Tastes of Childhood | Nostalgic Food Memories 

I want my 70s childhood back😇😥

Decent clean living people back then, a much better time to grow up in.

Findus Crispy Pancakes was my true favourite and I use to buy 5 packs of them and I use to hide from my mum because she took one out of my plate and I knew that my mum loves it ever since. Rest In Peace Mum xxxx

Vesta Curries! My God.....a time where food actually had FLAVOUR!

Cooking instructions for crispy pancakes were....Cook at least 5 days before trying to eat, contents may be warmer than the earths core

Well. I'm 55yrs old and in my kitchen cupboard I have a packet butterscotch Angel Delight and a packet of Smash... Some things never leave us. Chocolate cake and pink custard was my forever favourite lol. ❤

Now craving fishfingers and chips, washed down with an artic roll. Oh, and bring back Tizwas 👊🏻💥

When my mum used to make yeoman mash, I remember sometimes she never mixed it properly and I’d get a mouth full of powder! Usually served with crispy pancakes and cheap beans! I genuinely still eat most of these foods 😂

I loved the 70s, it felt more secure and homely...to add, at the ripe age of 63, I brought some Cadbury Smash the other month, I still have a crisp sandwich...delightful 😊

56 and still, love a crisp sandwich and butterscotch angel delight thanks

I'd like to see back Heinz Potato Salad, Heinz Curried Beans (with the sultanas), Vesta Beef Risotto and Pot Rice.

At Primary school the lunches were always superb, I really enjoyed them. For 45p/week, we got meat & 2 veg with gravy & dessert was mainly some kind of sponge & custard. My favourite was green (mint flavoured) custard with their chocolate sponge. I could never get enough of it & always got more until they ran out. It was popular. Their "Spotted Dick" was always really good too with loads of Raisins, this always came with a delicious vanilla custard. Tragedy struck when lunches went up to a whopping 50p/week.

The much missed Toast Toppers. Somebody (Heinz) is surely missing a trick there!

Does anyone else remember Kellogg's 'Rise and Shine' powdered orange juice? We always took some with us on camping holidays. There was also Cadburys tinned sponge puddings that you were supposed to boil in tbe tin to heat up but as a kid i was impatient and ate cold out of the tin with some custard.

Nostalgia is wonderful,I remember all you mentioned,I still get a Rupert Annual at Christmas and I’m 53,I love plasticine,crayola wax crayons etc,I just collect nostalgic favourites.

Vesta chow mein and crispy noodles . Still get one wrapped up for christmas every year.

Anyone remember Cornflake Tart at school. Pastry with a layer of golden syrup with cornflakes sprinkled on top, lightly baked and eaten with custard

Ahh... toast toppers. Remember it well. You made the toast first then put the topper on and stuck the toast back under the grill hoping it hadn't charred the bread! Good 'ol 1970s. We'll never see the like again...

So many items on here I tucked into in the 70s. I particularly loved the minced beef crispy pancakes, fish finger butties, crisp sarnies (salt and vinegar or roast chicken usually) sausage, chips and beans, angel delight, trifle, Arctic roll, Findus chicken pies, tins of Tyne brand stewing steak and minced beef and onions, jam sarnies were good, but jam on hot buttered toast was king. Cheddars are a huge let down these days, they used to be a rich golden colour and be cheesy and savoury. These days they're an anaemic light yellow and tast of bugger all!!!

Brilliant video, I loved having crisp sandwiches for Saturday dinner and Raspberry angel delight, one school puddings I hated was Tapioca as we called it Frog spawn, it was disgusting. Pink custard was my favourite.

Great video, born in '71 I still remember all these as a kid, strawberry Jan sandwiches always and never anything but cheese and onion crisp sandwiches. You're obviously the same as me with angel delight, butterscotch definitely my favourite. I ever had Smash, mother wouldn't allow it in the house(chemical puddings were fine she said) too old fashioned🤣 loved green mint custard and chocolate cake at school. Thank you for your video, great memories 👍🍻

Corned beef, chips and beans! 😋😋

whoever came up with "never full of grey bits!" deserves a medal...second only to "it's the taste"!

