Back in Time for Dinner

The mother spoils it for me. I was newly married in the 70s, having been in academia up till then. I had a better idea of cooking than she does and always had a positive hope that the dish would at least be edible. Mostly turned out OK!

I had two cook books, the OXO book of Meat and a cheese cookery book, both given away free with purchases!

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Elegran

A vegetable being the mainstay makes sense though - we ate a lot of vegetables.

I suppose they are trying to make an amalgam of families from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds which reflected extremely varied tastes and access to different sorts of foods. I recognise some aspects of 60s/70s life but certainly not all. We did tend to eat good stews and lots of veg but Mum sometimes experimented with new things such as Vesta Curries. We had crisps in the 1960s I well remember and Spaghetti Bolognese was commonly eaten in our house in that decade too. We never had chips or really any fried food except occasionally herring in oatmeal. We didn't have a garden or grow veg. Grandparents in the country did though.
Its an impossibility for this programme to produce an exact way of life for "every family". They are making a noble effort though. They do contact people living in those days too- eg Mary Berry and that lady who wrote the cooking in a bedsit book.

She always looks worried sick and discontented too, with her forehead wrinkled and mouth pursed, though maybe that expression is just because she needs glasses.

Correction: A vegetable garden was the mainstay
And the bracket in the wrong place after 'likeable'

We need an edit button! I should have previewed.

I agree elegran. It is contrived in that mother never does the cooking in real life, father does it all, so mother has not been a happy bunny in the kitchen and is spectacularly useless at everything. The meals are also carefully chosen to be dreadful and not normal fare for most families which I knew.
I do have that original book 'How to cheat at cooking' by Delia and there are much better recipes in there although I have only ever used one or two. A bit unfair on Delia I thought!
They have obviously never been camping and used a gaz stove. What a ridiculous performance by the females!

I did wonder what sort of food they eat now cooked by father (he is very likeable) as are the two girls.

Did other families always end their meals with a cup of tea? We didn't except at breakfast.

A vegetable was the mainstay during the war years - mum told me how the next door neighbour dug up the front garden as well for her so she could plant potatoes (dad was away). After the war most of the back garden continued as a vegetable garden throughout the decades and the front reverted to dad's beloved flowers.

Perhaps I shouldn't comment but mum is so terribly thin (worryingly so) I wonder if she eats much at all and is just not interested in food and cooking. Or perhaps she has a 'fast metabolism'. I wish!

I imagine the family were selected from a lot of applicants, so the producers got what they wanted. The meals were chosen to be spectacularly awful, so it is no surprise that the cook was too.

Then they gave the husband a lovely meal to make - in real life that would probably have been the first time he had cooked, and he would have made a hash of it. In real life the wife would have been cooking for at least eighteen years, and would have been at home in that kitchen.

Manufactured social history. Bunkum. It would be laughable if it it didn't broadcast the notion that the nation lived for decades on rubbish cooked by morons until the wonders of - ta-ra - brown rice and flavoured potato crisps.

And why did they wait until the seventies to let them grow some of their own food? Most gardens had a vegetable patch.

I agree with Pompa, the mother is worse than useless, I want to shake her. She is still incapable of opening a tin, and unable to even cook egg and chips.

I haven't seen it yet, so have the Smash to look forward to!

Oh yes, I remember the power cut era - Oh shit dear the lights just flicked on and off as I typed that (that was spooky!)

Just watching this weeks program. I'm sure most of our GNers (certainly Mrs P) could cope in the kitchen far better than this woman, she is always whinging. The kids seemed to cope better. SMASH, how on earth did we eat that, we certainly did, looks like wall paper paste. We still have our camping stove and gas lights from the power cut era.

The luncheon voucher was invaluable to us back in the day.

We were paid well, (I was what would now be called a PA) but having a LV just to spend on food was a real luxury.

We explored Italian Restaurants, Department Store Cafes, Indian Restaurants, (not many of them at that time) and up market restaurants where they served wine and snails!!! as well as the Chinese restaurants previously mentioned.

It was such fun and a real education. How we managed to eat so well and arrive back at work in time ready to do an afternoon's work astonishes me now. There were a group of us and we could run really fast even in high heels.

Cynthia Payne's sister was a friend of my mother's. She was the antithesis of Cynthia.

I have a vague recollection of luncheon vouchers. Mine was 1/- and we got five of them inside our pay packets. In those days (1966), we got paid weekly in cash.......... or did I just dream that?

Yes, they did.

Why do Luncheon Vouchers remind you of Cynthia Payne? Did her clients pay in Luncheon Vouchers?

The mention of Luncheon Vouchers reminds me of that celebrated "madam" Cynthia Payne whose establishment was next door to where Jean (Boht) and Carl Davis lived many years ago when DDs were at primary school in Streatham. Jean once told me what nice and quiet neighbours they were -even with so many " visitors"!!

The cafe we went to was near Tottenham College in West Green Rd.
(My future MIL was the canteen manager, but we ate out !!)

I was working in London in the mid sixties zany, like Pompa, had my first taste of Italian food at a tiny cafe just round the corner from Berkeley Square. They served lovely sausages and mixed grills, but I was intrigued by the staff shouting orders down into the cellar kitchen for "lasagne al forno, spaghetti alla bolognese!" I asked what the lasagne was one day, ordered it and was hooked. It took me longer to try the spaghetti - eating it looked a bit too complicated and slightly messy!

Anyone remember luncheon vouchers - mine were 3/6d and you could buy a three course lunch with that.

In about 1965 I had my first Chinese food in a restaurant near to where I worked. Us girls thought we were the height of sophistication

In the same restaurant were male managers and we felt equal to them - "and the times they were a changing." Bob Dylon.

I remember a little cafe near our college run by an Italian lady, back in the early 60's. It served typical greasy spoon food. One lunch time we (about 6 of us as I remember) asked if she could make us some spaghetti, WOW, from then on we got so much Italian food each lunch time, we could not eat it all. My first introduction to real Italian food.

More European centred rather than the rest of the world?

I wonder what our dining-out experiences would be like now were it not for the cuisines introduced by the wide variety of immigrants to our country!

We had all the above, and being Cornish - pasties of course. Mum had what they called butter pasty during the war because of meat scarcity so it was potato swede onion and knobs of butter.
Always a capon at Christmas and beef every Sunday. In my case bread jam and cream sometimes for breakfast but mostly bread and milk which I love to this day. So bread with butter sugar and full fat milk. Of course the milk wasn't pasterised.

Mrs P assures me we had Vesta meals, I find that very difficult to believe.