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The 1960s is renowned for being a decade of change, with different foods and cooking habits being introduced into the kitchen. As people started to take the first package holidays, inspiration was brought home in the form of dishes like spaghetti Bolognese. The gradual growth of Indian and Chinese communities, and the subsequent arrival of Indian and Chinese takeaways and restaurants, heralded the beginning of British people's taste for these cuisines. But fish and chips remained the nation's favourite dish.
Consumption of meat and sugar reached record levels, probably in reaction to the years of rationing. Tinned foods, which had become well established during the 1930s, continued to be the most common convenience food, providing out-of-season fruit and vegetables and easy-to-prepare meats and fish. The large white sliced loaf became ever more popular. In 1961, a new method of aerating bread to create the standard slice was invented - known as the Chorleywood process - and local independent bakers were bought up by the industrial flour millers, which mainly sold the large white sliced loaves. Cereal makers branched out from the familiar corn flakes and wholewheat breakfast cereals to produce sugar-coated cereals. The most prolific advertisers of the time were Kellogg's and Bir's Eye, while one of the best-loved advertisements from the decade was the promotion of baked beans under the slogan Beanz Meanz Heinz.
A much greater variety of foods became available in the shops in the 1960s. Sainsbury's saw the number of its food products double from 2000 to 4000 over the course of the decade. The growth of air travel meant fruit and vegetables could be flown in. Tomatoes from the Canary Islands became available during the winter. Avocados began to appear in the shops. The main innovation of the 1960s was the spread of frozen food. Bird's Eye, Findus, Ross and other companies produced a stream of new frozen products. In 1968, a specialist chain store called Bejam was set up to sell only frozen foods and even Harrods had its own-label frozen fish and chips.
The shopping revolution continued. In 1960, Tesco opened a supermarket in Cheltenham with a previously unheard of 390m2 of selling space and by 1968 had coined the term 'superstore' for a new shop in Crawley that sold food and other goods on its 3720m2 floor. Self-service shops and supermarkets began to influence the way that food was prepared and sold. Now that food had to be pre-packed the design of the packaging became more important, as the customer was given more choice. In 1964, shops were given the ability to set their own prices, providing a spur to the large retailers that could buy their goods more cheaply. Until then, under the resale price maintenance laws, food manufacturers set the price for each item. Packets and tins came with the price printed on them.
By the mid-1960s, immigrants from Hong Kong had set up Chinese restaurants and takeaways in almost every large and medium-sized town in England. The expulsion of East African Asians from Uganda, and their earlier flight from Kenya, led to a similar expansion of Indian restaurants. These new restaurants helped to develop the taste for more exotic food among the British population and made restaurant meals affordable to more people. The 1960s saw the start of a trend that has gradually transformed British eating, with the popularising of the cooking of other countries.
It's hard to imagine even Nigella Lawson wearing a ballgown to present her cookery show. But in their TV series Kitchen Magic, famed tele-chefs Fanny and Johnny Craddock wore full evening wear to demonstrate, in front of a studio audience, how to cook for a dinner party. By the end of the decade, the popular TV chef Graham Kerr, known as the Galloping Gourmet, was travelling the world and providing viewers with recipes - and sometimes rakish anecdotes - and contributing to a steady growth in acceptability of foreign dishes and ingredients.