21-07-2025
Findus Crispy Pancakes to air-fryer chips: How the British freezer has changed though the years
The idea of preserving food by stashing it in a very cold place is as old as humanity itself. But the process wasn't successfully domesticated until a century ago, when Clarence Birdseye returned from a stint as a fur trapper among the Inuit community in Newfoundland between 1912 and 1926. Noting that the fish they caught would freeze immediately when pulled from the water at this latitude, Birdseye was impressed that it kept its texture and flavour when defrosted months later.
He discovered that the same retention of flavour applied to peas if they were blanched after picking and then immediately frozen, even keeping their bold green colour. Fast forward to 1929 and, operating under the catchy moniker Captain Birdseye, Clarence introduced frozen food to the American consumer.
It wasn't until the 1970s that home freezers (produced by brands such as Lec and Co-op) began to replace traditional larders on this side of the Atlantic. They've housed our homemade and processed comestibles ever since...
Having smoked endless cigarettes and sipped Party Sevens and Lambrini until we passed out on our paisley bedspreads, our only hope of getting up in time for work was the teasmade going off. Which it almost never did.
Our frozen-meal choices reflected our lack of concern for our health. Vegetables and homemade soups were considered suspicious interlopers while Crispy Pancakes and lasagne filled the drawers (courtesy of Findus), along with boxes bearing BirdsEye Steakhouse Grills and, for afters, Sara Lee gâteaux and Arctic Roll. Meanwhile Rodney ' Likely Lads ' Bewes enticed the housewives of Britain to buy BirdsEye products during ITV ad breaks with the pay-off line: 'Be a good girl, have a proper lunch tomorrow'. Different times indeed.
Our freezers had to keep up with our frenetic, shoulder-padded lifestyles but the nutritional content of what was in them was firmly stuck in the epoch of Dennis Skinner and the three-day week. It was the advent of the frozen microwave meal – Vesta Chow Mein or Beef Curry? Take your pick – which could be heated up in our new Panasonic in minutes, meaning a near-instant dinner for the stressed, junior-executive coat-hanger salesman. The results were barely an improvement on boil-in-the-bag; questionable, too, was the noxious ooze of a BirdsEye Chicken Kiev, a common precursor to the glacial, impasted horror of a Wall's Viennetta.
We maxed out our credit cards like avaricious Gulf sheiks in Harrods, but, looking back, our diet was in fact on the level of an Uzbek coal miner. Only we had McCain Oven Chips and a lot more plastic trappings to fill the pedal bin.
By the end of the Thatcher era, home freezers were as ubiquitous as Gazza and Danny Baker's 'Daz' adverts. But we were starting to consider our life expectancy. Enter the health-conscious ready meal, a category dominated by WeightWatchers and Lean Cuisine, which tried to tempt us with 'meals' such as Honey Mustard Chicken with Grey Poupon, which, if you're wondering, is just another kind of mustard.
Frozen-food manufacturers also assumed that we wanted smaller versions of things – which we did, buying up McCain Micro Chips and Chicago Town Mini Pizzas in our droves, perfect for that sensation of feeling both fiscally cheated and still really hungry come 9pm.
We wanted to live longer but our new commitment to healthier frozen choices extended neither to our children – who, for the first time, were able to gorge on freezer treats marketed exclusively to them such as Turkey Dinosaurs and Calippo Shots – nor to our pudding choices, alternating as we did between Mars ice creams and tubs of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough. Happy type 2 diabetes to us all.
As budget airlines made a trip to Bali a more tempting option than a fortnight in Benidorm, frozen food manufactures struggled to produce versions of pho, sushi and nasi goreng that tasted even remotely like what we ate on holiday.
In response, produce actually became more parochial, but with a premium twist. The downmarket reputation of the freezer-friendly microwave meal for one was rescued by M&S, Tesco and Sainsbury's launching top-rung ranges of dinners, from beef bourguignon to 'luxury' fish pies. If the concomitant prices were too high, there was also the option of a frozen Yorkshire pudding from Aunt Bessie, one of the most successful ways in which a dish perfected in the 1920s gas oven could be transposed to the era of Big Brother and Benetton.
One of the few outliers with international aspirations was Sharwood's, which branched out from sauces into frozen Indian meals. More redolent of Doncaster than Delhi, they were at least an improvement on the Vesta curries of the 1970s.
Meanwhile, BirdsEye dipped its toe into health-food signalling with its frozen Chicken Dippers, 'now with Omega 3'. The strapline was later quietly dropped from the packaging, presumably when it became apparent that most consumers thought Omega 3 was a games console; an item which freezes just as adequately as battered chunks of cheap hen.
The premium trend reached its apotheosis with the M&S Gastropub range and, a notch higher still, Charlie Bigham's frozen meals which, if eaten daily, remain capable of bankrupting Warren Buffett himself.
Yet this was also the era when we started to get artisanal with our freezer drawers. Herbs? Avocado chunks? Smoothies? Bone broth? We discovered we could freeze them all. While ensuring that there was still room for bags of frozen seafood mix for our make-from-scratch endeavours, as well as the ever-expanding thin-crust pizza ranges with toppings that, finally, extended beyond margarita and pepperoni.
This was also the decade that saw Instagram infiltrate our kitchens. All at once, Little Moons mochi ice cream balls became an essential dessert staple among children and Instagrammers with the IQ of children but with access to a tripod and portable charger.
Domestic freezers today can breathe a sigh of capacious relief after the full-to-bursting era of Covid stockpiling. They still contain forgotten Plant Chef and Moving Mountains vegan burgers, which we will eventually eat with the kind of grudging sanctimony usually displayed by Jeremy Corbyn's inner retinue.
As for kitchen newcomer the air fryer, well, that's just far more fun isn't it? Discovering that frostbitten Brussels sprouts from last Christmas taste good in the Ninja is the present-day equivalent of Alexander Fleming mucking about with penicillin. We must now, naturally, give frozen chips the same treatment.
TGI Friday's and Greggs have, oddly, compelled us to eat in rather than dining out by launching 'fakeaway' chicken meals and frozen sausage rolls respectively, and I won't even pass comment on the 'innovation' that is frozen veggie tots.
Of course, there's little room left in our Miele for any Rodney Bewes-endorsed goods today. But open your freezer on a full moon and it's still possible to hear a Findus Crispy Pancake rattling its icy chains.
