Frankfurter Crown -- Before there was Instagram, there were recipe cards. Author Anna Pallai revisits the glory days of food photography in her book "70s Dinner Party: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly of Retro Food."
Seafood mousse -- While going through her mother's binders of recipes, Pallai uncovered outlandish, and often nightmarish, creations such as this fish.
Tomato Aspic -- Aspic, a savory jello rarely to be found on modern dinner tables, features heavily, often with meat or vegetables suspended inside it.
Piquant Meat Loaf -- Growing up in London in the 1970s with a Hungarian father, there was a lot of meat in Pallai's household. She's now a vegetarian.
Carrot Ring with Peas -- A lot of the dishes are a mix of the prosaic and the exotic. Here, elegant geometry elevates plain old carrots and peas.
Mushroom canapes -- On a diet? After you've eaten that grapefruit for breakfast, you can snack midday on plain crackers, limp mushrooms and a smear of tomato puree.
Tomatoes, sausages and peas -- To a British public as yet unaccustomed to fresh salads, some well-placed sausages provide reassurance that it is indeed a proper dinner.
Orange dessert -- These days, we can bore our friends with our food and our photos via social media. In the 1970s, you had to offer them a full dinner before unleashing the slide show of your camping vacation in France.
Launch party -- For the book's launch party, Anna Pallai hired food stylist Lottie Bone to recreate dishes featured in "70s Dinner Party."
Sandwich loaf -- This dish was Pallai's personal favorite. It's "an entire loaf of bread sliced horizontally with different fillings," then frosted with a "green-tinted cream cheese."
Cauliflower Surprise -- This, says Pallai, is "a whole cauliflower on a bed of white sauce, but sectioned into it are [frozen food brand] Bird's Eye beef burgers." Definitely surprising.
Cucumber and Grape Mold -- The mold here refers to the lime jello being shaped in a decorative container, rather than the greenish growth which develops on rotten food. We think.
Fanny Craddock's swans -- The garish heyday of notoriously flamboyant English cook Fanny Craddock was before the era covered by "70s Dinner Party," but Pallai couldn't resist including one of her recipes at the party. These boiled-egg swans, with inedible pipe-cleaner necks, are served on a lake of blue-tinted potato mash.
The terrifying world of 1970s party food
Story highlights
New book "70s Dinner Party" showcases vintage food photography
Writer Anna Pallai inspired by mother's collection of recipe cards
CNN —
Ham and bananas hollandaise. Eggs in a cage. Beef tingler.
In the days before Instagram, before clean eating and kombucha, aspirational cooking – in 1970s Britain at least – meant a showstopper dinner party.
Set-piece dishes were designed to astound, and often confound.
Inspiration came from recipe cards and cook books, where the new art of food photography was entering its difficult, experimental teenage years.
Londoner Anna Pallai has brought this more innocent food era back to life via her 70s Dinner Party accounts on Twitter and Tumblr and now a book, “70s Dinner Party: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly of Retro Food.”
The bland and the bewildering
The book is partly “a reaction against the self-satisfied nature of some food now, and the virtuousness that’s meant to go with clean eating and healthy eating,” Pallai tells CNN.
“It’s not like I advocate eating unhealthily, but I do think the food of the ’70s and that period was cooked to be enjoyed by other people, not only visually, but also to be eaten.
“Whereas now it’s very much about ‘look at this healthy thing I made for myself.’
“I far prefer something that includes others.”
The dishes’ names leap out as dazzling combinations of the exotic and the prosaic – Emerald Cantaloupe, Fish Whirls, Wurstel Sausage in Aspic.
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Suspended meat
While these were dishes designed to impress, they were also sturdy structures built to withstand hours of standing about waiting for guests to arrive.
If that meant suspending meat in savory jello or layering green mashed potato with boiled eggs and sliced olives, then so be it.
Cauliflower Surprise: Those brown bits are beefburgers.
Some dishes could pass as cutting-edge contemporary art – Mushrooms under Glass, Brains in Butter.
Others sound like the kind of X-rated games found at the swingers parties of feverish imagination – Ladies’ Seafood Thermidor, Italian Bananas, Prune Whip.
But, says Pallai: “What I didn’t want to do was just unnecessarily mock the food of the time.
“It’s very affectionate and there’s lots of things I far prefer about it.”
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Just as we chuckle about the fashions we wore in earlier decades, the mason jars and avocado toast of our own era are likely to get old as quickly as a cheese-and-pineapple hedgehog on a doily.
“It’s the colors and the styling,” says Pallai. “There were quite a lot of things that looked pretty awful but when you boil it down, it’s actually just how it’s been shot.
“Things date and our food will date in the same way.”
