In a flourish of cheerful string music, the voice over in clipped Received Pronunciation tones introduces us to a bustling Northumberland Street in Newcastle. After a short introduction into why everyone needs to eat a balanced diet (it seems that milk as all the answers) we are ushered into the Express Dairy demonstration kitchen. It is here, along with the other women sitting in the audience, we find out what cottage cheese has to offer the modern cook. The film is one of many corporate...

In a flourish of cheerful string music, the voice over in clipped Received Pronunciation tones introduces us to a bustling Northumberland Street in Newcastle. After a short introduction into why everyone needs to eat a balanced diet (it seems that milk as all the answers) we are ushered into the Express Dairy demonstration kitchen. It is here, along with the other women sitting in the audience, we find out what cottage cheese has to offer the modern cook. The film is one of many corporate productions made by Newcastle based filmmakers Tuners, who started life as a chemist shop, selling cameras from 1931 onwards down Pink Lane, Newcastle. The business grew into one of the North East’s leading photographic and cine retail firms, with 4 stores in Newcastle as well as branches in Whitley Bay, South Shields and Darlington.  From 1945 they successfully branched into the promotional film market and were operating up until 1999.

This film, although not precisely dated, must have come after 1954, as this was when WW2 rationing was finally phased out in Britain. Indeed there are eggs and sugar in abundance in the recipes featured here. The Express brand would have been very familiar with the audience too. The Express Country Milk Supply Company was established in London in 1864 by George Barham and became the Express Dairy Company Limited in 1892 because the milk was transported into London by train and delivered to homes.

After the harsh austerity of wartime Britain, the cooking of this era has a gentle playfulness which can be seen when flicking through any vintage cookery book from the 1950s. Very often recipes delight in making various food-based shapes, are garishly coloured and set in aspic. In this film we see the trend in an ‘Express Sailboat Salad’ where boats with tinned peach hulls and cucumber sails, charter a course on a sea of cottage cheese. Even the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ salad is artfully decorated, the vegetables pleasingly placed in repetitive patterns. After 15 years of miserly make-do cookery from black and white Ministry for Food pamphlets, this must have felt like an exhilarating change.

Yet this was also an era looking both forwards and backwards when thinking about consumer trends. For example we are told Express milk products are both available delivered to your door through the milkman or in the supermarket. The success of Express Dairies led them opening a chain of Premier Supermarkets, seen in this other NEFA film Time for Leisure. However their success was short-lived and they were later bought out by Tesco in the 1960s.

Back in the demonstration kitchen we see a woman in a stiffly pressed pristine white dress and high heels at the oven, taking out a cottage cheese-based lemon meringue pie. It is not the attire one would first imagine would be best for cooking in however the inherent glamour of this host would be something the women in the test audience would recognise. This was after all the era of the first television-based celebrity chefs. In 1955 the (now infamous) Fanny Cradock, with her coiffed hair and distinctive make-up style instructed busy housewives on how to entertain ‘Chez Bon Viveur’.  The recipes here are a bit simpler than Cradock might have cooked for her dinner guests (in some cases, they are more an assembling of ingredients) however given her proclivity for culinary talking points, she certainly would have approved of the sailboats.

The film finishes on an omelette and a plug for a free pamphlet that contains recipes for more cottage cheese based cuisine. Such leaflets were very popular at the time and most household appliances and larger ingredient brand names had pamphlets that any keen cook would have collected to add to their burgeoning kitchen stash. This was after all the era of more extravagant cookery with European influences and with new ingredients. Elizabeth David, Patience Grey and Primrose Boyd as well as Betty Crocker all began publishing at this time. While the informational style of delivery may have changed, this film demonstrates that some traditions remain the same. The kitchen, like those of most new TV chefs, is filled with the latest gadgets, promoting aspirational living. It seems that glamour is always welcome, so long as someone else is cooking.