1950s

When the Queen came to the throne in 1952, Britain was a country struggling with the aftermath of the Second World War. Sugar, butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fat, bacon, meat and tea were all still rationed. And many other foods were also in short supply.

But change was in the air - the books of Elizabeth David (pictured) aimed to give the British middle class a taste of the Mediterranean.

Dish of the day

Despite the challenges of rationing, family diets still contained more bread, vegetables and milk than children have today.

The post-rationing years saw a steady increase in meat consumption, which only began to wane in the 1980s.

The fifties diet was high in fat though - the potatoes would probably have been roasted in saturated fat rather than today's healthier alternatives like unsaturated vegetable oil.

Food facts

In celebration of the Queen's accession to the throne, everyone was allowed an extra 1lb of sugar and 4oz of margarine for Coronation month.

Two years later rationing finally ended, with meat and bacon coming off the ration in June 1954.

The 1950s saw a record number of families with young children as the birth rate soared in the post-war baby boom.

After the war, when the soldiers came back home, women had given up their jobs in factories and on farms, and women's magazines emphasised the value of their role as housewife and homemaker.

School dinners provided a hot meal at midday for just over half of all children in 1950, rising to a peak of 70% in 1966.

As it had done during the war, the school meals service continued catering for children from all backgrounds and not just those from poor families.

The service was regarded as a great success, producing healthier children and encouraging better behaviour, particularly when children and teachers ate together in small groups.

The food was typical 1950s fare - meat and two veg, macaroni cheese, fish on Fridays and always a cooked dessert such as rice pudding, semolina, tapioca or jam sponge and custard.

In 1955, commercial TV was launched and the new advertising jingles and slogans gradually became part of the culture.

Snap, crackle and pop, Go to work on an egg, and the first Oxo commercial, with its idealised nuclear family, made such an impression that they were selected as favourites by Channel 4 viewers nearly half a century later.

Shopping

The amount of choice in the 1950s was much less than today. Fresh fruit and vegetables were bought mainly from British growers, so people ate what was in season.

Strawberries would be in the shops for just a few weeks in the summer and there were no fresh peas, beans or salad in the winter.

Bananas and oranges, which had virtually disappeared during the war, began to reappear in the shops, along with tins of imported pineapple and other out-of-season fruit and veg.

Food was a major part of most families' spending, taking up about a third of the average income.

Back in Coronation year, shopping was a very different experience to today. To get your rations, every household had to register with a butcher and a grocer.

You then had to queue up at the counter, and what you took home depended on what they had in stock. The shop assistant would weigh or measure each item - most food was sold loose - and wrap it in paper. Since few homes had fridges, people usually shopped for fresh food every day.

Virtually all food was sold from small specialist shops and many people had their bread, milk, vegetables and groceries delivered.

But shopping began to be transformed in this decade. With encouragement from the Government, which was worried by the shortage of labour, the bigger food retailers began to open self-service shops, an idea copied from the United States.

As customers entered the shop they were handed a wire basket or the precursor of the shopping trolley - a wheeled frame that would hold two baskets, known as the 'pram'.

Taste

To the modern palate, 1950s food would seem bland and monotonous. More than a decade of rationing and food shortages meant that plain cooking was all that most housewives knew how to do.

With only 2oz of cheese and 5oz of bacon allowed a week for each person, cooks had had to learn how to improvise.

The Ministry of Food issued plenty of advice about how to make nutritious food using the small range of foodstuffs available, but the limited number of ingredients restricted the possibilities.

Food face of the decade

For the middle classes, the books of Elizabeth David were nibbling away at the meat, potato and well-boiled cabbage culture of the immediate post-war period.

David spent the war years in France, Greece and Egypt, and was horrified to discover what rationing and shortages had done to the English diet.

Her books, including Mediterranean Food (1950) and French Provincial Cooking (1960), were written to bring the food-loving culture of the Mediterranean to Britain, and slowly began to influence what people ate at home.