourite, but Vesta curries could have been the end before it even started. <Shudders>
Ice cream slices and two wafers.
Quiches
don't know if it really counts as 70's food but my favourite 'takes me back' meal of my childhood was a Mattesons (try saying Mattesons without saying mmmm) german sausage in a horseshoe shape, which you had to boil in a bag.
This was accompanied by tagliatelle, in a Colmans packet cheddar cheese sauce, which had a particular tang that i still love to this day. My mum invented fusion cookery way before it was fashionable, with this german / italian / somerset fusion, and convinced me that as nations we were claerly better together.
You can microwave the sausage now and the cheese sauces you can buy from the pasta section are far more realistic but some days I just reach for the packet with its distinctive sort of cheese flavour, the wife disowns me, and I'm a 9 year old boy again.
Arctic Roll and Vientta
Vienetta(?) Not sure of the spelling myself.
I would love to see the machine in action making it, though.
At restaurants, starters seemed to be limited to either a prawn cocktail or a glass of orange juice on a doiley.
We often have the discussion surrounding Sunday dinners when we were kids in the 70's and how our parents would spend all day Sunday (seemingly) with pans of veg boiling to the point that they contain zero colour or nutritional value and were served up as fairly pale looking washed out green things. The little kitchen in our house would have condensation running down the windows and walls due to the the volume of steam coming from the assortment of pans boiling away their contents.
Despite my old man being a butcher the meat all tasted and looked the same to me and I hated everything on the plate apart from Yorkshire puds.
The OH's mother was still maintaining this all day cooking method when I was in my late 30's
german sausage in a horseshoe shape, which you had to boil in a bag.
I'm also interested to know how they trained the Great Danes to be able to do the 'sausages' in the same shape over and over again.
prawn cocktail
Better establishments even ran to a random pointless sprinkling of paprika for some reason.
Chelsea Whoppers.
Chicken in a basket.
Trio's.
Why was food in the 1970s so uniformly terrible?
Vienetta
Only for posh events!
Sweets in Jars was my thing, a whole hand sized paper bag for 10p.
I would love to see the machine in action making it, though.
Its your lucky day
At restaurants, starters seemed to be limited to either a prawn cocktail or a glass of orange juice on a doiley.
Don't forget the melon / Parma ham combo.
My mum used to "make" those birds eye fish squares in a parsley sauce... That smell was enough to have me dry heave...Just for funz we "treated" our children when they were 10 or so, to as much of this stuff as we could find, so smash, birds eye burgers, angel delight...They were hugely impressed (as you can imagine)
Why was food in the 1970s so uniformly terrible?
We forget how expensive food was. These days food makes up about 10% of peoples household expenditure, back in the 70s is was more than a quarter of people's spend even though we were buying a lot less value-added food like ready meals. What we look back on as cheap rubbish was more than twice the price of whats available to us now
Angel Delight was quite a treat when we were kids! Early / mid 80's this was, me and my sister in the kitchen mixing it up, pouring it into bowls and leaving it in the fridge.
when we were kids in the 70’s and how our parents would spend all day Sunday (seemingly) with pans of veg boiling to the point that they contain zero colour or nutritional value and were served up as fairly pale looking washed out green things.
As yes, the cooking method of my grandparents where every ingredient in the Christmas Dinner would be put on at the same time. 6hrs for the turkey? Excellent, will put the sprouts on now as well.
Cabbage and ribs bubbling away on the hob.
Tripe and onions too. Not for me though. Tripe looks like some kind of acoustic foam Bleugh.
And my nana's Sunday roast that included meat, roast potatoes, cabbage and .... baked bleedin' beans c/w gravy. Happy days.
birds eye fish squares in a parsley sauce
Also makes me feel sick. And with mashed potato too? Bleurgh!
I always like to say that I don't mind most things, but white fish cooked in a way to make it tasteless and then put in a vile white sauce? Cannot. Stand. It.
If you are struggling with what to do with white fish a brush of olive oil (more niche than you might think in the 70s/80s but still obtainable and you would hardly use any doing this) and lemon juice and under the grill.
But poaching it in a white sauce? No, no, no.
Smoked fish poached to make Cullen Skink or similar? Yes please.
Boil in the bag fish squares was probably the least processed food I ate in the late ‘70’s/‘80’s. At least it was real fish fillet rather than some mechanically extruded fish slurry.
Our local bakery do their own beef paste. Absolutely delicious (Birds for those in the Derby area. Not sure how far afield they extend). Not sure what the stuff in Princess pots actually was...that and fish paste. Have horrid memories of family picnics with beef and fish paste sandwiches that had been warmed and sweated in my mums Tupperware. Not particularly pleasant.
