What food can you remember from the 1970s and 1980s? Bring your crepe suzette memories over here!

[TheStroppyFeminist]

We are cooking deep fried brie tonight, which we will have with cranberry sauce. We are following it with brandy snaps filled with cream. Lovely but very fattening and very 1980s restaurant style. I know it was mainly wedges of deep fried camembert in the 80s though.

Other dishes I remember:

Steak Diane, flambeed at the table with a French mustard sauce
Crepes suzette, also flambeed at the table, with grand Marnier, which was an orange liqueur, urgh!
Tornedos Rossini, which was fillet steak with pate on top IIRC
Cockles cooked in a French mustard sauce
Sole Veronique, which had green grapes in the sauce
Egg mayonnaise, which was hard boiled eggs, cut in half with mayo and paprika on top

What other delights were there? Most of these are my memories of restaurant food bur I also remember butterscotch Angel Delight and the disgustingness that was blancmange!

Vol-au-vents were an essential part of any buffet or Christmas family gathering. Little circular puff pastry cases containing some sort of savoury filling, eg ham & mushroom in cheese sauce, with a little pastry hat on top. A sort of miniature Greggs bake.

Oh and tins of tinned peaches or fruit cocktail for after lunch, and you'd feel like you were winning at life if you got the cherry!

Mousses in little plastic tubs with cardboard lids
Melon boats as a starter with ground ginger sprinkled on and one single glace cherry on a cocktail stick
Fruit juice as a starter, served on a plate in champagne type glass
Angel Delight

Findus crispy pancakes, Vesta ready meals. A night out was a meal at a berni inn....prawn cocktail, steak and black forest gateau 😍

I can still remember the noodles crisping up in the pan. The most exciting food experience as an eight year old since the Mr Kipling blackcurrant sundae.

Butterscotch Angel Delight was amazing. I also remember lots of soggy Artic Roll. Yuck.

My first avocado!
I hated it….. Now live on it!

Crab or salmon paste sandwiches... delicious.
I recently saw that Waitrose were still doing crab paste at a very reasonable price, but when I logged in it turned out they don't deliver it in my area.

My mum used to get a tin of salmon to make posh sandwiches when we had company.

Gammon steak and pineapple. Minute steak. Black forest gateaux.

Toasted grapefruit with brown sugar on the top.
used to come out at every dinner party as well as the piped potato, mackerel and melon boats with glace cherries

And a bottle of black tower.

Fish paste sandwiches on Mothers Pride sliced white bread. Compulsory at children’s parties.
Followed by trifle and fresh cream cakes.

😍

Also going to the airport with my dad, which my parents always called Ringway, for a day of plane spotting.

My dad moaning as I wanted a prawn sandwich, because it cost £1.

Always with the expensive taste. My dad grumbling again at Shopping Giant, because I wanted Ice Magic. "You always cost me more when I take you shopping!" He still bought it though.

My mother was a wonderful cook and some of the things we had were:-
Chicken a la King
Beef Stroganoff
Her fab Beef Casserole
A chicken dish which consisted of frying chicken breasts, then flambeing them in brandy, followed by a dash of double cream - delicious!

She also made loads of different puddings - we often had souffle, apple charlotte, bread and butter pudding, various crumbles, pavlova, something called a souffle omelette which was lovely, rich chocolate mousse (only 3 ingredients - plain chocolate, eggs and sugar) and lemon meringue pie!

Artic Roll was considered a treat - it tasted of the box it came in and the sponge had the texture of carpet.

An avocado, halved, with the stone removed and the hole filled with vinaigrette. So chic! So French!

Does anyone remember Pizzarollas?

Presumably discontinued because of the molten filling maiming anyone who ate them too soon?

I had some a few years ago and it was unbelievably bad. Loved as a child though, one of the top 5 school dinner puddings.

Kunzle cakes. Small chocolate boats with a sponge and buttercream filling and more buttercream and a variety of sprinkles on top. Different flavour sponges and buttercream. A gorgeous treat and sadly missed.

You sound very posh OP I wish my 1980s dinners were that good. 😋
We had Finders Crispy Pancakes.
Those boil in the bag fish things.
Super noodles.
Frey Bentos pies.
Vesta curries.
Apeal instant orange juice.
Tinned ham.
Tinned cream
And tinned spaghetti hoops as your vegetable on your dinner plate.

I thoroughly recommend the cookery book "The Prawn Cocktail Years" by Lindsay Bareham and Simon Hopkinson. Everything is there.
My favourite restaurant in 1970 did Duck à l'orange and banana split to perfection. Lunch was about twelve shillings and sixpence, which was a lot for us university students. 😂

You make a really good point! Also in YouTube there's an hour of adverts for sweets and treats from the 80s, you mentioning Fiendish Feets Yoghurts made me think of it. It's such a comfy watch

The Vesta meal that had those yellow things that puffed up in the deep fryer. I loved those yellow things. I suspect they were supposed to be prawn crackers.

St Ivel Gold
Lo bars

All the things you mention in your OP were haute cuisine in the 70's and bloody delicious. I also remember with fondness (and greediness) the sweet trollies. They would be laden with boozy triffles, big bowls of green figs in syrup, homemade chocolate mouse and lemon syllabub. They'd often also have a huge cheeseboard on them with cheeses you never see any more like Sage Derby, Red Windsor and a whole stilton steeped in port. Yum.