This week and next is British Food Fortnight and we've been looking at the history of British cuisine and now those iconic dishes through the decades...prawn cocktail anyone?
Post-WWII British food has evolved to gain a strong reputation for high quality dishes. With British-sourced produce and traditional cuisine alongside foreign flavours and influences, the Great British menu is an amalgamation that reflects the diversity of 21st century Britain itself. Each decade has had its own culinary identity. In part, an excuse to indulge in amusing nostalgia for foods you would never choose to revisit, remembering the classics also provides a reminder of the progress made culturally and technologically in the food world.
1960s:
Following a long period of austerity in Britain, the 1960s had record consumption of food items like meat and sugar after the fifties saw the end of WWII rationing.
The late fifties and early sixties was also the period when Britain began importing more food, enabling the introduction of pasta, which according to a
2011 Oxfam survey, is the world’s most popular food. At the time, though, the only pasta available would have been tinned.
The food that the 1960s became known for were the cocktail sausages, cheese and pineapple hedgehogs and vol au vents - all staples of any classic cold buffet. When it came to more formal meals, the dishes of the day were British variations of French cuisine like duck a l’orange and coq au vin. Though enormously popular at the time, these did not give the UK a particularly strong culinary reputation at the time and have since dropped out of the food mainstream.
1970s:
When it comes to seventies food, the only way to start would be with the classic prawn cocktail. Ubiquitous in its heyday, the prawn cocktail took the nation by storm in the decade famed for disco and flares. The dish, prawns with a Marie Rose sauce on a bed of iceberg lettuce and served in a wine glass, was a fixture of seventies menus often followed by steak and chips, and then Black Forest gateaux.
The seventies also saw a further increase in imported flavours and techniques, continuing a trend from the sixties. Spaghetti Bolognese became
known in the UK, along with the Anglo-Indian dish Chicken Tikka Masala.
This was reflective of a more general increase of Indian and Chinese restaurants and takeaways around the UK, as interest in foreign foods became much greater.
For a seventies dessert, Angel Delight aptly delighted millions as it celebrated its peak. With flavours including butterscotch, strawberry and chocolate, the packet-mix mousse dessert was a household favourite, and the sales of instant desserts doubled in the 1970s.
1980s:
Fast food continued its reign of terror with the introduction of the Pot Noodle as the go-to quick meal of the 1980s. The salty snack food thrived alongside shoulder pads and George Michael, until eventually going out of