I have had a hankering for Chicken Maryland for the past few days.
Don’t forget the melon / Parma ham combo.
The Spanish still serve that as a starter, using Spanish ham not Parma obviously. And very nice it is, too.
I used to live off the stuff as a kid - I was gutted when they stopped making it and I had to move on to oxtail soup.
Lot of 70s - 80s crossover here, but ‘decades’ are essentially arbitrary so...
Vol-au-vents??
A little tasteless pastry cave with a muddy mucker in there. Cleaves to the roof of the mouth. Utterly pointless. Prepared out of unwritten obligation according to unwritten rules. One’s gob was not amused.
Bloater paste?
Before we discovered tuna and mayonnaise in the mid-80s you could get ‘bloater paste’ in a little jar. It was grey and smelled like a fishy fart. If chilled in the refrigerator to an exact temperature it could plop in it’s entirety out of the jar in one shake like a slimy owl-pellet, or one of those things I used to clean out of the shower-traps at the end of a camping season.
Chicken Supreme.
Not supreme. Not close. Everything in the 1970s was creamy like cold sick. A lactic decade. The Milk Marketing Board (1933-1994) was in at it full tilt. You would be Bigger Stronger Faster if you went for a hat-trick of dairy cream in every course. Or Salad Cream. A typical milky three courser might go like this:
Starter - Creamy mushroom vol au vent
Main - Cream sauce with some meat in it. Maybe some onions. Luckily Heinz created a tin of just that. Now just add ham. Ham that looks like nothing in the picture. Ham that looks like little pieces of pink, floppy, broken vinyl. The cream sauce helps it all slide in nice and easy. No need to chew those tiny onions they’ll just find their own way down.
Pudding Something milky. Maybe a strawberry Angel Delight or a custard trifle with cream on top. A family favourite during The Rover Strikes was a can of ‘sterilised cream’ (in better times we had Fussells tinned cream) along with some tinned fruit cocktail. And by ‘favourite’ I mean the pseudo-cream helped you stop gagging on the the little hard bits of fruit stalk or seed that had found their way into that tin of terror. As a kid I remember being fascinated by the ‘oil and water’ effects of the thick cream refusing to mix with the slimy fruit syrup.
If you are struggling with what to do with white fish a brush of olive oil (more niche than you might think in the 70s/80s but still obtainable
Thats a handy tip for the next time I'm in the 1970s
Thats a handy tip for the next time I’m in the 1970s
Early January next year when Brexit properly kicks in.
*Edit - Oops, onions in cream sauce was Birds Eye, not Heinz.
Nearly everything was Birds Eye, Heinz or Nestle? A Symingtons Table Cream or Shippams Crab paste had at least the ring of upper-crust Englishness going for it. Like what Lord Beagle of Huntingtonfordshire would eat on his return from ‘just a game of golf with the accountant, darling‘
‘Oh, where are your clubs?’
‘Erm, yes, er, must have let them at Ted’s‘
‘And what’s that on your shirt collar’?
‘What? (examines in hall mirror). The dickens. Must’ve brushed against some wild raspberry in the rough. Ahem. Heavens, is that the time?...’
I used to love going to the Golden Egg in Keswick when I was a kid
Some exotic starters to be had
The Salmon Triumph is particularly appealing.
Derek, that Berni Inns menu brings back memories.
Connoisseur Coffee anyone?
Cheeseboard for 50p?
When was the last time anyone enjoyed a glass of Laski Riesling?
That delicious fruit salad up there needs a big dollop of this
Followed by those one of those "cheesecakes" made from a packet mix. Biscuit base and some kind of weird sugary slop on the top.
All I remember is my brother loved both. Class, we were. 😀
+1 Angel Delight.
Favourite sweets from jars - strawberry bonbons, chewing nuts (very chewy, not a nut in sight), soor plooms.
Crisps called Fangs, Bones and Bats - just looked them up - the Bats were Batburger flavour!
The Salmon Triumph is particularly appealing
As a starter or main course?
My favourite crisps in the 70s were sausage and bean flavour Rancheros and these beauties.
Chelsea Whoppers
I’ve seen some of her films Perchy you filthy man 😉
My mum would make a “curry” from the left over chicken from a Sunday roast, she would always throw a handful of sultanas in as well, when I say curry it was really a tangy stew.
Loved Ideal milk
Crisps called Fangs, Bones and Bats – just looked them up – the Bats were Batburger flavour!
Smiths Horror Bags!
