Holiday Food/Drink and Teaching Secondary Education in England Circa 1970s

[nightrose83]

Hi guys,

I've recently been looking into the educational systems and holiday customs of different countries for something I've been working on for awhile. Background and setting under the cut:

Comments

[naath]

Food> Turkey (Goose only if rich, they are expensive; nut roast for the vegetarians) and "all the trimmings" for Christmas - the "trimmings" being a mix of roast and boiled vegetables (must include sprouts, even if you hate them), often bacon and small sausages or sausagemeat, and stuffing (not always actually stuffed into the bird). Also bread and cranberry sauce (I'm not sure when we started importing cranberry though). Followed with Christmas pudding (preferably on fire, yay for brandy).

Boiled ham is a family tradition for Boxing Day, I don't know how many other people do that. Served with much the same things, but Cumberland sauce.

Mince pies are nice (NB - no meat is present in the current recipe, although there originally was). Brandy butter is nice on mince pies or Christmas pudding. Oh, and there is also "Christmas cake" (TOO MUCH CAKE) which is a fruit cake (like wedding cake). We also tend to eat way too much chocolate and assorted other sweets, particularly marzipan for some reason. At Christmas it is usually possible to buy huge tins of individually wrapped sweets, which are quite popular.

By NYE we're breaking out the smoked salmon canapes and champagne, possibly a little tired of Huge Roast Dinner...

It is NOT USUAL in most of England for guests to a meal to "bring a side" with them unless than have been particularly told that that is what the host wants (I'd call it a "bring and share" meal if I did, and people do have that sort of meal, only not usually for family gatherings IME). It is usual to bring wine, which may or may not be drunk with the meal (people disagree on what is most polite); or a gift intended for the host (flowers, chocolates) (of course one would not bring wine to a tee-total household!).

Education> you don't go to university if you left school at 16; to go to university you must take A levels. (Or something usefully equivalent, but not something you take at 16 unless have skipped some years of school due to being very smart).

Currently to become a teacher in the UK one takes A levels, does a degree (taking 3 or 4 years) and then a one year PGCE (post-grade cert in education). AIUI this has been the case since the 70s, earlier teachers were not required to have a degree. PGCEs usually involve some study of education theory and some classroom practice, different balances in different courses. It was possible to be hired as an unqualified teacher, and qualify "on the job" (I don't think it is now, except in private schools; I don't know when that was last common). I would not expect a new teacher to be less than 22 years old.

[naath]

https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/about/timeline/

may be of use

[naath]

Thank you very much. As far as drinks are concerned (both alcoholic and non) is there anything in particular that tends/tended to be common in your experience?

[naath]

ummm, tee-totalers got the short end of the stick in "traditional holiday drinks", obviously a tee-total household would have found options, but mostly it was orange juice and lemonade (these days there are fancier things, but in the 80s I don't recall there being anything really nice).

Alcohol wise we had quite a bit of sherry (especially on return from midnight mass), and wine; and brandy to pour all over the Christmas pudding. My family weren't huge on booze though, I don't think EggNog is much drunk here. Champagne for NYE, or substitute fizzy-wine to budget/taste.

[naath]

Thank you again. I'd seen something that said wassail (sp?) could also be made by some, but I wasn't sure how common that would be or would just sound strange to say my MC's mother made?

[nineveh_uk]

No-one would serve wassail unless they were re-enacting a C18 Christmas or something, possibly Harry Potter characters. It's long been superseded by mulled wine.

[syntinen_laulu]

I second Nineveh. 'Wassail' as an English Christmas custom had died out by the mid-19th century (except as a quaint custom kept up among benighted peasants in a very few remote villages). Here's the 1923 Oxford English Dictionary's definition of this sense of the word: "A custom formerly observed on Twelfth-night and New-Year's eve of drinking healths from the wassail-bowl. Obsolete." Your MC's mother would only make it if she and her husband were the sort of sandal-wearing folklore enthusiasts who go around collecting folk songs and trying to promote maypole dancing in primary schools.

Be aware that wine-drinking was quite a sophisticated habit back then; to drink wine regularly at meals you had to be either quite posh, or young and would-be cosmopolitan. NB that as late as in 1988 Cliff Richard could make a hit with a Christmas single with the refrain 'Christmas time / Mistletoe and wine' - people who didn't normally drink it did put a (possibly dreadful) bottle of wine on the Christmas table, for 'special'. And hardly anybody thought of mulling it, or any other drink such as cider, unless they were either very old-fashioned country squires in 17th-century manor-houses, or had travelled abroad and encountered Glühwein or Glogg; it wasn't in any sense a custom.

Sherry was commonplace, in the form of a bottle of sweet dark brown liquid that your gran kept in her sideboard all year and brought out at Christmas and funerals, by which time it was of course completely stale. Even after half a century of cheap holidays in Spain, sherry has failed to shake off this grim and uncool image.