Loved this video. So many memories. An item I used to like which you don't see anymore was Tip Top. Single cream in a can. Yum. One of my favourite desserts at home was slices of bananas in custard. Simple but so delicious.

Some amazing memories! I loved Findus Crispy Pancakes! Definitely the beef ones 😂 I loved school dinners and puddings!

Love your nostalgic vids Stu. Can i share some school dinner hall thoughts of my own with you from my experience in the 1970s. No 1 - always wanting the dinner lady to give me the corner slice in the tray of the lemon curd as that piece was always bigger. No 2 - Dreading the thought of arriving for dinner late and finding out the only dessert left was Prunes, lots of prunes. No 3 - Making sure you was near the start of the dinner queue on a Friday as you would be assured of getting fish and chips, they never did enough and soon ran out about 10 minutes into lunch. No 4 - Thinking that midweek they had chips on only to find out they were chip shaped Parsnips ! No 5- The water jug on the table would invariably contain more than water, lots of food bits too. Quite disgusting, but did we moan, no, we just got on with it.

Oh, I remember Angel Delight from a school camping trip to the Loire Valley. One night when we had howling gales and an electrical storm, we had to jump out of our sleeping bags to each hold down a corner of the tent. In bare feet, I stood in a dish of Angel Delight with peach slices. I can still feel the squelch between my toes.

Over here in Northern Ireland, I had 'school dinners' for a year in 1979. My favourite dessert was pink custard, with a disc of really buttery shortbread, that I'd smash up and let the custard soak into the shortbread, making it soft and gloopie! I can remember our Late Dining Hall supervisor, called Mary George....She was a born leader, banging the table with a big metal spoon to bring the childish rabble to order, before saying 'Grace!' 😊...'Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat. Thank you for the birds that sing, thank you God for everything...EAT!!!' 😂😂😂

When I was a very small child, back in the mid to late 1950s, my mum used to buy this stuff called Cremona Pudding and it was similar to semolina, but had a very distinctive, almost caramel type flavour. She'd make it with milk, just like rice pudding. Also I remember (again back to very early childhood) a drink called Cremola which were fruity flavoured crystals in a little tin and you added a spoonful of these crystals to a glass of cold water. Delicious! Moving forward in time to when I was in my early to mid teens in the 1960s, I absolutely loved Vesta Chow Mein which was re-launched maybe about five or so years ago, but tastes nothing at all like the original.

OMG, I’d forgotten all about Findus Crispy Pancakes! I used to have them with mushy peas, lots of tomato sauce, and bread and butter.

Loved semolina and tapioca

Fantastic! Captain Birds Eye with colour in his beard in black and white. I remember the white beard even in colour 😮

I still love that Central TV ident jingle

I'll never forget the warm tomato sauce we had at infant school around '76/'77. It was fantastic! You would make a hole in your ice cream scooped mash and fill them up. I assumed they made it as was served in metal jugs. Still eat Spam. Sliced, lightly fry it and have it with chips and a runny fried egg 😋

The 70's were the best for everything, including music and of course, the food. I miss toast toppers! Great vid, thankyou!.

Cheese & Onion Walkers crisp sandwich was and still is the best!

So many memories! Semolina at my school had rose hip syrup to go on it.. did anyone else have white ice cream wrapped in paper as part of the dessert? We also had corn flake tart too!

