Bird's instant trifle, Angel Delight, Smash potatoes: 1970s culinary favourites are making a comeback – Aidan Smith

‘Noshtalgia’ has soared during lockdown as people snub the food snobs and return to their youth for some comfort food, writes Aidan Smith

A famous advert for Smash instant potatoes

Bicycling, board games and boxsets. DIY, gardening and petty arguments turning nuclear. All of them have experienced an upsurge during lockdown, but when all the calculations are complete, will anything be able to beat the 738 percent spike in demand of instant trifle?

Think about that for a moment. It’s as if no one was buying Bird’s dessert-in-a-box and then everyone was. As if supermarkets run by managers who were kids in the 1970s kept ordering the trifle kits for nostalgic reasons, or for the social service of supplying a few lonely old bachelors with their weekend treat reminding them of the noisy, happy family mealtimes of childhood, but the deliveries were just about to be stopped, probably for good, when …. schlurph!

I’m trying to think of the right word, the correct onomatopoeia, for an entire nation willingly drowning itself in the gloopy custard of a pudding which has never gone away, which has occasionally been referenced in kitschy terms inviting laughter at how basic and processed our eating habits used to be, and which is now flying off the shelves, completely unironically. It is difficult and I don’t think I’ve quite captured what this would sound like. If you’re unfamiliar with the taste sensation you’re just going to have to try it.

Other brands of instant trifle are available. I do not mention Bird’s in the hope a crateful will be delivered to my front door, even though we four Smith kids were always complaining that food in the 1970s tasted “funny” and our mother would post the empty container - nothing was ever so funny that we didn’t finish it - to the manufacturers and was invariably sent a small larder of their products by way of apology. No, I cannot be bought, not even with a year’s supply of Dream Topping. In any case, figures like 738 percent suggest that extra publicity is not required.

Other 1970s favourites have enjoyed a big revival including packet potatoes, canned fish and tinned tangerines. The latter makes me think of Kingsley Amis. According to his son Martin, it was one of the old devil’s many irritations - and there were many - that these were often called “timmed tangerines”. Whatever the pronunciation, they’ve been a lockdown hit and the same with timmed pineapple slices.

Limitations of sourdough and kale

We’re in an era of noshtalgia, although writers like Anna Pallai will claim this yearning isn’t new. In her book 70s Dinner Party, published in 2016, she wrote: “In the current climate of clean-eating, the 70s seem to signify a happier, more honest time. We want something that has the balls to be shameless, completely and proudly crap.” The party of the book’s title, no less.

Now, food fascists, food trendies and food snobs will sneer. Boris Johnson, getting on his bike to mow down fatties as part of a major anti-obesity initiative, will be dismayed. But the Prime Minister cannot have it both ways. He cannot expect the populace, once barricaded indoors, to have remained entirely pure in thought and deed and consumption. As April turned grindingly slowly into May and began the interminable slog towards June, comfort meals were urgently required.

Here, the limitations of sourdough and kale have been glaringly exposed. Avocados may have taken over the world but they have their limitations, too. Parents old enough to remember the 1970s and who have survived all that emulsifier and colouring, might have tried to teach their children how to bake and that banana bread may have been tasty indeed. But sometimes a kid just wants Angel Delight, butterscotch flavour please.

Smash robots laughing at Earthlings

Who would have thought that, to combat a global pandemic, the Arctic Roll would prove to be a highly effective secret weapon? In the context of actual weaponry, the sponge-covered ice cream sweet probably appeared as ancient as a medieval trebuchet. It seemed unsophisticated and unloved as it languished in the bottom of supermarkets’ frozen-food bins. But the soft-cold combo which proved thrilling half a century ago has clearly lost none of its weird power.

Who would have thought this? Well, me actually. If you were a child of the Space Race who became a 1970s teenager you craved quick, boil-in-the-bag, ready-in-minutes, high-voltage food. You’d watched the Moon missions of the 1960s and knew that if you were going to be on a rocket to Mars one day then you had to get used to processed meals. Instant trifle was the future as was instant mash - hence the commercials featuring Smash robots guffawing at Earthlings still bothering to peel potatoes. Okay, so our rocket never blasted off and the promised jetpacks didn’t materialise either but we can’t really get the taste of 1970s food out of our mouths - and I say that despite the fact it wasn’t all packeted and powdered. Mum was a fine cook who whipped up many meals using actual vegetables. She and my dad hosted three-course extravaganzas and we kids would sit on the stairs listening to their friends’ laughter amid the sizzling of the fondue pot and hope there would be leftovers of lemon meringue tart for us. We also had au pairs introducing us to the exotic flavours of their homelands, though steak and kidney pie in a tin had been invented just for us and we thought we should stay loyal to it.

There’s another reason for all this noshtalgia. For lockdown read the three-day week. For teenagers in the 1970s the power cuts were hellish. The enforced blackouts were rotated and dark was the day - in every sense - if it was our postcode’s turn to be denied Top of the Pops. It is surely little wonder that our favourite pudding - created with the aid of a gas camping stove - was no mere trifle back then, and nor is it now.

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