The cheese n’ onion Fangs remain for me the most delicious crispy snack of all time ever. If was a billionaire I‘d track down the recipe and pay Smiths to remake them.
Here’s a packet found on a beach 42 years after. Sobering.
https://twitter.com/snapperlane/status/1059415138594406400?s=20
Tinned fruit was a common dessert option for my grandparents. Always a few tins of peaches, pineapple (SO exotic!) and pears knocking around "the larder".
Combine that with some evaporated milk and that was pudding sorted.
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Remember these chocolates?
Gawd knows how they got that green colour, but I bet its banned now.
Pineapple and cheese on a stick (the height of sophistication)
Hirondelle (a favourite of the Krays)
Watney's Red Barrel (what started CAMRA)
Light and heavy (kin awful)
Crab paste and Mother's Pride (oooer)
Remember covering most of my dinners with "Aromat" to make the boiled to death dinner bearable - just googled and its still available 😳 Oh & always got served processed peas at my grandparents.
Processed peas were one of the few vegetables I'd eat as a kid - my parents would still regularly buy them if I was going over to there's for Sunday lunch decades later. I also have memories of boiled-to-death vegetables, thankfully they discovered a steamer in later life.
Tinned fruit & EV was a common dessert, bit of a love/hate thing for me though as if I found hard bits of fruit (core etc.) it would be like finding fish bones in a main and I couldn't eat any more of it.
Also once convinced my mum to add blue food colouring to smash as I thought it would be cool - I couldn't eat it though, I guess the visual change was enough to push the wall-paper paste over the edge for me.
We had individual pizza once. It came from the freezer in the local Co-Op iirc.
It was my first taste of ‘foreign food’ (or ‘foreign muck’ as it was referred to) except for spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce. I wasn’t mad keen on those either.
If Vesta was ‘curry’ then this was ‘pizza’. Underwhelming beyond belief. Vesta curry was preferable to this (was later to learn by the time had left home and first tried a ‘curry‘)
At 10 yrs old I was learning that ‘foreign food‘ seemed every bit as dodgy and unappetising as I’d heard tell. Spaghetti hoops, individual pizzas, grapefruit. All quite risqué in the Black Country back in the day when our Great-Grandparents were quite literally Edwardian and favoured sheeps brains and pig’s trotters over any modern muck. Am not even joking.
Didn’t revisit pizza (or any Italian food) for over a decade. The next one I was to try was hitchhiking in coastal France. Weird setup. Old bloke with a wood-fired pizza oven on the harbour. Had never seen such a thing! Thought it was a time-warp or tourist gimmick. Everything fresh. Even fresh anchovies. Bought a slice. Thought I’d died and woken up in heaven. Britain had never seemed so far away as at that moment. At least you can get decent pizza nowadays (if you have a posh mate with a pizza oven 🤣)
speaking about the fish making you feel sick there was the parmesan cheese in the little red and yellow tub that smelt like puke
It was my first taste of ‘foreign food’ (or ‘foreign muck’ as it was referred to) except for spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce. I wasn’t mad keen on those either.
My grandparents were the same. None of that foreign muck.
Before my grandpa went into care, he was living at home and had carers going in. I visited once and offered to make him some lunch, asked if he wanted some pasta.
From the response, I may as well have just offered him a plate of soil dug from the garden.
Semolina finished under the grill with butter, raspberry jam sponge pudding mmmmmm
All those toast toppers, french bread pizza s aye right used to have bits of flesh hanging from the roof of your mouth due to the high temperatures that took ages to cool down
For those younger ones a Gregg's steaky bake big bite straight out the oven
Then the slashed fingers due to the corned beef tin key aperture opening device
Fray bentos oh boy
Vienetta
Only for posh events!
We visited friends in Sardinia two years ago, and they invited us over for dinner. After a couple of different types of pasta, Frederica announced that they had a ‘typical Sardinian dessert’ and produced a.............
Vienetta! We had to explain our amusement, which increased when we found out how expensive it is in Sardinia.
Someone mentioned Toast Toppers? I remember that Devil’s spooge.
(they seemed to like the word ‘top*’ in the 70s)
We had a top time, reading ‘Topper‘ Comic or playing Top Trumps before mom called us to eat our Toast Toppers. ‘Take your tanktop off before you get your dinner on it, I just washed it!‘
What was that sandwich spread that looked like actual vomit? Like a horror-film prop in a jar? ‘Sandwich Spread’. They did seem to like their ‘all in one’ meal solutions that somehow always resembled pukeyguts.