I PROPER enjoy your vids Stu. Always put a smile on my face and a laugh in my heart to know that others remember exactly the same things as I do. With the 70s ads, groovy music and your ownperfect warm delivery. My own observations.... somethings are best left as a happy memory... I bought a packet of Findus crispy pancakes a couple of years back and they were AWFUL. I've tried to expunge that experience from my mind and just remember the childhood version. For me its not the variety of crisp, but my discovery a couple of years back that "Golden Wonder" crisps still taste EXACTLY the way I rememeber them from childhood, and for me they beat the awful "walkers" into a cocked hat. While "Toast toppers" are a long gone memory, a VERY strange thing that both my wife and I agree strongly reminds us BOTH of toast toppers is.... wait for it.... ASDA's tinned barbecue mackerel, mashed up on toast and under the grill (we know how to live and NO mistake!!!). That's not a wind up but it is something about it brings the magic of toast topper right back to mind. I still eat Strawberry jam butties (no "lumps" please) and crisp butties (the aforementioned Golden wonders of course). Vestas... a guilty council estate pleasure (I was born and lived for 30 years on a council estate so I can say that). Please keep up the great work... always appreciated.

Butterscotch Angel Delight was obviously the best 😊

I loved Findus crispy pancakes. My Friday night tea treat chips and crispy pancakes. Mmm! And a bag of pick n’ mix and a comic , either the Dandy or Beano and I was happy.

Thank you so much for the memories of fish fingers,captain birdseye,and school dinners with pink custard and as we called them chocolate bricks but all joking apart they werent that difficult to eat and like yourself i enjoyed primary school dinners

Have recently bought Dandy, Beezer and Topper Annuals from 1968-1973 from charity shops. Keep looking because they are out there friends!

The skin on rice pudding was the best part. My fave was mint custard and chocky sponge.😊

I forgot all about mint and strawberry custard. Loved them. Everything got used then. Sponge and custard for cakes going stale. Angel Delight, big childhood dessert at the table. I used to love making jelly (whilst eating the centre joining segments). Trifle popular also, Sherry the best!

I do love "new ideas from the past" which were superseded by newer ideas from the future and therefore became outmoded before they'd really had their time! "Boil In The Bag meals" - like the Vesta range were such a revolutionary idea - and then someone invented the microwave! (...a bit like faxes and the internet!)

Cod Fish fingers are like 28p each now.....I still love em.

Loved crispy pancakes, angel delight and Arctic roll, so many memories wish I could go back to then. While my parents and family were still around. Remember dad doing Vesta meal for supper for me and him while we sat down to watch pot black. Still have jam and cheddar cheese sandwiches even now.

You've nailed it because I suspect you lived in an average (poor-middle class) 70/80s family like me. It was the crisp sandwich, toast-toppers and Jam sandwich that confirmed real life back then. Another one I remember was digestive biscuits, buttered, and sprinkled with sugar. We were so poor it was margarine (stork probably) from a huge tub (so a bit evil in retrospect). Great channel, and keep, keeping it real.

Born in 63 when i was 3 my dad was a delivery driver for SPD in Liverpool , for Unilever, i used to go with him on delivery day friday, we delivered Stork, blueband, summer county, or if on frozen truck , fisf fingers, crispy cod balls , Birdseye mousse, strawberry, ornangeand lemon , choc, arctic roll , and yes Birdseye peas were picked and frozen very quickly , my dad sometimes worke nights on the #PEA RUN to be honest we had mainly home cooked food hot pot, roast dinner , liver, steak, mince, moussaka, mum used to do curried kidneys with lemon , cheese and coriander dumplings , i liked instant whip, remember i could not eat it when i had measles in 1970, happy days and no obese kids😢😢😢

I used to go home for lunch in primary school with it being only one street away from where I live. There was a few, very rare occasions when I did stay school dinners and I wasn't really impressed at all. The worst offenders were the watery boiled cabbage and mashed potatoes in an ice cream scoop. I got my first proper taste, (pun intended), when going to secondary school, though. Luckily, they'd just introduced a new cafeteria system and the food wasn't that bad. Very samey, of course, as I recalled practically having chips and baked beans with every meal, and the puddings were general a slab of whatever flavoured sponge with custard. The drinks were pyramid shaped flavoured drinks. Smash was alright as long as enough water was added to it. Too much and it was like thick soup, too little and it was like eating putty. Ready Brek was a treat in our house. The fact that you had to heat the milk to put into it was considered labour-intensive, so it was relatively rare for a breakfast meal. I loved the butterscotch variety of it, with chocolate being a close second. Usually, it was either corn flakes or weetabix, with the occasional shredded wheat for breakfast. Cold meat sandwiches and salad were the standard Sunday tea-time meal for me. Either luncheon meat or chopped ham and pork out of a tin you opened with a key. Afters was usually tinned fruit and evaporated milk. Angel delight was another rare treat. Swiss rolls or a homemade Victoria sandwich cake make with margarine and sugar filling and jam were the cake component.

