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!

Oh, I’d forgotten Leo’s Peas which were the marrow fat type and came in a cardboard box with a bicarb tablet and some muslin. I think DM still has a packet in her cupboard.

Yes, the bicarb tablet in a little square of muslin! I’d forgotten that, and the name of them, but I can still see the box, grey with red lettering and a rather 1950’s style photo of the ‘reconstituted’ peas in a bowl.

Ooooh, Toast Toppers! Loved those!

Angel Delight or blancmange for dessert.

We always had omelette and chips for tea on Mondays and Fridays.

Pork chops and stewing beef that were so chewy it would take all evening to eat and, of course, we couldn't leave the table until our plates were clean. 101 ways with minced beef.

Always having to have a cup of tea with a meal, even as a toddler.

Now I'm in my 50s, I never eat beef, drink hot drinks, can't stand milk having been forced to drink it at school when it had been left in the sun and was on the turn, only eat pork if its a sausage but do like an omelette so long as its not remotely runny!

I had a cookery book in the 70s which had a 'cordon bleu' section in the centre, which had recipes and step by step pictures of nearly all the dishes in the OP!

I still make the Tornedos Rossini and the Chateaubriand fillet, but um the Crepes Suzette, as per a PP, were not a goer 😂 (as an anxious cook/new wife, I made them for my husband one night.....and I knew from the first bite it was like eating a slice of fried dishcloth, swimming in a medicinal-tasting orange liquid.)

I still buy Hamwiches from ASDA. I love them!

I’m 54 and still have a cup of tea after every meal. I still can’t bear the thought of jam sandwiches, having been offered them at every turn in the 70’s.

I’m really glad (and surprised) now that I was never made to clear my plate, or eat when I didn’t want to. I think that was unusual for Northern working class families back then.

I think my parents upgraded to a fridge freezer in the late 1970s but it might have been the early 80s. We got a lot of mod cons from the mid 70s on because that was when my Mum returned to full-time teaching after many years of not working, doing occasional supply teaching and then part-time teaching. It must have transformed the family finances when there were two full-time salaries coming in. We got central heating and a colour TV! Fitted kitchen followed some years later. I think they extended the mortgage a couple of times to pay for home improvements.

The fridge with icebox was definitely what I remember from my childhood. You'd buy a little rectangular block of ice cream in a cardboard package and hurry home with it to put it in the icebox on the same day it was going to be eaten. Neapolitan, Cornish or vanilla, usually. The only difference I could see between 'Cornish' and 'vanilla' was the colour. 'Cornish' was bright yellow, to simulate double cream, I suppose. I don't imagine there was much real cream in it, given how disgusting it looked after it melted!

I liked them, but the Surprise green beans (also dehydrated) were even better. A bit chewy, but a pleasant change.

It's just occurred to me that the Ski yoghourt pots might have been shaped vaguely like milk churns.

Chicken in a basket! The memory of any food in a basket brings back memories of those rare “eating out” occasions. Also a Ploughman's Lunch was the untimate for me (do you still get this?)

And then there was the dessert trolley — to my childish mind, it was the ultimate sign that I was somewhere fancy! Black Forest gâteau or possibly cheesecake - so exotic!!

At home, my memories are a bit more mixed. I less fondly remember gammon (inevitably dry from overcooking) topped with a pineapple ring, and (dry) pork chops served with pressure-cooked vegetables — the pressure cooker alone still sends shivers down my spine!

On the brighter side, I do recall faggots and peas fondly. I was always happy to see those in the oven - perhaps because they had a gravy so weren’t bone dry 😄. And of course, there was Angel Delight — the height of after-dinner luxury. Clearly I aimed high!!

Friends and I were discussing the other day how even nowadays we think the ultimate 3 course meal is prawn cocktail to start, duck à l’orange for main (steak Diane totally acceptable too), and Black Forest gateau for dessert. And it’s about time a good vol-au-vent came back too, especially if there’s prawn Marie Rose in it.

I'm in my 50,s and I also don't drink hot drinks or milk and it also stems back to those nasty little bottles of warm milk we were made to drink at primary school 🤮
Would it have killed them to put them in a fridge?

They wouldn't have had a fridge! They'd have needed a catering sized fridge to store dozens or possibly hundreds of tiny milk bottles or those little pyramids I dimly remember, and it probably wasn't seen as a priority, given that for a good chunk of the year when they were dropped off outside they were in freezing temperatures rather than searing heat.

I loved the milk at primary school. Often in the afternoon there would be bottles left over and the teacher would ask who wanted an extra one. I would always put my hand up and vividly remember the nursery teacher telling me no because I’d been to the toilet too many times that day.

They didn’t have a fridge in our school. Mr Booth from the dairy farm next to the school would deliver the crates to the corridor in mixed infants at 6 in the morning and there they would stay, under sun and radiator until 11. Just horrific!

I still make a lemon meringue pie now and then - inc. always for dh’s birthday. A bit of a faff from scratch, but it’s invariably popular. And I like the way it uses all of the lemons - zest and juice - plus yolks and whites of the eggs.

My DM often used to make vol au vents when entertaining. The mushroom ones were my favourites.

It would be pre 70s but I remember a tiny glass of grapefruit juice as a starter. Once in a blue moon we had it at home - it came in a Trout Hall tin.

My grandparents had lived in Canada and loved asparagus, but they could only get the tinned stuff in Scotland. It was a supposed treat at Christmas but I hated it - so slimey, in oil. Took me years before I tried the real thing.

Oh and we drank a lot of cremola foam, which came in a little tin.

And I remember Miss Muffet desert - was it semolina or tapioca or sth? I hated it whatever it was.

I loved hazelnut ski yoghurt but they had to withdraw them due to a food poisoning scare and I have never quite trusted yoghurt since.

This was around Christmas time, early 70s, my mum and dad used to buy me as a stocking present, Harveys Bristol Cream dark chocolate barrels. It was a long thin box with six half barrel shaped sherry filled chocolates in. I absolutely loved them and could only get them at that time of year. I would buy several boxes of them now if I could actually find any.

Desserts often consisted in our house on a Sunday, a bought sponge flan ring, tinned mandarin oranges (in the summer fresh strawberries), then jelly spooned over the top of the fruit to set and then decorated with fresh cream swirls.

There was a dessert in a packet similar to Angel Delight, it had Winnie the Pooh on the front and it was honey flavoured. I can still taste it now. Ski hazelnut yoghurt. Fangs and bones crisps. Midnight mint choc ice. Tunis cake. Arctic roll. Sausage and tomato crisps. Bovril crisps. Freshen up? The chewing gum with mint juice in the middle. Bernard Mathews products.

They cooked meals on site so they must have had a,fridge at my primary school.

Yes you’re right, it was Pecan Danish! Like a giant Danish pastry.

Someone has probably mentioned Junket. In the 70s we used to have Miss Muffet vanilla junket with nutmeg grated on the top for pudding. It helped not to know what Junket was (rennet).

In a fit of nostalgia I made some for my DC when they were small and they were horrified (even without knowing the source) and have never recovered. I served them a bowl of vanilla flavoured digestive enzymes, I didn’t cut the heads off their teddies

Oh I remember that from restaurants I worked in!

Like this?!
www.facebook.com/sixties.timemachine/posts/who-remembers-vesta-meals/5230737650313834/

I now see Miss Muffet junket mentioned just above my post. I’ve clearly not had enough 70s style E numbers to wake me up today.

Another one for Findus crispy pancakes. Also frozen triangular potato cakes filled with cheese... those were good.
Phileas Fogg Mignons Morceaux - I LOVED those!