Breakfast in the 1970s

So far on this blog I've looked at cookbooks from the 1930s that emphasised the value of thrift, seasonal shopping and reducing waste for the 'squeezed middle' between the Wars. However, by the 1970s food had started to look more like the stuff we eat today, albeit a bit more orange in many cases. Moreover, the idea of eating and food as an aspirational activity rather than a re-fuelling exercise seems to have returned in earnest.

This book, published by Hamlyn in 1976 and sponsored by Brooke Bond/Oxo, shows how eating was reflecting a wealthier and more leisured ideal of family life.
 

Gone are the sections on feeding invalids who presumably with the success of the NHS were a rarity in the spare bedroom by 1976, and in come sections on entertaining at home. Dishes and cutlery are from brands, largely associated with 'groovy' new design, and name checked at the beginning of the book so you can replicate the tables you see photographed: Heal's, Habitat, Casa Pupo, Elizabeth David, John Barker, Selfridges, Conran, Josiah Wedgewood and Sons Ltd. Food is photographed as a package along with the accessories, with backdrops that include salmon mousse placed artfully on a jetty at Nauticalia, Shepperton that are meant to suggest aspirational middle-class lifestyles.

It's a far cry from meat paste sandwiches at a drop leaf table in the living room.

Let's start with our weekend 70s breakfast or brunch, which the book explains to an audience almost certainly unfamiliar with such a concept (actually late rising is also probably a fairly alien idea too) as a "combined breakfast and lunch which saves cooking two meals",  in which muesli makes a star appearance as well as the classic kedgeree.

Muesli would have been a hard sell to the men in my family, who in the 1970s still expected cooked breakfasts, and I'm pretty sure that coffee served instead of tea would have raised a few eyebrows.

However, cheap foreign travel and money to spare for the older members of the family meant that even families like mine became aware of the 'continental breakfast' as a roll, some butter and jam and a weak coffee was dubbed.

The blurb that goes with this also reminds us that by now the figure of the  'slimmer' had appeared at the table - a concept hardly necessary in the cash-strapped or rationed years of previous cookbooks in the collection.

I recall the women in my family going through all the faddy diets of the 70s and 80s to little effect (remember the F-Plan - obviously the family joke was what the F stood for). So while "hungry men and children" were still getting bacon and eggs at the breakfast table (in nicer dishes now - I rather like all the crockery in these pictures, I have to say) with fried bread, the ladies of the house were nibbling oats and apples and having tea with lemon.

The recipes for breakfast actually look quite nice despite the shoe-horning of Stork margarine and/or Oxo cubes into many of them - not thankfully the muesli- although kidney omelettes would be an unlikely breakfast find these days.

Time to don the kaftan perhaps and whip up some kipper toasts...