Food from the 70s

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. :D