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!

A small glass of orange juice or grapefruit juice as a starter!!!!!

As a child on the very rare occasions I went to a restaurant, black forest gateau. OMG, what wild decadence that was. I honestly thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I have such vivid memories of each occasion. Even now, as a an ancient gimmer, I can still recall the taste and the disbelief that I was eating something so delicious.

OMG, devilled eggs! I used to make these, you'd scoop out the yolk of a hard boiled egg, mix it with something (brown sauce maybe?!) and pipe it back into the egg. What a faff!

OMG cottage cheese, grim! Sometimes with pineapple in it. My mum used to have it on Ryvita which have got to be the most disgusting cardboard tasting things in the world.

And the Nimble bread advert! "she flies like a bird in the sky" with a woman floating up to the sky in a hot air balloon IIRC, she was THAT light from eating Nimble low calorie bread. Ewww

Yes, full of mince and other super cheap cuts of meat!

Another sweet one, Waitrose used to make a syllabub in their desserts chiller, they were absolutely gorgeous. I worked just yards from a brand new Waitrose around the mid 70s and me and a colleague ate them by the bucketload.

When I got married, one wedding present was a Good Housekeeping cookbook and they had a recipe for syllabub in it. Nothing like the Waitrose one but it was such a light, citrussy pudding if you had a heavy meal. I made it many times to lots of complimentary remarks from guests. I'd make it now but the book went to the charity shop years back and I didn't copy the recipe before it went.

Might look online see if I can find the original recipe.

Pizza subs. We had some the other day. Meat or cheese and tomato. I think Fundus used to do them but Tesco do their own.

This formed piece of meat,like a burger but in a rib shape and had Chinese flavouring.

Sponge pudding in the tins 🥰

Boil in the bag cod in parsley sauce. My pre-veggie days 😛

Yes I remember These! I believe they still exit.
I would grate a lot of cheese on top and have with mash potatoes and carrot

This is the one on their website. Sounds lovely. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/food/recipes/a535654/citrus-syllabub-cream/

Chicken fricassee
Cheese soufflé
Fruit flan (shop bought sponge flan case, tinned mandarins set in orange jelly, and served with nestles tinned cream or evaporated milk)

Pink lady - little bottles next to the Babycham in pubs.
Home made hedgehog birthday cakes, swathed in chocolate butter icing with chocolate buttons for the spines 😆
Cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks pinned into an orange.
Pink custard for school dinners.
Funny feet Pink ice lollies in the shape of feet.
Kp outer spacers snacks.
The arrival of slush puppies machines - the blue one used to stain your whole mouth.
Caribbean Irish coffees with a slug of rum in.
The 'hand and spring' cheap cut of pork that was tough as old boots.
Jelly made with a dash of evaporated milk so it's creamy coloured.

I loved funny feet ice lollies, also funny faces.
Just remembered Sports biscuits and Top Deck lemonade shandy.

It's very similar Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g but the one in the cook book, you didn't need to warm it, I used white wine or on occasion a drop of sherry although any alcohol would do I would think and sprinkled a crushed up chocolate flake over the top.

How sophisticated was I ...😁

Breaded mushrooms starter with a blue cheese or garlic dip and a little tiny bit of a side salad - missed !

@AutumnLover1989 they were called Findus ‘French Bread Pizza’ and I loved them, the ones you get now arent the same, I have tried Chicago town they’re okay, but whatever you do do not buy the Lidl four pack I rarely throw food away but they went binward. What are the Tesco ones like ?

We liked them :) Worth a try. You might enjoy them. I think it was £1 and you get 2 in a box 😀👍

Oh wow, I remember this as well! Horrible but was thought the height of sophistication!

I also remember making Irish coffee in the restaurant. You had to put sugar in as it made it easier to float the cream, then a spoon into the (wine!) glass to conduct the heat so the glass didn't crack, then you'd stir the coffee and pour the cream onto the coffee over the back of a spoon. If it sank we'd have to start all over again!

It looked like this one here: https://recipereminiscing.wordpress.com/2017/01/12/the-real-story-about-irish-coffee-and-how-it-was-invented/

@TheStroppyFeminist i LOVED the breaded mushrooms ❤️- you can get them fresh or frozen now but they’re awful all wet inside, they are baked in the oven but the restaurant ones were deep fried

I love an Irish Coffee! They are still available in many restaurants.

I used to like them too!

I used to groan if anyone ordered an Irish coffee because they didn't always go right!

I was born in 84, but reading this thread quite a lot of it feels fairly familiar.

Those melon boats/avocados with lemon and olive oil where the stone used to be were my mum's absolutely standard starters. She still does avocado like that. And tomato juice at my granny's.

The ceremony of putting out three little bowls on the table when you had curry - one with yoghurt, one with sliced banana and one with mango chutney.

Lovely old-fashioned ploughman's lunches - choice of cheddar or stilton, huge brown pickled onions (my favourite bit) and doorsteps of bread. With a shandy. I can remember being about 6 (we'd just moved house so I can date it fairly accurately) and my dad bringing out the plates of ploughman's lunches to us in the pub garden, and shandies for me and my brother. Bitter shandy, probably about 50/50 with the lemonade. You wouldn't get away with that now!

My granny's lovely light Victoria sponge, with a pattern of icing sugar over the top made by shaking it through a doily.

I long for a proper pub ploughmans with proper crusty cob bread ❤️

God I love tournados Rossini! … I remember these toast topper in tins, highly processed but loved the bright pink can, think it was curry chicken!
also loved cheese crispy pancakes!
my mum used to make curry using chicken with Santana and apple chunks 😵‍💫 … and sausage risotto … one of my favourites!!

OMG I remember that in the restaurant I worked in: banana with curry! Ewww!

ETA I also remember it being fine for kids to have a shandy, omg.