I’m 76 and I still love Ready Brek 😃

I remember the green mint custard and chocolate pudding... wow... I have never seen or heard of it since so thought I had dreamt it, glad to have it confirmed! :)

Wagon wheels, sherbet dabs, liquorice all sorts. Jelly babies. Tizer.

You've sent me back to the 70s, more specifically a particular lunchtime in the late 70s. As was the custom at our primary school, the older kids (of which I was one at that time) served dinner to the younger kids. On this particular day, me and my mate Steve found ourselves as the last in queue to be servers, with the rare consequence of having no more younger kids to serve. Not only that but it was a gypsy tart (probably not called that anymore but it was the perfect combination of sugar and fat) for afters day which was universally recognised as the king of desserts. The joy we felt whilst stuffing ourselves with an unnatural amount of the greatest last course known to humankind still comes back to me every now and then. I'd pay a lot to get that sense of wonder and joy back!

Why was I devastated when I learned that fish didn't have fingers?

I was born in 68 and remember the omelettes in a tin, was wondering if anyone else remembered them from the 70s.. you just opened the tin and cooked them, they had all the ingredients in them. The ham one had ham cubes in it, the mushroom one mushrooms and of course there was also the plain cheese one. 🤣

The original Captain Birdseye, John Hewer, was always the best captain. He was actually in the Fleet Air Arm.

I would give anythin😂g to go back to the 70's. A time of pure imagination, and I find myself googling 70's interior design. Please do one of these videos. I love the vibrant orange and futuristic 70 s design. We had a sunken living room with white sofas , an avocado bathroom and brown guest toilet. I have never seen brown toilets and sinks since! Bring it on!

greatstuff , thanks mate , from wigan lancashire

School dinners were the only time I had salad with big rubber cubes that were supposed to be beetroot, foot long "sardines" in tomato sauce and grated raw carrots. Their "instant" mashed potato made in huge pots, had a unique taste all of it's own. I did love the treacle tart, or Golden Syrup sponge and custard. When I was a student I often had a pork pie and a Individual Fruit Pie for lunch. The fruit pies are long gone.

I remember the thick skin on top of the custard at school dinners 😂

I remember the very first time a had a school dinner at my Lower school in the 70s, it was a white fish slice with a white parsley sauce (With lumps in) served with lumpy mash & horrible mushy pea's. It was one of the most disgusting dinners i had ever had in my young life, no flavour at all in the parsley sauce, or the fish (But it stunk) I had to wait behind and the headmistress forced me to eat half of it before i could be excused and constantly telling me off for holding my knife & fork in the wrong hands, i felt sick for about 4 hours after eating it 🤣🤣 i still hate mushy pea's & white fish slice to this day, i am 50 years old now and not eaten it since. lol

I don’t and never liked jam.But I do like salad cream and use to have that in white bread instead of jam.I’m still partial to a salad cream sandwich now.🤗😋. I bought some Angel delight a few weeks ago and I went back to a Sunday afternoon when I was eight waiting to lick the whisk and bowl 🥹 .😋I had forgotten about the Toast toppers.The tins where tiny.Loved this videos it brought back so many nice memories.

Loving it Stu ! Some nice school dinners I had from 1976 at junior school in Derbyshire. After a year we got to be servers for the whole table so they got crap like veg and gravy and we got extra pie and ravioli and nice stuff. If you were avoiding headmasters table inspection we'd ladel any leftovers into any kids coats pockets or pump bags that were hanging up near our table. Creeping round dinnerladies and doing jobs like stacking tables got you extra pudding. Suppose it was a bit like being a prisoner of war. Then Friday night at nine the Professionals were on telly.

