Now salad cream and ketchup are going the way of 1970s food

KETCHUPS generally are no longer Britain’s bestselling condiment. Sales of Henry Heinz’s famous product fell last year by 13.2 per cent. Supermarket sales of all ketchups have fallen by six million bottles.

‘Craft beer-drinking foodies are now slathering their fries and gourmet burgers with artisan srirachas and chilli chutneys,’ laments The Grocer magazine.

But mostly people now prefer mayonnaise. Incredibly, in the year up to April, this exotic emulsion – with all its connotations of Johnny Foreigner – outsold ketchup for the first time in Britain.

This is in the land that once held in high suspicion any summer slick that was not Heinz Salad Cream – whipped up from spirit vinegar, rapeseed oil, water, mustard, pasteurised egg-yolk and modified cornflour, stabilised with guar gum and xanthan gum and coloured with riboflavin. Just like Granny used to make it.

Though there are those who still adore such gloop – a colleague swears there is no better roll than one with boiled egg, Baxter’s beetroot and the aforesaid salad cream – I personally wouldn’t use it to grout the bathroom. But the apotheosis of mayonnaise, and the sustained decline of Heinz ketchup and HP Sauce and their crusted-bottle ilk, reminds us of slow but powerful changes in how we eat.

Meals themselves have altered greatly. When I was a small boy, we had dinner and tea. Dinner was always around midday, was always hearty and always included potatoes. Tea was in the evening – usually about half-past five, and you had something grilled or fried, without potatoes (though occasionally with chips) but with bread and jam and scones and oatcakes and, indeed, abundant hot tea.

IT was in this order that traditional condiments, the sort of things in bottles that had helped win the war, moved and had their being. My late grandmother had a special shelf by the dining-table whereon they all sat proudly – jars of beetroot and pickled onion and Branston pickle, Heinz’s ketchup and Daddies Sauce, with its little photo of an archetypical 1950s sort of Dad who looked kind, if slightly balding.

Such condiments belonged to an era of unaffected eatingout at the sort of establishments now damned as ‘greasy spoon’ cafés – quite unkindly, because the best of these short-order cooking joints were very good indeed, and there are still some survivors.

But ketchups and pickles and mustards and their ilk are inevitably associated with an era when most of our food was pretty dreich and needed all the help they could furnish.

In the Hebrides, it was of heroic monotony: porridge, fish, potatoes, oatcakes, with ‘Stornoway bread-loaf’ and jam for a treat – and beef broth on Sundays, with the boiled-to-fare-thee-well joint thereafter enjoyed with potatoes. This is not to be knocked and my mother still serves soup with its boiling-beef postscript every winter Saturday, although a slather of HP sauce does help it down.

But the dominant memory of food in the 1970s was how reliant everyone was on the deepfreeze, to the point that those of us who grew up in that decade have a general horror of the freezer and retain it only for ice cream, ice itself and frozen peas.

What really drove millions to the deep-freeze was inflation, which hit vertiginous levels in 1974 and panicked folk the length of the country into investing in a chest-freezer and bulk-buying as much fresh produce as they could.

When we returned from Lewis every August, it was with much Lewis mutton and fine Stornoway sausages and the town’s famous black pudding and kippers and smoked mackerel – all of which were duly fed into the freezer, pride of place being given to the vast and illegal salmon that had been obtained, by night, at a certain West Side door after furtive coded telephone calls.

But our most exotic fare was macaroni cheese. Spaghetti, as far as we were concerned, was a limp, tinned affair in tomato sauce.

I can still remember, at the refectory of my new school, my first encounters with pizza, curry and spaghetti Bolognese, viewing each with deep suspicion. And I remember the first time I heard the word ‘lunch’, and wondered what it was.

There was a plodding TV show called Farmhouse Kitchen, where gruff ladies from Yorkshire showed you how to make piccalilli. By contrast we had the over-thetop performances of ‘Galloping Gourmet’ Graham Kerr and Robert Carrier, who slathered everything with cream and butter and were big on aspic and cutlet-frills – dinner-party, show-offy stuff, but scarcely practical.

HAD ITV not lacked the sense to commit fully to Farmhouse Kitchen regular guest Mary Berry by giving her a sustained 1970s show at a reasonable time slot, she and not Delia Smith would have become our national culinary treasure. But in the late 1970s the BBC gave Delia her platform, and stuck by her, and the rest is history.

Delia’s studio-bound shows were of stark simplicity and the lady herself seemed a little distant, even cool. But she caught on because her recipes – if followed exactly, a vital point – actually work, and they include many reasonable renditions of French, Italian and other exotic dishes.

She emerged at a time when the way we cook was changing rapidly, not least because of new patterns in employment.

Most women, for instance, are now in full-time jobs, and who these days goes home to a mid-day dinner of mince and tatties?

Today, for most of us the evening meal is the main one of the day, and cooking in the true sense – starting from scratch, with raw ingredients – is something we do for fun two or three times a week.

Otherwise we assemble something from good cold ingredients, or take advantage of ready-made meals from the supermarket.

We eat much less meat and much more pasta, salad and fresh fruit. ‘Lunch’ for most of us is a high-end sandwich and bottled water – just as well, recalling the bibulous and epic entertainments that editors used to haul one out on two decades ago.

Breakfast is minimal to nonexistent. The grilled and the fried are frightfully out of fashion and, checking my own fridge and larder just now, I find no ketchup. No brown sauce. No pickles. Just a big jar of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise and two wee ones of Dijon mustard.

I appear, then, to be ‘ontrend’. Yet it is hard not to feel just a little wistful at the world we have lost, with its plain fare and unaffected contentment; the cosy booth of an unpretentious diner and – ketchups optional – the big flavours of a really good all-day breakfast.