About a Boyhood

Surviving 70s Cuisine

About A Boyhood: Surviving 70s Cuisine

In the 1970s, there was a vague lifestyle movement (fuelled by Habitat) to make the kitchen the heart of the home. This never quite took off in our house. For a start, our kitchen was too small. Situated next to the cellar, it was cramped, with overflowing alcoves of crockery and cups dangling by hooks. There was a cheap Baby Belling cooker and gadgets such as a food-mixer and kitchen scales attached to the white-brick walls to save space. Very much not a fitted kitchen of the type that took over in the 80s, its only storage space for cleaning products was a cubby hole under the sink protected by a blue cloth on a cord. This I was too scared to pull open as it often revealed the happy homes of spiders. There was a small, polished pine dining table with four chairs, which proved inadequate whenever our friends crowded round for tea or a birthday party. Meals were usually served up in the living room, requiring much toing-and-froing up the stairs with trays and pans. My mother complained that we needed a dumb waiter of the type found in posh country houses.

Often, the kitchen smelt of burnt toast, or lamb fat from my father’s go-to meal of grilled lamb chops, Smash and peas. The walls bore the usual childish scribbles and sketches – bug-eyed monsters or the Red Arrows or pirate treasure maps. At one point there was a large Mr Men poster on the far wall, but it didn’t last long. I can’t remember what replaced it. At Christmas, an advent calendar would be hung next to the door, with its tantalising windows hiding foil-wrapped chocolate. Overall, the space was singularly undecorated, functional, bare. And always cold on winter mornings, with its uneven, foot-chilling indigo tiles only adding to the discomfort.

Our meals were the predictable British 70s fare, starting with breakfast. For me and my brother, this was nearly always cereal of the tooth-rotting variety. Golden Nuggets. Frosties. Ricicles. Or my favourite, Sugar Puffs, floating on a sea of saccharine milk. Later, our mother put an end to this sugary madness, and insisted on Sainsbury’s own-brand Weetabix in its distinctive oblong green box, or eventually the hated Shredded Wheat. Shreddies, however, whose little wheaty squares sprinkled with Lyle’s were surprisingly good, were just about acceptable. For her own bowl, she favoured Alpen, muesli being a new-fangled 70s innovation. We tried it once and found there were too many nuts and too few raisins. Looking back, I can see her choice was linked to her health-kick after our future-stepfather Keith came on the scene. Our dad, when he was home, would cook up a full English with salty slabs of back bacon and fried eggs swimming in oil. As an alternative, he would just have toast: cutting great slabs of grainy wholemeal with our trusty breadknife on which he slathered Golden Shred marmalade or Gales Country Honey. As we didn’t have a toaster, he would inevitably burn his breakfast under the grill, filling the kitchen with the not-unpleasant smell of carbonised scrapings.

Lunch or dinner was the usual 70s horror of something tinned or from a packet. Spam was a favourite of my mother’s, for some reason. A hangover from WWII rationing, with its horrid golden jelly and bland processed taste, Spam was repellent. It was only ever edible when my mother cooked it up in batter, a fearful concoction called Spam fritters. Often, we’d gobble the batter and leave the tongues of pink meat, like sensible children. Much mileage was gained from Heinz tinned spaghetti on thick-sliced Sunblest; always with Stork SB or Blueband margarine, never butter. For chilly days there was Bachelor’s Cup-a-Soup onto which my mother liberally sprinkled crunchy, semi-burnt croutons. And then there were the trusty fall-backs of Findus Crispy Pancakes. Or Birdseye beefburgers (with onions). Or fishfingers with Mc Cain oven chips and tinned peas. It always impressed us that our mother’s nursing-college friend Jan was married to a man who worked for McCain’s. This was almost like living with a celebrity.

If dinner was homemade, there was the tried-and-tested option of aromatic meatballs made with sage and onion, served with rice, which my mother made to perfection: never soggy, never dry, just right. Or liver and onions, with its ammoniac tang and unusual leathery texture. Or shepherd’s pie, our firmest favourite. We used to lovingly separate its components on the plate, eating the mash first, followed by the carrots, leaving the delicious mince for last. One homemade dish which always disappointed was egg-and-bacon flan. An assault course of gristly meat and underdone pastry, every mouthful had to be tempered with a slug of Robinson’s orange squash to take the taste away. Very occasionally, my mother pushed the boat out and made a spaghetti Bolognese. This was heavenly; the meat juices running from the pasta, revealing salty mince and tender onions. All without the sacrilegious addition of cheese; parmesan not having hit the UK yet, though my mother did have a paperback of Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food which she rarely used.

