From savs to spag bol: eating (and drinking) in the sixties
IN the 1950s, World War 2 was still a vivid memory for many.
Although New Zealand was not greatly deprived during the war years, immigrants fleeing the horrors in Europe remembered the privations all too well.
At school, my Scottish cooking teacher urged us never to waste a morsel, but, by the time the sixties began, we were starting to relax. Swinging London sang its siren song as we scrambled to catch up in our island fastness 21,000km away.
There was actually less scrambling required than we thought, foodwise. While England had wrestled with rationing until 1954, we had dined like kings.
Our fat sheep and cows, golden wheat fields, orchards dropping abundant fruit, and waters chockfull of swimming edibles — all produced food fit for the finest restaurants abroad.
But did we know it? Not at all. Even so, we did joke that
Kiwis ate nine meals a day. Unfortunately, this was true.
At sparrowfart, a cup of tea and a biscuit to kickstart the system. (Proper coffee was still a decadent dream.)
Then breakfast, perhaps a WeetBix or three, a heroic plate of porridge, or a fryup — giant New Zealand sausages (they still outgun undernourished foreign pork sausages), bacon, a couple of eggs from nextdoor’s hens. Toast made with white bread, heavily buttered and piled with homemade jam, or spread with Marmite. Then tea or milk, depending on your age. (Farmers, of course, might breakfast on doormatsized steaks or a haunch of mutton, with a mound of fried spuds, for good measure.)
Then, peckish around 11am, morning tea. At work, cups of tea, plus giant cakes from the bakery.
At home, especially at weekends, warm date scones dripping with butter, perhaps a pikelet or three. With jam, of course. (Mothers bottled fruit, pickles and jams ceaselessly.)
During the week, a neighbour might visit for a cuppa. With doors never locked, you might find Ada from next door helpfully making tea in your kitchen.
School children received small glass bottles of milk midmorning, nicely curdled from sitting in the sun, awaiting distribution by the milk monitor.
After a brief pause, lunch. Everyone went home for lunch if they possibly could.
Lunch was slightly lighter than dinner, relatively speaking. Maybe sausages, saveloys, scrambled eggs, pasta, or a reduced version of last night’s dinner. No pudding, though (just cake).
Workers and secondary school pupils hurtled home for lunch and swallowed majestic amounts of calories, before hurtling off again.
My friend and I ensured we didn’t faint with hunger while returning to school by popping into a bakery for cream buns.
If you couldn’t get home, you ate your homeprepared lunch, lovingly wrapped in greaseproof paper by mother or wife. (Not a man’s job, was it?)
My school lunches were a marvel. Homemade crayfish or asparagus rolls, sandwiches with exotic fillings like grated carrot with raisins. Hardboiled eggs, with salt and pepper in twists of paper. Homemade biscuits or squares. And an apple. (For health.)
Peanut butter? Just a faroff American dream back then.
Then, afternoon tea around 3.30pm. For kids, this involved diving into the cake tins (do people still have those?) to see what Mother had baked.
To drink, a glass of homemixed sweet, sticky orange cordial topped up with water.
For workers, a repeat of morning tea, with more lamingtons, custard squares, caramel squares, even pies. Sometimes, your mother invited women friends for afternoon tea: displays of home baking, with pots of tea, and chatter and hilarity.
That generally saw us through to dinner, probably meat and two veg (still from Dad’s garden), a casserole, or occasionally more exotic fare like a curried (tinned) salmon pie.
Oh, the excitement when word of spaghetti Bolognese reached Godzone! The bated breath, the twirling forks, the challenge of wrestling with slippery lengths of spaghetti.
Macaroni cheese — previously the limit of our pasta experience — now seemed a poor cousin.
After the main course came pudding. Not dessert — that word skulked far in the future.
Pudding might be jelly with sliced banana winking from its ruby depths, stewed fruit (more of Mum’s preserves!) with custard, or perhaps steamed pudding.
Then tea, for those so inclined. New Zealand ran on Tiger Tea in the sixties.
After a brief pause, supper. Perhaps a visit from a neighbour: more tea, more baked goodies, and finally, we rolled off to bed.
Note that wine did not feature, since the wine industry was hardly a redveined glint in our eyes back then, largely being tucked away in the homes of the ‘‘Dallie’’ migrants. Alcohol meant beer, beer and more beer. These were the days of the ‘‘six o’clock swill’’. Pubs closed at 6pm, when men, panting for a beer after work, stampeded into the nearest bar and drank at supersonic speed before chuckingout time an hour later.
Then they drove home, imperilling pedestrians and drivers alike. (Note, ‘‘men’’; rarely women — and those who dared enter a public house were safely ensconced in the lounge bar, often behind a curtain.)
Speakeasies flourished: you knocked three times, asked for ‘‘Duckie’’, and entered a noisy bar room crowded with dim shapes barely discernible through the haze of cigarette smoke.
This largely ineffective measure by the state to curtail alcohol consumption — a counter to those licentious, boozing settler days — merely moved alcohol consumption from the pub to the home.
Besides, pubs were not exactly inviting; most were designed for ranks of dedicated drinkers standing at the bar, rather than friends socialising.
Visitors to New Zealand were stunned to find draught beer served in glass jugs, along with the requisite number of small glasses.