The smash aliens ad was a touch of genius

Sometimes when my mum made angel delight, she would put it in the freezer to make different flavours of ice-cream.

Still eat most of these now! I dont think fish fingers taste the same as they used to do, unless my tastebuds have changed! Love Semolina, Tapioca and Sago.

during dinners in the 90s, i always remember the smell of chips through the whole school at dinner time, and large baked biscuits, exactly half of which was coated in Chocolate (like it was dunked on its side halfway in the chocolate)

I loved my School dinners in senior school 81/82. In fact it is when I first tasted curry and pizza which weren't readily available back then. Loved the desserts, but we only ever had yellow custard, usually with pineapple upside down cake or syrup sponge. Also remember them tin jugs the water used to be in which were all different colours, along with the thickest, heaviest glasses known to man! I remember our dinners were 11p which was brilliant for such a good meal. Always felt sorry for kids on benefits though, as they would have to give a number to the dinner lady for a free meal.😔 I just don't think the food we had back then tastes the same? maybe we should bring back artificial flavours and preservatives? 🤣 Thanks for another great, retro video Stu 😀

Treacle sponge with custard... Yuummmm 😋

Brennan's batch loaf, ice cold butter, and a bag of either Skips or Rancheros jammed in and a pot of tea. I'm off to the shops...

We always had Birds Eye fish fingers at school,we used to see them delivered in a truck,with chips n peas on a Friday,we loved it,there not the same now 😢

Pink custard was my favourite, we never had green.

Toast Toppers!!! I'd forgotten about those. Mmmmmmm.

Pink custard on cornflake cake as a kid in the 90's haha

I still love a crisp sarnie! It’s the simple pleasures. 😊. My favourite school pudding was white vanilla ice cream and hot chocolate sauce/custard. My friends and I used to wonder where the white ice cream came from - we only knew the yellow variety outside of school.

Very surprised Cadbury's made Smash. The Captain Birds Eye theme sent goose bumps down the spine.. I thought the food in the 70s was overrated except for the sweets and lollies

If I remember correctly schools cooked on site. It was all healthy meals. Cottage pie/Shepherds pie But most of all the puddings were what you waited for My favourite was Chocolate Concrete and Custard and if you had time you mixed it together and it looked like sick Or pink Blancmange and chocolate sauce And Arctic Roll That was always in my parents shopping trolley Made sure we had one inte freezer in case of visitors

I know people complain about how expensive the Heinz Curry and Barbecue Beanz range is, but I really like them, I have toast on a plate, with a bowl of the curry flavour with mango chutney, or barbecue sauce with the barbecue flavoured beans. They are really good for a quick snack, or tea if you can’t be bothered. I also like the cans of short-cut spaghetti or hoops, which are much cheaper, but also good for a quick meal, with ketchup, or anything else you feel like. Nowadays you can get curry or chilli in a can, or macaroni cheese, although obviously it never compares to cooking from scratch.

As an American who has become a confirmed Anglophile over the years, I love seeing the differences (and some similarities), between British and American foods from my childhood years.

To this day, even the sight of rice pudding makes me want to vom. The primary school I went to didn't have a kitchen, so the dinners came by the meals-on-wheels kitchen 25 miles away and most likely were prepared around 9 to 10am. By the time it was served, between 12 and 1pm, the rice pud had turned into yellow mush and had started to spilt. No amount of jam could rescue the vileness.

I loved the taste of school mash back in junior school, if there was a choice of chips or mash I would pick the mash. Still no idea why but it tasted way different to homemade mash. I still buy a sliced white loaf and a box of fish fingers quite regularly just to make fish finger and chip butties. Has to be sliced white bread with a good amount of Lurpak spread on it, put the fish fingers and chips in, good dash of malt vinegar on top with plenty of ketchup, magic stuff.