Dessert was the arena in which the decade provided a child with real gifts. If it was homemade, it was often sweet, stringy rhubarb with boiling custard, or treacle tart with cold custard (just as wonderful). At Christmas my mother made a peerless trifle, with abundant cream, maraschino cherries, almonds and a weightless sponge; a sump of pure sherry at the bottom. For tea with our friends, it was either Arctic Roll or Angel’s Delight. Both were exquisite. I could never get enough of the log of sponge and strawberry jam with its excitingly cold core of vanilla ice cream. When it came to Angel’s Delight, part of the pleasure was witnessing its creation. To watch the sachet of pink, sherbet-like mixture poured into a bowl, to which was added water, and then see it rise to its weightless perfection, was intolerably wonderful. There was no notional upper limit of how much strawberry Angel’s Delight either me or my brother could scoff. Even choc ices, when they arrived mid-decade, couldn’t begin to compete. In the summer of ’77, our mother made us a James Bond birthday cake shaped as the number seven: a stodgy block covered in snowy icing with 007 set out in sprinkles. It was the best birthday I’d ever had.

For afternoon sweet snacks there were of course biscuits, of which the 70s provided a dizzying array. Bourbons, Jammie Dodgers, Chocolate Digestives and Custard Creams. For special occasions there were Mr Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells with their solid white crown and crumbly pastry. Or his divine Country Slices, with raisins and great granules of sugar on top. These would disappear from their plastic packaging if they weren’t severely rationed. Same for his cuboid Fondant French Fancies or the dependable Sponge Fingers. My mother’s afternoon cake of choice was a Battenberg. There was nothing to compare to a slice of its insanely sweet marzipan outer casing and the pastel-shaded squares of sponge within. However, for real sybaritic indulgence nothing could beat a chocolate marshmallow teacake, its silver and crimson foil wrapper hiding untold pleasure within.

Our weekly trip to Stevenage swimming baths brought us into contact with the world of crisps and chocolate. And what a world that was in 1977. The sharp tang of chlorine will forever be associated with Smiths Square Crisps, a new innovation with their do-it-yourself sachet of salt which you would shake around in the bag. This and other goodies were found in the big vending machine outside the changing rooms. In fact, everything about the pool was big and new and scary. To a seven-year-old it appeared Olympian in size, with a fearsome three-tier diving board at the far end, its space illuminated with abundant natural light from the huge windows. It even had a competition-size viewing gallery where our mother sat as we flailed in our arm-bands. But the vending machine was the reward for the all the fear and discomfort. Along with Square Crisps were the delights of KP Discos and Hula Hoops, Cheese Quavers, Skips and Outer Spacers with their flying saucers on the packet. Then there was Monster Munch which always left your fingers covered in flakes, or crunchy Potato Twists which stuck in your teeth. Along with the standard Golden Wonder ready salted or cheese and onion, there were more exotic choices such as Oxo-flavour Ringos, Rancheros or Discos. Or the supreme smoky-bacon-flavour Frazzles.

If it was chocolate we were after (and it often was), the vending machine spoilt us with choice. From chunky Yorkies or Texans (favoured by macho Keith) to the more delicate delights of Fry’s Chocolate Cream or a Mackintosh Caramac (our mother’s fall-back options). Of course, there were the old staples of Fudge, Curly Wurly, Toffos and Rollos, but also more exotic finds such as a bar of boozy Old Jamaica or a 5p Golden Cup, whose sickly caramel centre always made you regret the choice after a few bites. Our journeys back from the pool, often in the inky darkness of a November night, were always spent on the back seat of the Citroen in an orgy of crisps and chocolate. Nothing could spoil these moments except for the time when we saw Keith sail by in the illuminated window a coach.

Mum and her paramour had been arguing constantly for a while until Keith had disappeared from the house. Where he’d gone, we’d no idea. Most probably back to his own folks up in Yorkshire to lick his wounds. We were glad of his absence as their fights had been getting ever more vicious and disturbing. When he left, Keith had become the unmentionable. After a fortnight, we still didn’t know where he’d disappeared to. Then, one night, our hair matted and reeking of chlorine, we spotted his gaunt visage in the fleeting window of a coach travelling in the opposite direction.

‘Mum, mum,’ I cried. ‘There’s Keith! He’s on the coach.’

She pretended not to have noticed and looked around theatrically.

‘Where? Oh, it must have been someone else.’

‘No,’ James joined in. ‘It was him all right. Where do you think he’s going?’

‘It won’t have been him,’ she insisted ‘Now stop yelling or you’ll make me crash.’

For a second I caught her face in the rear-view. From the way she was biting her bottom lip I could tell she was lying.