Family fare as it used to be - in the 1970s

Dec 9 2009 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Family fare as it used to be - in the 1970s

British cooking has come a long way since the 1970s, when quiche was considered quite daring and every restaurant menu boasted prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau. Evidence of just how far modern cuisine has evolved was uncovered by Examiner reader Liz Balderstone when clearing out her kitchen. Hilarie Stelfox takes a look at how families fared around the dining table in 1971

BACK in 1971 The Examiner ran a competition to find the best recipes used by readers and their families.

Liz Balderstone from Longwood sent in a recipe for fish in a white wine sauce and was delighted to see it accepted for publication.

Her ‘Plaice With Grape and Wine Sauce’ was one of the more adventurous dishes in Competitive Cookery, a book that is positively stuffed with the mostly uninspired and fairly mundane – 421 recipes in all.

It is, says Liz, a reflection of the tastes of the day.

“I don’t know where I got my recipe from,’’ she said. “I thought I’d made it up, but now I realise that it’s just fish in a Veronique sauce. There’s nothing original about it, but most of the recipes in the book are a bit like that.

“It’s quite amazing really how things have changed. What struck me most is the lack of ingredients. Nearly every recipe in the book relies on tinned tomatoes, carrots and onions. And there’s a lot of lard and unhealthy stuff.’’

By coincidence, 1971 was the year that Delia Smith published her first cookery book How To Cheat At Cooking, which launched her career as Britain’s favourite food writer. It was closely followed by a television series in 1973 called Family Fare.

The early 1970s saw the beginnings of change for British food. Delia always says she wanted to do something about the ‘awful’ food of the 1960s and began a quiet revolution.

She encouraged household cooks to start using the slightly more exotic ingredients that were finding their way into shops and supermarkets and to go back to the basics of good cooking. This was also the dawn of the supermarket as we know it today.

But in Huddersfield, Examiner readers were still cooking with canned vegetables, lard and sausage meat. There was a distinctive lack of herbs and spices in their recipes.

Examples of this stolid, no-nonsense approach to cookery are on every page of Competitive Cooking – from the Minced Beefburger Casserole, which utilises a tin of minced beef, potatoes, chopped beefburgers and very little else, to the steamed Chicken Mould (using minced left-over chicken, breadcrumbs, egg and tomato ketchup).

There were some attempts at ‘foreign’ dishes – Mock Chop Suey involved frying onion rings in fat then tipping in minced beef with cans of kidney beans and bean sprouts (‘Cover and cook for half an hour’).

The provider of that one said it was “inexpensive and very tasty’’, the latter of which seems unlikely. A similarly insipid recipe for Chinese Pork suggests using soy sauce along with salt and pepper, as well as the ubiquitous onions, to flavour the meat and adds “serve with chips or rice.’’

The British taste for foreign cuisine began with basics such as Chilli Con Carne and Spaghetti Bolgonese and recipes for both these staples appear in the book. But it is mostly a compilation of what were clearly family favourites and filling stodge produced by mothers who needed to feed their children on a budget. There’s even a recipe for cheese on toast, with the daring addition of mustard to make it Welsh Rarebit.

“What’s really noticeable,’’ says Liz, 63, “is the lack of fresh ingredients. There’s a dependence on canned foods.’’

At the time she wrote her recipe, Liz, a retired English teacher, was a young mum with two daughters under three – a third was born in 1971.

Because her husband David has a gluten intolerance, Liz has had to be both creative and careful in the kitchen.

She raised her family on recipes from the Cordon Bleu cookery school, but admits to also using some of the ideas from Competitive Cookery.