Web Page 3079 24rd November 2023 First Picture: Rationing Advert

Second Picture: Heinz Salad Cream

Fourth Picture: High Tea

Food in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s Ask any American in their 60s or 70s who is the best cook he or she knows, and they will almost certainly reply, “My mom”. Ask any English person of a similar age and they will almost certainly name anyone BUT their mother. You could be kind and blame this lack of British culinary skill on rationing. Rationing continued even after the end of World War II; indeed, when the Queen came to the throne in 1952, sugar, butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fat, bacon, meat and tea were all still rationed. Rationing did not actually finish until 1954, with sugar rationing ending in 1953 and meat rationing in 1954. Rationing and the meagre choice of ingredients and flavourings, whilst concentrating our mums minds on creating filling and satisfying meals, would preclude the best cook from creating cordon bleu dishes. Food was seasonal (no tomatoes in winter for example); there were no supermarkets, no frozen food or freezers to store it in and the only takeaway was from the fish and chip shop. The 1950s were the age of spam fritters (now making a comeback!), salmon sandwiches, tinned fruit with evaporated milk, fish on Fridays and ham salad for high tea every Sunday. The only way to add flavour to this bland plain cooking was with tomato ketchup, Daddies Sauce or brown sauce. There were no salad dressings as we know them today. Olive oil was only sold in very small bottles from the chemist, to be warmed and placed in the ear to loosen ear wax! Salad in the summer consisted of round lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes, and the only dressing available was Heinz Salad Cream. In the winter, salad was often thinly sliced white cabbage, onions and carrots, again served with Salad Cream. Heinz also did a range of tinned salads: Potato Salad, Vegetable Salad and Coleslaw. ‘Meat and two veg’ was the staple diet for most families in the 1950s and 1960s. The average family rarely if ever ate out. In the pub you could get potato crisps (three flavours only – potato, plain or salted – until Golden Wonder launched ‘cheese and onion’ in 1962), a pickled egg to go on top, and perhaps a pasty or some cockles, winkles and whelks from the seafood man on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening. Things started to change when the UK’s answer to the burger bars in America arrived in the 1950s to cater for that new group of consumers, the ‘teenagers’. The first Wimpy Bars opened in 1954 selling hamburgers and milkshakes and proved extremely popular. Although the first Chinese restaurant in London was opened in 1908, the real spread of Chinese restaurants began in the late 1950s and 1960s with the influx of migrants from Hong Kong. These proved very popular; indeed in 1958 Billy Butlin introduced chop suey and chips into his holiday camps! The 1960s also saw a dramatic rise in the number and spread of Indian restaurants in Britain, During rationing it had been very difficult if not near impossible, to obtain the spices required for Indian cooking but with the rise in immigration and the end of rationing, this was no longer a problem and the restaurants flourished. So much so that in the late 1960s, the famous Vesta curries and Vesta Chow Mein, the first taste for many Britons of ‘foreign food’ became available in the shops.. The late 1960s saw a boom in the British economy and a rise in the standard of living. The first package holidays to Europe started in the late 60s and made overseas travel affordable to all. This too played its part in tempting the British palate with tasty new foods and ingredients. The decades between 1954 and 1974 saw a dramatic turning point in British eating habits. From a nation still dealing with rationing in 1954 and whose staple diet was plain home cooking, by 1975 not only were we eating out on a regular basis, we were becoming addicted to the new spicy foods available and the nation’s love affair with Chicken Tikka Masala had well and truly begun. Stay in Touch Peter gsseditor@gmail.com