At the start of the seventies, my folks owned a newsagent so, as you can imagine, I formed a very close relationship with chocolate.
How many of these do you remember? I think Mars Bars, Twix and Kitkat are still my favourites, although nowadays, I only allow myself one piece on a Friday, because they have no calories on that day.
As I remember, we used to have a weekly delivery from the “pop man” who would bring every imaginable flavour of Corona – I remember Cream Soda and Dandelion & Burdock being favourites.
Set menus were much more common at home – a hang on from the fifties after rationing finally stopped. Fish on Friday – usually from the chippy, or occasionally a “Chinky do” – we made our own dim sum by ordering half a dozen dishes from the local Chinese restaurant. Sunday was traditionally a roast, even in the summer – I can remember lazing on the back lawn with a small glass of sherry while the joint roasted.
Saturday saw dishes created from scratch using fresh ingredients – almost every recipe started with slicing an onion, and we had around a dozen different recipes we’d alternate. Quickest was bacon, onion and potato casserole, all the way through to a complex moussaka. Making a béchamel sauce from scratch was a real skill.
On weekdays, we were more likely to open tinned vegetables with chops or a Fray Bentos pie – you opened the flat tin and the pale pastry rose to many times its thickness, turning golden brown.
So many things came in tins from peaches and pineapple to semolina and hot dog sausages. No such thing as sell-by dates, we had enough tins in the cupboard to outlast a siege, and you only chucked them away if the lid began to bulge. And only then after opening them to make sure they weren’t still edible.
Those were the days! And yet, we had far fewer food allergies and eating disorders. The advent of Homepride cook-in sauces in 1974 meant one could do coq-au-vin or chicken in white wine sauce with very little prep. The early jars were a real treat, although we never understood the thing making them so tasty was a bunch of added salt and sugar.
Dinner parties: the fondue set was a must, along with cheese & pineapple hedgehogs, cheese straws, Twiglets, cocktail sausages, vol-au-vents and garlic mushrooms. No party was complete without a Quiche Lorraine (tomato and bacon), and people were inspired by holidays abroad – adding pizza, gazpacho and paella, and meals from Indian and Chinese restaurants, with Homepride helping to make chicken curry or sweet and sour pork.
Anyone who was there in the 70s will remember the classics: Prawn cocktail or Melon for starters, Mixed Grill or Steak, Black Forest gateau or lemon meringue pie. It was rare to find a vegetarian option, the attitude was “just don’t eat the meat.”
JRo Author 