I once ate over 20 spam fritters at school as a dare. Our comprehensive school often had left over food, during one year, so we had food competitions with it..... someone else won the sausage one. 😋

Del Monte Pear Halves with Carnation Milk (probably from Kwik Save) after my Grans Bully Beef Hash - Sweet memories.

Now I want an apricot jam sandwich and butterscotch angel delight 😂😂

I had this food as a kid, and the only way I can describe it was it was small flakes that tasted like banana. I would say the flakes were a little bigger than powdered potato flakes, as the texture was similar to those tiny pasta shapes you can get. I had this food in the late 80 early 90s

cremola milk pudding was my favourite. i cried when they discontinued it.

I have pretty good memories of school dinners, particularly at junior school. My favourite was fish fingers and chips with beans, followed by chocolate shortbread and green mint custard. I was a dinner monitor at junior school. We had a table of 8, and I and another monitor had to collect plates, cutlery and food, and dish it out to those at our table--the same 8 sat at the table every day. Then we had to take the plates, cutlery etc back. When I started secondary school in September '73 school dinner was 12p per day. Yep, I still make crisp sandwiches, but usually mix in some grated cheese. I remember my mum making syllabub quite a lot in the 70s. Don't think I have had it for at least 30 years now. I loved Vesta's Chopsuey and Chow mein. One came with crispy noodles that you had to put in a chip pan.

Dog poo in the street, smoking on the bus, teachers smacking the kids, being sent to the shop to buy mum cigarettes aged six, I miss the 1970’s.

Artic roll one of my favourites when I was younger

I remember my school dinners. Some of our meals word disgusting. I'll never forget cold mince meat with a concrete cobbler. I remember blunting my knife on it.

Wish I could still get hold of some Heinz sandwich spread!

Red Mountain coffee.......we wer talking about this the other day ........don,t see that anymore .😄😄😄

I overdid it with a birds trifle so much so I could not touch another ever, even now at 65

Butterscotch angel delight for the win 🏆🙆🏻‍♂️❤

I still buy an Arctic roll occasionally just for nostalgia sake

We had blancmange (family favourite was mocha) growing up in NZ and I remember fish fingers but that's about all. We didn't have school meals but semolina, tapioca/sago and ground rice regularly featured on menus at home - and mum loved ''blood in the snow'' aka rice pudding with jam from her childhood in England. I found arctic roll when I spent xmas 1983/4 with my grandparents in Suffolk, the local co-op always had it in and it truly was love at first taste, would still be my preferred choice now but I don't often see it here in Ireland unfortunately. As for jam sandwiches, my school/work lunches alternated between jam, cheese or sardine sandwiches for around 20 years, plum, blackcurrant and raspberry being my favourites.

My primary school lunches were terrible except the soup which you only got in winter which was followed by mains and a biscuit. You only got a pudding if you didn't get soup, and no biscuit. The potatoes which I didn't eat after my first taste when I was 4, was smash mash. Yuk. The stew you could eat all day, cos it waa mainly gristle. If you got more than 20 peas, you were lucky. Semolina and Tapioca were horrible. I can't remember what one we called frogs eggs. Usually complete with stewed prunes. Which we ate and brought the stones out and put on the side lip. We always counted them like this. " Tinker, tailor, soldier sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, and the Indian chief. Nobody git beyond sailor, ie. 4 prunes. The custard was made with powder, oh and the primary school bog paper was izal, waxed paper that didn't work. Most folk only did a pee unless they couldn't hold a crap until home time. Ah, memories.

Vesta!! We thought it SO exotic - nutritional value, probably 0!! but we loved them🤭😂

Let's go back to the 50s. School dinners were all fresh meats and vegs. Puddings were all made "on site". My favourite pudding was junket, pink with coconut on top. Nothing was in packets or tubs, nothing artificial in those days. I used to get "Potato Puffs" from the tuck shop at 3d per bag. (1.5p today) Also school dinners were one shilling and three pence per week but later went up to one shilling and six pence. That's about 7.5p today.