Menu ideas for 1980's themed dinner party

[BoRhap]

Can anyone give me some ideas for 1980s food. Preferably home cooked stuff. Tempting as it is to serve Findus Crispy Pancakes I'm not sure my guests would actually eat them.

Pot noodle >nods

I was in my 20s in the 80s and learning to cook the day to day stuff as well as set pieces. I remember a few little brown wholefood and vegetarian recipe books. As well as Delia (my Bible), I had Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern cookery book, all Elizabeth David's cookery books, some Jane Grigson, some Rose Elliott and assorted other vegetarian cookery books. We weren't vegetarian but didn't want to eat nothing but meat. The range of fruit, veg, pulses, spices, herbs etc was increasing all the time.

What you cook for an 80s meal depends a lot on what your intention is. If it's to make everyone laugh you'd go for half a grapefruit for starter, vol au vents filled with M&S tinned creamed chicken or frozen chicken kiev, Viennetta for pudding.

But if you want something that works as a good menu, try these:

Avocado and prawn cocktail, including iceberg lettuce, which was new to the UK in the 80s (or so I've just found out via Google) - avocado was very novel, prawn cocktail was very popular

Pork chops with cream and mushrooms - she's updated this recipe a bit from the 80s version, no bad thing, ordinary cream did split but it tasted delicious

Fresh fruit salad including kiwi fruits, a great novelty in the 80s - this might be the moment to add Viennetta on the side! Or cheesecake, which I recall being extremely popular back then.

Agree most of these were eighties.

Banoffee pie was early nineties.

Blue Nun German white wine was eighties.

As others have said, lots of these suggestions ate 70s not 80s

I disagree

That was the big night out at Berni Inns.
Anybody remember this.
Planned weeks in advance

Yep. Also, I think, Schooner Inns. That's when it was fashionable to send your steak back if it wasn't cooked to your liking.

For me the 80s were all about lasagne and garlic bread. Every time you went to someone's house that's what you had. Now it's bog standard but it was quite interesting and creative then.

My parents 80s dinner parties were usually prawn cocktail or smoked salmon with prawns in a half avocado. They loved fondue or cheese soufffle for the main course. Massive French stick. And dessert was usually profiteroles. Huge stack of them.

This thread has made me smile! I was a teenager learning to "cook" for myself & used to eat lean cuisine ready meals rubbery scrambled eggs. We were quite posh...

I remember soda streams being the in thing.

Agree Delia is the way to go at least then you'll get a decent meal

& the lean cuisine was always chicken in some weird grey sauce and wild rice to distract from there only being two dessert spoons worth of rice

Rocket and shaved parmesan salad, whatever you cook.

Not from the 80s, surely. I didn't hear of rocket until the 2000s.

I think it depends where you lived and how posh you were. A pp said they had spag bol in the 70s. But in northern working class areas it didn’t appear till late 80s. In many cases what people think of as 80s food is what their parents learned to cook in the 70s. Old habits die hard. It was only about ten years ago that my DF condescended to try pasta and pizza! My DM still won’t eat yogurt because it’s “foreign slop”.

I think you'd have to have been very posh to eat rocket in the 1980s while the rest of us were oohing and aahing over newfangled iceberg lettuce.

I think you could pass off a little glass of orange juice off as a starter as long as you stick it on a little paper doilies. (That was always my starter in Faulty Towers style hotels in Devon or Cornwall)!!!

Breaded or Garlic Mushrooms with a dip I think were 1980’s seem to remember very popular in my local Beefeater, also horn of plenty which was a brandy snap filled with berries, cream and ice cream I think. Definitely agree about lasagne and garlic bread, steak, and just remembered Avacodo Vinagerette

Prawn cocktail.
Black Forest gateau. Sara Lee