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!

Yes! I had forgotten all about the French bread pizzas with pineapple on!

I still look out for the Sara Lee Pecan Danish - best food ever.

@24Dogcuddler I used to love a coke float at the Wimpey.

I can’t think of any more foods that haven’t been mentioned but for drinks would add Blue Nun , Mateus Rose and Babycham with a cherry

Different food memories here.

Christmas day prawn cocktail - chopped up Iceberg, a tomato cut into strips as the 'prawns' (children didn't eat prawns, apparently), huge blob of salad cream and tomato ketchup on top.

Frozen chicken from Bejam. Occasionally made palatable by the addition of a tin of Homepride Red Wine Sauce (plus four cans of water). Enough sauce on the plate to distract from the size of the single chicken wing and 1/8 of a can of marrowfat peas and one of carrots.

Unsmoked bacon soaked for 24 hours in milk to 'get the salt out' and then waved at the grill for 1 minute so the milk started dripping onto the grillpan.

Every yoghurt advertised as being good for being thin.

Ryvita made floppy by the lowest fat cottage cheese with all of the liquid. Fewer calories than a scraping of St Ivel/Flora Extra Super Duper Lite/whatever it was.

Stork margarine for mashed potato, Echo margarine for baking. Always wondered why butter icing was so revolting.

Anything that said Lean or Light or had a woman in a swimsuit or tight frock advertising it.

St Ivel powdered skimmed milk made half strength/double the water.

Condensed soup made with 3 cans of water to one can of soup, sometimes cold milk poured on top.

Then, on the more positive side (visiting GF)

Jersey Milk
Cheese that was firm but crumbly, salty and strong with crusty bread or Hovis crackers/biscuits.
Butter. Salted butter at that.
Goblin Steak and Kidney pudding, boiled new potatoes with butter and herbs, fresh peas and a tinned plum tomato. And white pepper and salt.
Mellow Birds coffee after Playschool had finished and he had sole care of me for the next couple of hours.
Knock your socks off pickled onions.
Piccalilli and more gherkins.
Poppyseed rolls.
Crusty bread, preferably with poppyseeds on the top.
Lemon Curd
Lemon and poppyseed cakes
Seville Marmalade
Meat rolls filled with sage and onion stuffing.
Fig Rolls and Garibaldis
Tea made with tea leaves from an automatic dispenser on the wall and in a china teapot with a green and white knitted cosy and handknitted cover for the handle.
Fresh beans from the garden.
Pease pudding with smoked gammon.
Roast beef and horseradish or mustard made up from powder fresh each time in sandwiches.
Homemade mint sauce with some of the knock your socks off onion vinegar.
Salads with a dressing that wasn't salad cream, often had herbs and fruit in them and weren't just a bit of iceberg, half a tomato and three slices of cucumber.

My DH had whole trout with flaked almonds and brown butter just last week at The Drum And Monkey (a fancy fish restaurant) in Harrogate. It did look very 1970’s.

I had a traditional prawn cocktail before my smoked haddock and cheese sauce, a childhood favourite. Gorgeous.

Yes, I remember these and my mum used them when we went camping. There were these little strips that puffed up into quaver type things that garnished the Chow Meins I think. We also had instant mash called Smash.

Having rice crispies with the "top of the bottle", grapefruit grilled with honey and cinnamon, oranges cut up and dipped in glucose powder, deep fried eggs, cheap frozen pizza, semolina with vermicelli, spam fritters, toast toppers, spangles, dolmio, loooonnng spaghetti

My mum made -
coq au van
boeuf burguion
chicken chasseur
chicken chop suey

all with Swartz powders
also-
findus crispy pancakes
pop tarts
micro pizza
vienetta

Heralding in the 1980s, the F-Plan Diet. Stirring wheat bran into everything in the expectation that it would make those bad, bad calories, of which we were only allowed 1000 a day (1200 if you were a man, 850 if you promised to take a vitamin pill) go straight through us.

I only remember as being a young child during that time, so it's hazy but these things stick out:

Findus crispy pancakes, Angel Delight, Instant Whip. I think maybe you can still get Angel Delight but I haven't liked it for years! I remember orange juice that used to be in a power form!?

I always wanted Smash instant mashed potato, because I liked the adverts, but my mum would never buy it! Microchips (don't know if you can still get them!) Space Invader crisps.

