Michael Barratt, BBC "Nationwide" presenter from 1969 to 1977, wonders how youngsters will survive without dripping in his "Weekly News" column, October 1974.
What did we eat in the '70s? Well, me and my very working class family tucked into such delicious delights as white bread, crispy pancakes, and cereal sausages...
Cereal sausages? Yes, this is what we now call the type of sausage my financially hard-pressed mother used to buy in the '70s. They were chipolatas, thin, tasted of nothing much except a hint of salt, and were quite dry. They weren't made of cereal officially. It was probably sawdust. They were horrible. Once on the plate, they'd quickly go all wrinkled - like fingers that had been submerged in water for a length of time.
Other treats included savoury pancakes. These really
were a treat. When we could afford them, it was a sign of a financially sound period in that worrying era of galloping inflation.
We didn't eat pasta (apart from tinned spaghetti), courgettes, peppers, aubergines, nothing like that. In fact, I don't even recall seeing such things in the supermarket.
The only dried pasta available at the supermarkets was of the long, spaghetti variety.
We ate spuds - boiled, fried, chipped or mashed. We ate baked beans. We ate tinned processed peas. We ate lettuce, spring onions, cucumber and tomato as salad - and
never had mayonnaise or salad dressing. It was
always salad cream.
There was what "posh" people ate and what
we ate in the '70s. And the two were very different things. And to be honest we didn't know much about how the other half ate.
Back then, I remember our margarine sometimes tasted meaty. I can't explain why, but it was sometimes quite strong. "You're bonkers!" children of the '80s and '90s tell me. But it's true. "It's whale," my mother used to say.
Bread was white. Cake was shop-bought for Sunday tea. Usually a Soreen malt loaf or dry madeira, but occasionally an artic roll! Real treat, that. The Sunday tea "savoury" was usually sandwiches. Paste. Or spam. Or corned beef.
We ate SO MUCH paste!
People try to make out now that we were all eating prawn cocktails and Black Forest Gateau in the '70s. I'm not quite sure when the prawn cocktail actually arrived. As far back as 1962, posh Annie Walker was talking about them in
Coronation Street and Fanny Cradock wrote about the "ubiquitous prawn cocktail" in 1967 (more
here). "Ubiquitous" in
some circles. The Black Forest Gateau was a 1960s incomer. But my family had never heard of them in the '70s as far as I remember. Both were rampant in the 1980s when there was a bit of dosh around.
Soup was never tinned, it was too expensive unless you were ill, when tinned soup (particularly chicken) was considered to have great restorative powers. We had powdered packet soup, which was like dish water. However long you cooked and stirred, the bits of "pea" and "carrot" (ahem!) were hard and sometimes powdery inside.
Foreign food? Curry was a great fave round our way. The local takeaway served up awesome curries, swimming in yellow fat and in the case of chicken, containing nasty flabby pieces of chicken skin.
Mum fried in lard. We'd heard of cooking oil, but it was "dear" and an unknown quantity. Stick with what's cheap. Stick with what you know. A great favourite family filler was the traditional bread 'n'dripping. Actually, it had been falling out of favour for a decade or two and had always been a peasant food anyway. In the 1970s, it was still common amongst us commonest-of-the-common-commoners. When my step-granny used to bring round a pudding bowl containing cold meat juices and fat with the jelly on top, it was a tremendous culinary treat.
Spread it on your bread - LUVLEY! Fry the sausages in lard - LUVLEY!
Until around 1981, when I suddenly turned to my mother and said: "'Ere, Mum, don't you think cooking oil might be healthier?"
But
that was around 1981.
A 1977 UK Happy Days novel.
