Without doubt, growing up in the 70's and early 80's in Britain wasn't the culinary odyssey that it is today. On my semi-provincial Essex housing estate, we were blissfully unaware of the existence of anything more exotic than a beetroot, and most people still thought a butternut squash was something you got from sitting on cold surfaces.
Complex techniques for chilling, freeze-drying, genetically-modifying, and transporting fresh fruit and vegetables thousands of miles from Bangladesh to Basildon and from Israel to Grays in a matter of seconds were a decade away. So, if a product needed anymore than three consecutive days of lukewarm British sunshine to ripen, we just didn't have it. It was as simple as that. In the summer, you found 'summer things', and in the winter....................well, in the winter you found a selection of wizened root vegetables and tired-looking apples. Exotic fruit like papaya and mango could only occasionally be found in larger supermarkets (larger by the standard of the day) in tins, and even then were met with curious stares and comments like "Oooh, I wonder what you do with it?". Or that other 1970's classic "My friend Jean had that at a ruby-wedding and they were all on the toilet for days!" The few encounters we had with unusual 'foreign' foods were met with suspicion rather than curiosity or excitement. Without the gastronomic wisdom of today's 'celebrity chefs', people just didn't know what to do with a shallot, a butternut squash, or an aubergine.
Variety in our diets was provided by a huge range of processed and chemically-enhanced foods, which were pretty cheap, and most importantly, freezable. Bearing in mind that these were the days when we still considered defrosting to be a 'cooking technique' and deep-frying in animal fat to be excellent at 'sealing in the flavour', we had no real need of additional 'fresh' ingredients. The foods that we packed our cupboards and chest-freezers with probably did have some exotic ingredients like bell peppers or garlic, but they'd been processed and dehydrated beyond recognition. Small flecks of red pepper or coriander could be found hiding in packet soup mixes and pot noodles like the desiccated human fragments which littered the sands of plundered burial sites in the Egyptian desert, but we had absolutely no idea what they looked like in their original form. It was like looking at Cher, and trying to imagine what she looked like before she'd been preserved and medically-enhanced.
People weren't 'hungry for adventure', and foreign travel was still relatively rare (and normally limited to locations which were close, cheap, and not too different). People had heard of Spain, or maybe even knew someone who had been there, so 'Spanish-style' rice made some sense to them. It was yellow, it was savoury, and you just had to add water. Nobody had actually been to Provence, Mexico, or Thailand, and hence hadn't a clue what 'Mexican-style' or 'Oriental' was supposed to include. The taste was described using a range of simple terms like spicy, creamy, sweet, and savoury (or my sister's favourite term 'funny'), and anything unfamiliar was grouped together under equally simple headings. If you liked it, it was 'International Cuisine', and if you didn't like it, it was 'Foreign Muck'. It either tasted nice or it didn't, and when talking about food, the words familiar and edible meant more or less the same thing. Char-grilled chicken would have been described in horror as burnt, and al dente vegetables would have been considered raw. In my house, in order to constitute a successful meal, it needed to be hot, well-cooked, capable of being cut with a blunt table-knife, and above all, plentiful.
When it came to food, life in the 70's may not have been as delicious or varied as it is today, and describing our eating habits as sophisticated would be like describing China as the 'home of democracy'. But, like everything else in life, it was relatively simple. We were happy with what we had and didn't waste time worrying about what we didn't have. Life followed a few very simple rules; if you didn't like someone, you didn't talk to them, if it smelt 'funny' you didn't eat it, and if you couldn't afford something, you didn't buy it. Credit cards were for millionaires, queues were to make sure the person who'd waited the longest got on the bus first, and knives were for cutting food (or lino tiles!).
................and then along came the aubergine and everything in life changed.
