A magical FEAST of memories
Vesta curries, Angel Delight — and the first M&S sarnie. A new book takes a gloriously nostalgic look at our favourite foods of yesteryear
breweries realising there was profit in food as well as drink, the decade saw the opening of familyfriendly establishments by such chains as Berni Inn, Harvester and Beefeater.
Other dining options included the 4,000 Chinese and 2,000 Indian restaurants and takeaways opened by the beginning of the decade, thanks to a surge of immigration in the Sixties.
The new arrivals found a Britain eager to embrace their cuisine.
Among these was chop suey, invented in San Francisco, and the classic banquet dish peking duck, apparently dreamt up in Britain. This cautious appetite for the exotic saw Britons developing a taste for wine on their increasingly popular two-week package breaks to Spain.
Back home, annual consumption doubled from seven bottles per head in 1970 to 15 bottles by 1980. Today, we knock back an average of 35 bottles yearly.
Much of that was quaffed during entertaining at home. Women’s magazines devoted pages to guidance on how to create canapes, including Ritz crackers topped with soft cheese, vol-au-vents and the classic cheese-and-pineapplechunk hedgehog.
EIGHTIES: READY MEAL REVOLUTION
THOUgH more women were entering high-paying managerial and professional jobs, men still had little involvement with domestic chores at home.
Mum did the planning, shopping and cooking — and this was done increasingly with the help of a microwave oven.
By the end of the decade half of homes had one (today, 90 per cent do) and, paired with fridges and freezers, they transformed the way we ate. At the end of the Seventies, Marks & Spencer brought out the first chilled ready-meal, chicken kiev, and though a pack of two cost a pricey £2 (equivalent to £8 today), they sold out in days.
Today, M&S sells more than ten tonnes of chicken tikka masala every week and we re-heat our way through three times as many ready meals each year as most other European countries.
The traditional meal, prepared at home from fresh ingredients, vanished into the distant past.
Family time together was also undermined by the new technologies of the decade, including computers, computer games and personal stereos. Outside the home, lunchtimes were also transformed in 1980 when M& S produced the first pre-packed sandwiches (salmon and tomato was the first filling, soon followed by prawn mayonnaise).
Today, 60 per cent of us eat lunch at our desk and the sandwich market is worth £6 billion a year, accounting for one-third of the takeaway market.
As waistlines grew under the onslaught of foods high in fat, sugar and salt, the average Eighties woman was two inches bigger around the hips than her Fifties counterparts. not surprisingly, the decade saw 24 diet books in the best-seller lists.
Fitness gurus such as Jane Fonda launched exercise videos, and Diana Moran, the Lycra-clad green goddess, attempted to get the nation fit over their cornflakes.
Pulling women in the opposite direction were the stylish, femalefriendly wine bars, the Yuppy alternative to the traditional maledominated boozer. By the end of the Eighties, these had helped to push consumption of alcohol as a whole to twice the level of the Sixties.
NINETIES ON: SUSHI & INSECTS
BY 1990, supermarkets accounted for 80 per cent of all food sales in Britain. The time we spent on meal preparation had already declined from an average of one hour each day in the Eighties to just 38 minutes at the beginning of the nineties. now we cut corners further with quick fixes including, remarkably, the pre- cooked, ready-to-heat baked potato. We also came to expect all-yearround availability of previously seasonal fruits and vegetables, including imported exotic leaves such as rocket and lamb’s lettuce.
The value of the salad market grew by 90 per cent over the decade.
We drank bottled water, thanks to French company Perrier, whose clever advertising persuaded us to buy something that came out of our taps free.
In 1990, only 5 per cent of households bought mineral water, but consumption soared during the decade. We now drink an astounding 2,539 million litres a year.
As late as the Seventies, tea was still five times more popular than coffee. But even if it meant learning a whole new language — skinny, moccachino, frappuccino — we enthusiastically embraced the idea of coffee shops.
Jamie Oliver, nigella Lawson and other celebrity chefs made cooking ‘cool’ for men as well as women, and the ever- dependable Delia Smith was hardly off our screens throughout the decade.
Even so, by 2002 about 35p of every £1 spent on food went on eating outside the home, and nearly 30 million of us were eating out at least once a week.
The three-meal-a-day habit of the Fifties is being steadily eroded and we can only speculate about how our eating habits will change in the decades to come.
The country’s fastest-growing food market is sushi, which you can buy everywhere, from supermarkets to sandwich bars.
Yet to the families of the Fifties, the idea of eating raw fish with mustard and seaweed would have caused the same revulsion with which we might regard the dubious pleasures of Spam today. Or insects in the future . . . EXTRACTED from Back In Time For Dinner. From Spam To Sushi: How We’ve Changed The Way We Eat by Mary Gwynn (Bantam, £20). To order a copy for £16 (20 per cent discount), visit mailbookshop.co.uk. offer valid until March 26, P&P free for limited time only. The TV series begins on BBC2 at 8pm on Tuesday.