Food from the 70s

+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

Vesta Chop Suey, and a glass of Blue Nun or Liebfraumilch for the grown-ups. Those crispy fried noodles and that little sachet of…erm…soy sauce? Mother could make one packet feed a family of 5.

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.

..Time warp Formby Beach! Spooky timing Smiths Fangs crisp packet & closing date to get your Horror Grippers ..June 1976…Forty two years old!!! @LivEchonews @NTFormby #FormbyBeach #Liverpool pic.twitter.com/QMNQtuADcP

— Colin Lane (@snapperlane) November 5, 2018

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.

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:

https://www.facebook.com/Toast-Toppers-108044102584496/

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! :P

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: