30 Easy Homemade Snacks From 1970s Britain No One Makes Anymore

When was the last time you sat at the kitchen table, sliced a banana onto buttered bread and called it your tea? 30 easy homemade snacks from 1970s. Britain wants to find an entire decade of after-school hunger and Saturday afternoons in front of the telly. Most are now gone, wiped out by ready meals, kids menus and the slow death of bread-based tea time. However, behind every odd sandwich and questionable snack sits a proper bit of history, and some of these stories will change how you remember the food you grew up on. Hot chips, two slices of soft white bread, a knob of butter and a splash of malt vinegar. That's the chip butty and it remains the patron saint of British carb-on-carb cooking. The heat from the chips melted the butter into the bread, the vinegar soaked through to the crust and the whole thing was folded in half and eaten in three quick bites. By the 1970s, the chip butty was already over 100 years old, having emerged from the chippies of northern England in the 1860s. Working families relied on it as cheap filling fuel and Friday tea time in millions of homes meant a parcel from the local chippy and a fresh white loaf on the side. Speaking of carb-on-carb genius, the next snack pushed the idea even further and modern parents would have a fit. The crisp sandwich is bread, butter and a packet of crisps, nothing else. Come the 1970s, it was the unofficial uniform of the latchkey kid generation. Ready salted, cheese and onion or salt and vinegar pressed between two slices of soft white loaf. The trick was to flatten the packet just enough to crack the crisps without obliterating them, then tip the lot straight onto the buttered bread. It was the ultimate self-served snack, requiring no supervision and no cooking, which is exactly why it took off as both parents headed back to work and children let themselves into empty kitchens after school. Hold that thought, because the next entry was probably bubbling on a thousand stoves the very same afternoon. Two slices of toast, a tin of Heinz baked beans poured on top and you've got the most Britain on a plate snack ever invented. By that decade it was already a national institution, having taken hold during wartime rationing when tinned beans were affordable, filling and unrationed. The genius is in the simplicity. Sweet, savoury, slightly spiced beans soaking into the toast, often finished with a generous shake of black pepper or a sprinkle of grated cheddar melted on top. The Ministry of Food once classified beans as essential during the war and that status carried straight through to the average British kitchen well into the 80s. Funny thing is the next dish sounds far posher than it actually is and the name itself is a centuries-old joke. Welsh rarebit isn't cheese on toast no matter what your nephew tells you. The earliest written reference dates to 1725 under the name Welsh rabbit, a pointed 18th century jab at the Welsh since Welsh then meant cheap, second-rate or substitute. The joke was that this rabbit-less meat-free dish was all the Welsh could afford. The rarebit spelling appeared by 1781. An authentic rarebit is a thick paste of strong cheddar, mustard, ale and Worcestershire sauce, slowly cooked into a glossy roux and grilled until it bubbles and browns at the edges. Throughout the 1970s it remained a Saturday lunch staple in plenty of British homes. Yet for all the posh Polish of rarebit our next snack was the absolute opposite. Beloved, salty and faintly disturbing. Few homemade snacks divide the nation as cleanly as the pickled egg. By that era every other household had a fogged-up jar of vinegar-soaked eggs sitting on a kitchen counter slowly turning a slightly alarming shade of beige. The standard recipe was little more than hard-boiled eggs, malt vinegar, peppercorns and patience. The eggs needed at least a fortnight to take on the flavour properly. They lasted weeks, paired beautifully with a bag of chips and went down a storm in pubs across the country. You'll still find them mass-produced in jars on supermarket shelves, but the homemade tradition has more or less died out entirely. Right, brace yourself. The next one took everyday beef essence and put it straight onto a slice of bread. Bovril, the dark, salty, intensely meaty paste, was a 1970s kitchen fixture. And yes, you spread it straight onto hot buttered toast. The product originated in 1870 when Scottish butcher John Lawson Johnston was contracted to produce concentrated beef for the French army during the Franco-Prussian war. He named it Bovril by combining bos, the latin word for ox, with vril, a word he borrowed from a popular sci-fi novel about a master race energised by a mysterious force. Across the decade Bovril on toast was a true winter tea time treat, particularly after a long damp afternoon at the football. Meanwhile with the kettle on, plenty of households had a tin of something fishy waiting quietly in the cupboard. Tinned sardines mashed lightly with a fork, piled onto warm buttered toast, finished with a squeeze of lemon. There's your 70s tea. Sardines on toast had been a working class fixture since canned fish hit British shops in the late 19th century and they boomed during both world wars when affordable tinned protein was a household lifeline. Through the 1970s John West and King Oscar Tins lived in every kitchen cupboard, often sitting next to a jar of pilchards and a small stockpile of corned beef. The slight problem was the smell, which lingered in the kitchen and the lounge curtains for days afterwards. Stay with me, because the next snack uses a different little fish and it has a fascinating cornish backstory. Pilchards are essentially grown-up sardines and tinned pilchards in tomato sauce were a 1970s tea time regular. The Cornish pilchard industry had been a major British food source for centuries, with the harbours of Newland and Mousehole at the heart of the trade for generations. By that point most pilchards on a British plate came in a tomato sauce tin, mashed thickly onto toast for a quick savoury snack. The Cornish industry collapsed late in the 20th century and by the 2000s pilchards were rebranded as Cornish sardines to revive their image. Same fish, friendlier name, double the supermarket price tag. If fish on toast feels a bit medicinal, the next one is the absolute opposite. Pure cheesy comfort. Plain old cheese on toast doesn't sound like it needs much introduction, but the 70s version is genuinely lost. Back then you'd grate or slice mature cheddar onto a piece of bread, sit it under the grill of a gas cooker and wait for the cheese to bubble and brown without burning the bread. There was no microwave shortcut, no pre-grated bagged cheese. Some households gave it a dusting of mustard powder, a dash of Worcestershire or a sprinkle of paprika before grilling. The slow grilled version, made with a proper block of mature cheese, is now a genuine rarity in everyday British kitchens. Picture this. A snack that was basically smeared yeast on bread and somehow it became a love it or hate it national institution. Marmite was invented in 1902 in Burton-upon-Trent when a German chemist's discovery that brewer's yeast could be concentrated into an edible paste was turned into a British product. Throughout the 1970s the small black and yellow jar lived on the shelves of practically every kitchen. The standard approach was a thin scrape across hot buttered toast, the sort of thin scrape required if you ever wanted to be invited round again. Marmite was even credited with helping prevent vitamin B deficiencies during wartime, which is why it sat in nearly every ration kit and field pack issued to British troops. Coming up next, a snack less recipe than ceremony, complete with a teaspoon and a tiny salt cellar. The boiled egg with toasted soldiers was the unofficial breakfast and after-school snack of an entire generation of British children. The egg cup, the little spoon, the decapitation ritual, the careful dipping of buttered toast strips into a runny golden yolk. In that era almost every kitchen had its preferred egg timing technique. Three minutes for soft, four for medium. A fierce family debate over which was correct. It was deeply tied to childhood, soft boiled eggs being one of the first solid foods kids learned to eat themselves. Health worries about runny yolks all but killed the tradition by the late 80s. Now if you fancy a real sugar rush, the next homemade snack will make every modern parent absolutely wince. Yes, really. Two slices of buttered white bread, a generous shower of granulated sugar pressed together. The sugar sandwich was a working class tea time staple right through the 1970s, when sugar was cheap, calories were currency, and nobody had The crunch of granulated sugar against soft white bread was the entire point of the exercise. Some families used brown sugar for that slightly molasses-rich tang. It was a quick fuel up for kids before tea, a small reward for finishing chores, and a reliable peace offering when a younger sibling had been crying for half an hour straight. Just when you thought sweet sandwiches couldn't get more peculiar, the next one swapped sugar for fruit and became a kid's favorite. Banana sandwiches were a 1970s after-school classic. Soft white bread, salted butter, sliced banana, and sometimes a light dusting of sugar for good measure. The combination of fat, fruit, and starch was filling and very cheap, which is why it lived in millions of lunchboxes up and down the country. Famously, Elvis Presley's love of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches gave the simpler British version a slight celebrity association, although the British version skipped the peanut butter entirely. Mums occasionally added a dab of jam or a sprinkle of cinnamon, but most of the time the banana did the work alone. Brace yourself, because the next sandwich barely qualified as a recipe, yet it appears in nearly every British childhood memory. The jam sandwich was the workhorse of 1970s lunchboxes. White bread, butter, a thick smear of strawberry or raspberry jam, Robertsons, Hartleys, or homemade if your family had been picking fruit at the weekend. By the time afternoon break rolled around, the jam had usually soaked into the bread and turned the center into a sort of pink stained pudding, which was actually the best bit. Sometimes mum would dust the top with icing sugar for a treat. The shift to package snack bars and individually wrapped fruit pots in the 80s effectively wiped the jam sandwich out of British playgrounds for good. Next up, a savory favorite that came straight from the tin and ended up on a slice of toast. Tin spaghetti in tomato sauce on toast might sound bizarre to anyone under 30, but it was a 1970s tea time staple. Heinz spaghetti had been in British shops since 1926, sweetened with that famously slightly sugary tomato sauce. The standard prep was to warm a small saucepan of spaghetti, slap it onto buttered toast and call it dinner. School children ate it religiously, particularly when mum needed something quick before everyone disappeared to the park. The popularity ran on simplicity. One tin, two minutes, no actual cooking required. By the time Italian pasta entered the British weekly shop in the late 80s, tin spaghetti was already in retreat. Imagine a hot pan, a flutter of butter and the most British baked thing imaginable. A tea time ceremony coming up next. The crumpet has been around since at least the 17th century, but the 1970s was the era when toasting one under the grill, slathering it with butter and watching the pools form in those tiny holes was a near daily ritual. Crumpets are still hugely popular in the UK, with hundreds of millions sold every year, but homemade crumpets, once a real tea time skill requiring metal rings, the right batter and a steady hand on the griddle, have effectively disappeared from home kitchens. Most modern households simply toast a shop-bought crumpet and never think twice about making them at home. Speaking of toasted tea time treats, the next one came current studded, sliced in half and dripping with butter. A British teacake is a soft, lightly sweetened current bun, usually split in half, toasted and buttered while still warm. Once the 1970s arrived, mums were either baking them at home or picking them up from the local bakery, where you'd get a row of six in a paper bag for a few pence. The fruit caramelised slightly under the grill and the butter melted into the toasted side, soaking right into the cut surface. They sat at the centre of a traditional afternoon tea. Pot brewing, telly humming, plate of tea cakes on the kitchen table beside a packet of digestives. Mind you, the next snack is one almost nobody under 40 has encountered. The name alone deserves a moment. If you came of age in the 1970s, you almost certainly attended a buffet featuring a foil-wrapped grapefruit bristling with cocktail sticks, each spearing a cube of mild cheddar and a chunk of tinned pineapple. Cheese and pineapple on sticks defined the 70s dinner party era, alongside Volo Vance and Black Forest Gatot. The combination is genuinely good, the sharp tang of cheddar against the syrupy sweetness of tinned pineapple, all on a single bamboo stick. Today they survive only ironically at retro buffets, the very idea of homemade hors d'oeuvres having been replaced by supermarket platters wrapped tightly in cling film. Honestly, the next entry has one of the strangest names in British food, and the snack is even stranger than the name. Devils on horseback are pitted prunes wrapped in streaky bacon and grilled until the bacon crisps and the prune turns sticky and sweet. They're a Victorian invention that found a second life as a 1970s dinner party canapé. The horseback refers to the bacon wrap, the devil to the spicy hits and recipes added with cayenne or chutney. The combination of salty bacon and sweet prune is genuinely brilliant, the sort of contrast that makes you wonder why nobody serves them anymore. They still occasionally appear at Christmas as a fancier cousin of pigs in blankets, but the homemade version is essentially extinct. From the cocktail party to the kitchen counter, the next snack involves puff pastry, frozen cases and a 1970s ambition. Volo Vance are small puff pastry cases filled with savoury mixtures, chicken and mushroom, prawn and Marie Rose, cheese and ham. The 1970s saw them everywhere, helped along by frozen pastry brands like Just Roll that took the hard work out. Hostesses would buy a packet of empty cases, knock up a creamy filling, pile the mixture in and sit them in the oven for 15 minutes before guests arrived. They were a centrepiece at buffets, christenings and Sunday afternoon get-togethers, often arranged in a careful pyramid on the best plate in the house. The decline came alongside the cooling of formal home entertaining. Up next, another tiny party nibble that wouldn't survive five minutes on a modern children's menu. Cocktail sausages were the buffet pillar of the 1970s. Small, meaty, often glazed with honey or mustard, served on a plate or speared on cocktail sticks alongside cubes of cheese. Walls and Mattisons made them, but plenty of butchers sold them loose by the pound to anyone planning a kids party at the weekend. The pre-pricked, pre-cooked party version meant you could have them ready in 15 minutes flat, straight from the oven onto the buffet table. They were the first port of call for hungry children at any party, occasionally creating a small queue around the buffet within minutes of being put down. Coming up, a savoury number that proves Britain did, in fact, find ways to make mushrooms into a hearty snack. Closed-cup mushrooms, sliced and cooked low and slow in butter and a splash of milk or cream, then piled over hot toast, a quintessential 70s tea. A pinch of black pepper, perhaps a sprinkle of parsley. And that was your lot. The dish ran on field mushrooms in the early part of the decade, and shifted toward farmed white mushrooms as commercial mushroom farms expanded across the country. It was savoury, surprisingly satisfying, and almost free if you had a forager in the family willing to wander the local woods on a misty Sunday morning with a basket and a Right, here's a controversial one. A snack that horrifies modern nutritionists, but every nan over 70 still defends it. Beef. Dripping spread onto warm toast with a pinch of salt is one of the most divisive snacks on this list, and one of the most genuinely beloved by anyone who grew up with it. Dripping is the rendered fat from a roast joint, kept in a bowl and refrigerated until firm and a little jellied at the bottom. Heading into the 70s it was already on the slide, but plenty of households still kept the Sunday roast drippings for the Monday tea time toast. The flavour is rich, almost meaty, and triggers an instant memory hit for anyone who ate it as a child. Strangely enough, the next one was equally divisive. A small jar of fishy paste between two slices of bread. Shipham's fish paste, in its tiny glass jar, was a 1970s pantry mainstay. Salmon, sardine, crab or bloater, all whipped into a smooth, salty pink paste with a consistency of damp sand. A thick spread on white bread was an after-school staple, particularly for working parents who needed a sandwich filler that lasted in the cupboard between weekly shops. Shipham's had been making fish paste in Chichester since the Victorian era, and the 1970s was very near its commercial peak. The decline came in the 80s when fresher fillings and the rise of supermarket sandwiches pushed the little jar out for good. Hold the line because if fish paste sounded mild, the next snack was a similar idea but somehow even more 1970s. A salad cream sandwich is exactly what it sounds like. Buttered bread, a slice of cucumber or a lettuce leaf, and a stripe of Heinz salad cream pulled across the top. Salad cream had been around since 1914, but the 1970s was its pomp when it lived on the kitchen table next to the brown sauce and the bottle of vinegar. Some made it a substantial sandwich with tomato, cheese or boiled egg, but the bare salad cream version was a perfectly accepted tea time snack across the country, particularly in northern households where mayonnaise was viewed with deep and lasting suspicion. If the savoury 1970s sandwich came easily, the next one took a sweet little flight into territory that would now alarm a dentist. Cinnamon toast. In 1970s, Britain was made by spreading butter over hot toast, sprinkling a generous dusting of caster sugar and finishing with a scatter of ground cinnamon. Some families flashed it under the grill again to caramelise the sugar, some didn't bother. It crops up in a surprising number of British childhood memoirs, often described as the smell of weekend mornings. The taste is warm, slightly toffee-like and impossible to make badly. The decline was gradual. Children's cereals took the breakfast slot, processed snack bars filled the spice rack. Picture this. A sandwich filling so sweet your dentist would faint, but it was a guilty pleasure across the country. The condensed milk sandwich is exactly as advertised. Sweetened condensed milk spooned thickly onto white bread and pressed into a sandwich. Tinned sweetened condensed milk from brands like Carnation and Nestle had been a British store cupboard mainstay for decades, and 70s kids were eating it straight off the spoon when nobody was looking. Some put it on toast, some used it in a sandwich, some wedged it into a banana sandwich for an extra hit. It's roughly 55% sugar, which is precisely why no one is making it anymore. And also, in fairness, why it was so addictively good. After all that sugar, the next entry might just be the king of working-class tea time sandwiches. A wedge of mature cheddar, two slices of buttered bread and a thick smear of Branston pickle, and you've got the workhorse of the 1970s cheese sandwich. Branston launched in 1922 from the village of Branston in Staffordshire, and through the 70s it was a kitchen table mainstay. The chunky, sweet, slightly tangy chutney played perfectly against sharp cheddar. It was packed in lunch tins, served with bread and butter at supper, and made every cheese taste like a more interesting cheese. A century on, Branston still sits in nearly every British fridge, but the homemade sandwich version has quietly faded. Time for baking territory. The next one was a true griddle classic that even kids could whip up. Drops guns, also known as scotch pancakes, are small fat pancakes made from a thick batter of flour, milk, egg, sugar and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda, dropped in spoonfuls onto a hot griddle. They take maybe 90 seconds aside, served warm with a smear of butter and a thin drizzle of golden syrup. Right through the 1970s they were a first cooking lesson for many primary school children, and mums made them on Saturday afternoons for tea. Even the Queen herself was famously partial to them. She once sent the recipe to President Eisenhower. Final one coming up, and it's another genuine 1970s staple that today's nutritionists would prefer we forgot. Fried bread is exactly what the name says. A slice of white bread fried in the bacon fat left in the pan after the morning rashes. It was the unofficial start to a thousand 1970s breakfasts, and by mid-morning plenty of households were frying a fresh slice as a snack for hungry kids. Crisp on the outside, golden in the middle, soaking in flavour, often eaten with a fried egg balanced on top or a generous sprinkle of salt. The decline arrived with sliced supermarket bread, fewer cooked breakfasts at home, and the great cholesterol panic of the 80s. Jokes aside, the 1970s really was the last decade where the average British kitchen turned out homemade snacks like these without a second thought. Hope you found this video helpful, and a little nostalgic too. If any of these stirred a proper memory, my video 15 British fast foods from the 1970s that no longer exist is the one for you. It digs even deeper into the everyday tastes of post-war Britain that almost no one remembers anymore... as...