Have you been watching Supersizers Go...?
I always thought Giles Coren was a knob and Sue Perkins tried too hard before watching this, but they really do make a most entertaining team.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about it, it's a BBC2 series in which two foodies live on the cuisine of a particular era for one week, and see if diets then were any better or worse than they are today. Last week was Victorian, but last night was the Seventies.
I found this utterly fascinating, not really realising what crap we actually did eat back then. I remember the Seventies like they were last week, however I had put to the back of my mind some of the ghastly foodstuffs. Luckily, my mum was (is) a great cook, so we ate well, with lots of fresh veg - well, as much as you could get back then. There were no fresh herbs or much garlic to be found, and parmesan only came in a tub smelling of coach sick. But there was much experimentation. Think Butterflies with good food.
The basket-load of typical shopping they showed on the programme contained things like Crispy Pancakes (which Mrs F-C and I had only recently and declared them to be like cheesy cardboard), fish fingers, Angel Delight, frozen everything and lots of sugar and fat. They tried school dinners (who remembers the playground spotted with pink custard sick?), plane meals, restaurant lunches, Fanny Cradock recipes and tried them out on the likes of Sailor's Henry Marsh, Pan's People's Dee Dee Wilde and a chef I'd completely forgotten about Glyn Christian. It was great. It was like my mum and dad's dinner parties. I could almost hear strains of the Carpenters and sense the swinging from my sofa.
Some of the food actually looked really good - I could go a plate of crinkle-cut chips right now, and as for that baked alaska, I'm right there. And the amount of booze quaffed made our house look like the Temperance Society. But was it really bad for you?
At the end of the week, Giles was told the food had actually done him some good. I think we moved about a bit more back then.
And I'm still here, so it can't have been all bad. I'm off to find me some boil-in-the-bag fish. Care to join?
