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!

My mum’s legendary sherry trifle, legendary because the amount of sherry put in was off the scale....”Don’t light a match near one of your mother’s trifles” was my Dad’s regular warning.

Oh yes, I remember taking tins of shandy on school trips and kids pretending they were drunk while teachers just rolled their eyes and wandered off for a crafty fag.😆
The innocence of it all.

Late 1980s, I remember going to a popular curry house in Birmingham and ordering "the special" which one of my colleagues had told me was unmissable. It was bananas, pineapple, apple and sultanas in curry sauce. Not inedible (I'm not a picky eater), but not something I'd have chosen if the ingredients had been listed on the menu.

I was only small in the 80s so no fancy stuff for me but I do remember fiendish feet yogurts and having St Ivel spread on my sandwiches.
Also remember the Heinz steamed puddings. I really liked them!

Also remember having evaporated milk a lot. For pudding we often had a fruit flan often with tinned mandarins poured ontop of a shop bought base and lemon meringue pie.
I also loved Black Forest gateaux.

I’d forgotten about the pink custard! I loved that so much.

Was your mum my mum…?😂 I was about to say the exact same thing.

I've still got those cards! And use some of them. I had a subscription, and got a pack each month. The pizzas mentioned upthread were Findus French Bread Pizzas.

Piccalilli. Doughnuts in a can. Salad cream. Tinned meat pies. Junket. Semolina with raspberry jam. Spam fritters. Steak and kidney pie. Gammon with pineapple slices. Funny feet ice creams. Horlicks tablets. Fondue.

Early 1970s whenever we went out to a disco, the first alcoholic drinks we bought were Pony and Cherry B.

Later I moved on to Bacardi and coke and my two friends drank Port and Lemon and Cinzano and Lemonade.

I used to drink Babycham.

I rediscovered Babycham and Snowballs a few Christmas' ago. Really enjoyed them!

I remember my mother making a different kind of syllabub - I think you whisked the egg yolks over a bowl of warm water, then added marsala wine, lemon zest and sugar and whisked until it increased in volume. It was definitely served warm and tasted very alcoholic! Am I wrong?

@PistachioTiramisu is that a Zabaglione? Used to be served with some kind of almond biscuit in Italian restaurants

Oh yes, you are right! I kind of thought it was called something different from syllabub! Sorry (it is nice though!).

I'm sure I read somewhere that Nimble was ordinary bread but thinner and tiny slices.
Mmm Ryvita edible cardboard.

Nimble and Slimcea were indeed tiny little slices, and weight for weight the bread was similar in calorie content to normal bread. Back in the days before nutritional labelling of food, the marketing could gloss over that and just quote calories per slice.

The dimpled side of Ryvita could hold a lot of butter. My mum was a perennial dieter and used to get cross with my sister and me for having snacks of "her" crispbread improved by the addition of its own weight in butter or Dairylea.

Cremola Foam
Campbells tinned meatballs
Tinned fruit with evaporated milk
Toast toppers
Boil in the bag fish
Boil in the bag roast beef
Tinned Ambrosia rice with jam
Angel Delight
Kia-ora squash
Um Bongo

I still love Ambrosia rice pudding. IMO, it was much creamier than DM’s home made somehow!

My mother had a thing for Kraft dinners, which consisted of pasta and cheese in a box. Shecwas born in Canada but came to the UK as a child - for her family this was one of the few processed products from their time over there you could get here.

I hated it. The cheese was horrible.

Weirdly she never seemed to consider that you could buy pasta and cheese and make your own!

Primula squeezy cheese
Tomato sauce on the table in a plastic tomato shaped squeezy bottle
Findus crispy pancakes
Ice magic
Mum thought the height of sophistication was to cook spaghetti and serve it with tomato ketchup (huge apologies to any Italian people reading this, or indeed anyone with tastebuds - she knew not what she did…)
Pineapple and cheese on cocktail sticks
Mini gherkins
Bananas in custard
Tinned fruit and custard
Fray Bentos pies
Pressed tongue and tomato ketchup sandwiches 🤮
Boiled egg and tomato sandwiches - she would put the tomatoes in boiling water to remove the skins