I second whoever said that eggnog wasn't usual in Britain, or associated with Christmas. Joanna Lumley, who had a small part in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, was given the line (by the American scriptwriter) 'Ooh, eggnog, just like we have at home' and recounts that she protested in vain that this was an utterly incongruous thing for an English girl to say. This line probably reinforced the notion over the pond that eggnog was an English Christmas thing.

[nightrose83]

I do recall from earlier research that eggnog seems to be either a strictly imported thing in other countries if it's there at all, or American. Thanks. :) So, if someone were to have alcohol during the holidays, it would most likely be sherry?

[thekumquat]

What year?
And what class and sex?

Sherry would be drunk, but nowadays has an old-lady association. In the 70s, men might have one but then move onto beer while the women might have more sherry and then wine (Babycham, Liebfraumilch, whaever there was in the off-licence) with a meal, then all the liqueurs that were hugely popular in the 70s and 80s.

Baileys was knocked back in large volumes by everyone (including kids who would have as much as they were allowed - children can still drink alcohol at home from the age of 5, and in the 70s and 80s no-one thought it was a problem for teenagers to drink including in pubs, and for adults to be a bit tipsy in charge of them. And it was also acceptable for parents to drive to a pub, leave the kids in the car with a packet of crisps each, have a drink or two, then drive home after a couple hours.)

[nightrose83]

It may have a differing context when/how I've seen it used. Mostly, it means someone who just wants people 'like them' (racially, culturally, etc) to be in a given country, with a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment.

[syntinen_laulu]

Turkey (Goose only if rich, they are expensive)
Yes. Also, there's a lot less meat on a goose, so relatively it is (and was then) even more expensive than it seems.

stuffing (not always actually stuffed into the bird)
But in the 1970s it still was. You might make balls of extra stuffing if you thought the bird wouldn't hold enough, but the notion of not stuffing the bird only took hold much later, after a long run of cases of food poisoning from inadequately-cooked battery-farmed poultry.

Boiled ham is a family tradition for Boxing Day, I don't know how many other people do that.
Yes, that was pretty normal, especially if you expected to have friends/family/neighbours dropping in then and through the holiday period: you kept the cold ham on the sideboard and cut some when people turned up.

(I'm not sure when we started importing cranberry though)
Not sure either, but def. later than the 1970s.

Mince pies are nice (NB - no meat is present in the current recipe, although there originally was).
These days pretty much all commercial mincemeat is made with 'vegetable suet' (which I believe is palm-oil and rice flour): makes it OK for veggies and Hindus. But in the 1970s mincemeat was still made with beef suet, the last vestige of the original meat component.

By NYE we're breaking out the smoked salmon canapes and champagne
But wouldn't have been in the 1970s unless you were seriously rich and lavish. The Scottish salmon-farming industry, which has now made salmon an everyday cheap food, was barely in its infancy then (total production of Scottish farmed salmon in 1971 was 14 tonnes, as compared to 163,000 tonnes in 2013). Back when all salmon was wild, smoked salmon was a luxury comparable to caviare (and I don't mean dyed lumpfish roe, either).

It is NOT USUAL in most of England for guests to a meal to "bring a side" with them
Agree. If you all go to Gran's or Auntie Mabel's for Christmas or Boxing Day dinner, it's understood that Gran or Auntie Mabel will be providing the entire meal. Though chocs or a bottle of something don't come amiss, and if any of the visiting family is famous for her super-duper Christmas cake or mince pies, they might make and bring them.

[nightrose83]

By NYE we're breaking out the smoked salmon canapes and champagne
But wouldn't have been in the 1970s unless you were seriously rich and lavish.

Thank you for all the information. What would have been common at a NY's table for people who weren't rich?

[reapermum]

This is one of those things that differ between England and Scotland. New Year's Day was not a holiday in England until 1974, so ordinary people didn't celebrate it as they had to go to work. In Scotland New Year can be bigger than Christmas.

[nightrose83]

Thank you. That's interesting. After it did become a holiday, what did/do people usually do, if anything?

[reapermum]

We don't do much specifically for new year. Most people finish at work on Christmas Eve and don't go back until after New Year, so it tends to be an end of the holiday celebration.

[alextiefling]

As we'd usually have Christmas pudding for dessert on Christmas Day, and leftovers on Boxing Day, the main feature of New Year's Day would be the Christmas cake - a huge heavy fruit cake made weeks or months in advance and kept moist by 'feeding' it with brandy. Lunch beforehand would be a cold buffet with salad and cold cuts, and salmon once that became available. There would probably be at least one blockbuster film on the TV, too. (Only 2 or 3 TV channels back then, btw.)

There might also be staying up the previous night to see in the new year, with toasts drunk in cheap white wine.