"Ski" yogurts. Their flavours were much nicer back then. I remember in particular the hazelnut ones and also orange.

Eden Vale Choc Top Yogurt

Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates set into a bar

Monkey Gland Steak at the Berni Inn

Original Special K, it was like little acorn cups and tasted amazing. I still can’t believe they changed it to generic flakes.

Chocolate Lovelies. The rosette of frozen cream was my favourite bit.

Cheese and bacon Toast Toppers, so salty and delicious on white sliced.

PEK Tinned ham and Heinz tinned vegetable salad with fresh cucumber, lettuce, tomato and salad cream for Sunday tea.

Student recipe Spag Bol, it was exotic in the 70’s - I still make it the same way.

@Solaire18381 I still love Microchips - they’re called Quick Chips now, the powers that be at McCain apparently thought that the pun on the ‘new digital age’ of microwave cooking was too naff to keep.

I also used to love Walls ready cooked microwaveable pork sausages, but haven’t seen those for years.

Oh yes - boil in the bag cod in parsley sauce!

PEK tinned ham is available now. You may not be lucky enough to be near a Heron foods!!

I have had a curry with tinned fruit in it in recent years. I thought DH was joking when I was away with DD in a seaside town and he said that was what I would get at the local Thai/Chinese but he was completely correct

Consommé is something I mourn from restaurant menus but is available in tins from Waitrose. It fits in with the diet narrative previously mentioned.

Cassata on the pudding menu was also popular with my family.

The melon used to be served as a boat with a slice of orange on a cocktail stick as the sail and a glacee cherry on top

My school served brains on toast at tea time (like a snack) and braised heart

Plate salad. A dinner plate with a slice of ham, a boiled egg, a cut up tomato, a little pile of sliced cucumber and a few lettuce leaves, all in their own plate section. Maybe some beetroot. A jar of piccalilli on the table for my dad. Always salad cream with it.

I was explaining to DCs that as 80s kids we use to enjoy 'fiery' sweeties and jawbreakers flavoured with cinnamon and aniseed. We would challenge each other to persevere through the spicy coating to get to the sweet bubble gum centre. You don't see these flavours as much now as hot seems to have been replaced with sour.

I loved the Vesta packet curries. The chicken curry was my favourite. Still got a little stash of the beef ones!
I remember Noodle Doodles, Alphabetti so you could spell
rude words, and those single serve packets of breakfast cereal. For a while Coco Pops had Sweep on them and I think Ricicles was Sooty?
Frozen mousse desserts, trifles and my favourite the Peach Melba!
I loved granny's home made trifle with Swiss roll and mandarin oranges at the bottom, covered in jelly, then custard, then loads of lush tinned cream. 😋
Always had to help her make sausage rolls and hedgehogs for Hogmanay! And I was allowed to stay up for the bells and drink a Snowball.

I remember watercress and orange salad from the eighties, and homity pies. Delia invented the stuffed red pepper and everyone lost their minds.

And Birds Eye Supermousse.

More usually, prawn in a Marie Rose sauce.

Baked Alaska
Prawn cocktail
Stuffed eggs
Findus crispy pancakes

Black Forest gateau. Cheesecake which was a new thing. I went youth hostelling with a rucksack full of Vesta curries. Knickerbocker glories in milk bars. Mateus rose (you kept the bottle and used it as a candle holder ).
Salads featured a lot as diet food , as previously mentioned. It would be cottage cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and maybe some tinned mandarins . Tinned mandarins seemed to be everywhere.
I loved hazelnut Ski yogurts .
There was also a craze for American style chargrilled burgers which were far nicer than any burger these days .

Surprise peas.

Dehydrated peas that you added boiling water to. They were delicious.
I suppose they pre-dated frozen garden peas as the only other peas available before the dawn of the freezer age were tinned and usually marrowfat.

We had freezers in the 70s and 80s!

We had those dried marrowfat peas, they came in a small flat box.

We didn’t have a freezer in the 70’s and 80’s, just a tiny ‘icebox’ at the top of the fridge. You couldn’t store food in it as aside from the size of it, it wasn’t actually sealed so it was always just clogged with ice.

Well I know that! I was there! So were Surprise peas - I think they were around until the 90s, but they’d been around since before we all had big freezers and just had little ice boxes at the top of the fridge. Would have been early to mid 70s for us.

Remember the Freezer centres on the high street? There was a huge one up the road from where my parents lived.