For your round, you’d buy a jug, not a clutch of pints, as in the Old Country.
Outsiders found the sight of tiny glasses clutched in the massive fists of beefy Kiwi blokes strangely amusing.
More elegant bars did emerge in the sixties, boasting actual tables and chairs and even food. Some workers even began buying their lunch in suitable pubs, instead of rushing home or unwrapping homemade sarnies. Once bistros and more comfortable drinking dens emerged, groups of colleagues started gathering for more relaxed drinks after work.
However, it was not until 1967 that the closing time was extended to a decadent 10pm.
Young people gathered in milk bars — quelle horreur!
Kids were warned away from the Tip Top, a den of vice selling milkshakes and attracting teddy boys (bodgies) with greasy sideburns, and their female counterparts (widgies), sporting ponytails and matador pants.
Even worse was a basement coffee bar, rumoured to attract beatniks discussing anarchy and Ginsberg. (OK, so that was a fifties movement — we were late to the party.)
Rugbyclub bars were possible hangouts, but not everyone wanted to see propforwards standing on their heads demonstrating unusual drinking skills.
Of course, there were always student parties. Blokes brought beer (hosts provided just the venue) and girls were offered drinks in glass vases or former Marmite jars.
Noise and drunkenness were normal, but, at the beginning of the decade, drugs hadn’t been invented yet.
Pipes (even if just held, not smoked) still marked out the young man of a scholarly or poetic bent, while arty females could occasionally be seen brandishing long cigarette holders for effect.
At the other end of the scale were afternoon teas in dim, hushed establishments like Dunedin’s Savoy.
Ladies wore hats and gloves, were served by uniformed waitresses, drank tea from tinkling china cups, and chose cakes from tiered cakestands. Ladedah!
Later in the sixties, coffee bars flourished and became more teenagerfriendly, especially after the famous Kiwi cheese roll was invented — that whitebread, meltedcheesy, butterdripping delicacy born in Dunedin, later spreading the length and longth of Godzone.
Dinner parties were not common, but were bound to be kicked off with a cocktail glass lined with iceberg lettuce, cradling tinned prawns swimming in a sea of mayonnaise, topped with a sophisticated pinch of cayenne pepper.
Chicken a l’orange might follow, rounded off with a trifle or a pineapple flummery, all presented with linen and silverware dug out of the wife’s hope chest.
Parties at home were more common, and were either cocktail evenings, or big dressedup affairs with Marge from No 16 on the piano, Bob on the drums and the full company yodelling the hits in chorus.
No soloists here — Kiwis were too selfconscious for that.
Still, if the mood was right, furniture and rugs could be pushed back for a spot of dancing to the accompaniment of the radiogram.
Ladies brought food, and supper was so gargantuan the hosts ate leftovers for days. (Alongside this were Maori gettogethers, which were similarly not short on food and featured group singing, but with a brace of quicklymagicked guitars replacing the upright piano.)
The famous Kiwi dip
(packeted onion soup stirred into a can of reduced cream) was de rigueur, along with savoury installations resembling a hedgehog that had nipped in from the back garden to join in the festivities: a grapefruit stuck with toothpicks bearing diced cheese and pineapple, cocktail onions and glace cherries — the height of sophistication.
The ‘‘progressive dinner’’ also made a brief appearance: one course in each house. Walking (or staggering) distance between houses was essential.
Hosts supplied foaming draught beer in peters (flagons).
Sherry — possibly not vintage — was also purchased in peters.
Those too grand for beer, drank cocktails: gin and tonic, brandy and ginger ale, Pimm’s choked with fruit.
Lethal punch might be served, ensuring a riotous (if blurry) evening.
There was wine, but little of it. The famous Blue Nun, Hungarian Bulls Blood, Chianti in strawcovered bottles (later repurposed as lamps) and little else, unless you made a surreptitious pilgrimage to the migrant Dalmatians’ cellar door.
Most stuck to Speight’s — less sophisticated, but cheaper.
Eating out at a restaurant was a major treat, and options varied from cheap Chinese cafes with all dishes heavily dependent on cabbage, and nary a chopstick in sight, to upmarket venues with waiters, good wines and a pianist in the corner.
The chippie was also a treat, often at the weekend to give
Mum a night off from cooking.
But you had to eat your chips and battered cod, sausages — even battered oysters — straight from the newspaper wrapping. Plates and cutlery were sneered upon.
Bluff oysters were plentiful, cheap and delicious, as were crayfish (seldom seen now) and mutton birds in plaited kete bags — a greasy, aromatic delight.
And let’s not forget the pie cart, beloved by blokes returning from afterfootie beerfests.
Girls seldom braved the pie cart for pea, pie and pud (that’s a minced beef pie with a dollop of mashed spud and real peas, to you), since they were always buzzing with drunks.
We may not have had baristas serving 10 kinds of coffee, and just as many types of milk, nor our delicious wines now famous worldwide, the healthy snacks, the cool cafe society, or the interesting restaurants, but were we wellfed? Damn straight!
Shirley Johnson started her career in journalism in Dunedin and continued it in Ireland, working for many magazines and newspapers, plus radio and television. She now divides her time between Dunedin, San Francisco and Dublin, where she lives with a foster cat called Roxanne. And she thoroughly enjoyed the sixties.