I've nothing much to add other than this thread has brought back happy memories and a little bit of stomach acid 🙂
I do remember how proud my mum was with her first hostess trolley. About as stable as a knackered shopping trolley only already on fire 🙂
I used to love "smoking" sweet cigarettes as a kid, luckily didn't translate to the real thing. Sherbet Fountains were great too as were pineapple cubes.
There was a real sweet shop on the way to my primary school - I didn't know why my parents wouldn't let me go in every day like my friends. Perhaps that's why I've still got my own teeth?
Bread and butter with slices of pickled cucumber!
BTW this isn't just a UK thing. My partner is Canadian, she also has memories of really crap 70/80's food, that often involved the words "Kreme" and "Kawlity" , often in the same brand name...She tells of a fad amongst the parents of her friends of using sweet Jello...often lemon or Lime, as the basis of salad, so imagine coleslaw...now imagine coleslaw where the mayonnaise has been substituted with Lime Jello...or a Caprese set in orange Jelly...
The past is a foreign country indeed.
Surely only in the UK would you get a Toast Toppers ‘community’? Apparently they were only discontinued in recent years. Fill yer boots:
That delicious fruit salad up there needs a big dollop of this
Beat me to it. Heinz syrup sponge pudding and Dream Topping - a full tin and a full packet to myself, in hindsight I think my gran was just desperately trying to get some calories in me.
these beauties.
Heh, they used to sell Potato Puffs at the tuck shop at school. One lad used to crush up the bag before opening so when everyone helped themselves he offered it round it was impossible to get more than a pinch of potato dust.
Creamola Foam. Raspberry flavour.
Nimble bread, women eating a peece with jam mad from nimble were slender and model like
She flies like a bird in the sky
Heh, they used to sell Potato Puffs at the tuck shop at school. One lad used to crush up the bag before opening so when everyone helped themselves he offered it round it was impossible to get more than a pinch of potato dust.
That was the general form in our school. Measures required to be taken. Everyone was on the scrounge and some non-too-politely.
‘Gizza crisp’
‘But it's me dinna’
‘Gizza crisp goo on’
‘Just one then’ (reach in pocket, try to crush them quietly)
A few kind souls seemed willing to pre-empt the above exchange by sneaking up and smashing your bag of snacks with either a friendly flat palm or a firm iron-grip.
Gammon flavour Tudor crisps.
Canny.
I do remember how proud my mum was with her first hostess trolley.
We still have one and it gets used regularly - they shouldn't be mocked IMO.
Heinz syrup sponge pudding and Dream Topping – a full tin
Those tinned puddings - you had to boil them in a saucepan for 45 minutes or something! Inevitably forget until the smell of burning pan eminated from the kitchen.... no wonder someone invented the microwave. I bet they still have the choice on the instructions - microwave for 2 minutes, or boil for 45! 😛
Frey Bentos tinned corned beef pies. Heaven. Saw some in the pound shop recently.
I remember 2 celebrations in our house that substituted the Vienetta for something even rarer:
And
and for the kids:
What ever happened to the humble Texan bar? After all, "a man's gotta chew... "
And laser lances! Used to last me a whole chemistry lesson!
Of course, I'd usually get a sneaky nip of the Black Tower if the parents were entertaining. Or acquire a can of McEwans! I wonder if it would taste the same if I tried some now.
I bet they still have the choice on the instructions – microwave for 2 minutes, or boil for 45! 😛
Pretty sure they do. I'll check later and report back.
and for the kids:
Surely shome mishtake:
Babycham for the kids? It's 6% abv.! That's stronger than Stella.
My parents were skint so a treat in our house was these sickly little sods.
XL cheese crisps....bring em back!
Yes - Cremola foam!
^^ Just had a look, you can still get those Kipling French Fancies
Only 27g, and only 16g of that is sugar! Not much more than half.
Almost diet food. As a kid I thought French people must eat those all of the time rather than proper cake.
We had ‘Greens’ cake kit/mix cakes for a big treat. The orange flavour one was lush.
Just add egg, oil and water.
A bag of these:
... only onion & vinegar flavour. Washed down with (OK, I'm cheating, early 80s) a can of this:
The cheese n’ onion Fangs remain for me the most delicious crispy snack of all time ever.
Me too!
there was the parmesan cheese in the little red and yellow tub that smelt like puke
Still can't eat parmesan - even shaved straight off the block - because of this, and sitting beside others eating it is a challenge.
Creamola Foam. Raspberry flavour.
I'd forgotten about Creamola Foam - definitely raspberry. 😃
Ah, the era of great dinner parties, with delights such as ham and banana hollandaise:
or that all-time classic, crown roast of frankfurters:
