Frances Whiting: Am I the only one who misses the cuisine of the ‘70s?
Meat loaf, apricot chicken, French onion dip and after dinner mints — what is not to love about the food of the greatest decade of all time, asks Frances Whiting. Keep your kale, I want to eat like it’s 1970 again.
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When I was in about Grade Seven, a friend asked me over to her house for a sleepover.
This invitation saw me fizzing like a can of shaken lemonade because this is what the promise of a sleepover does to small girls, but also because her house — and her parents, Roger and Carol, were unspeakably glamorous.
Even their names were glamorous. While the rest of us were all making do with parents called Wayne and Sandra, this girl had Roger and Carol — and sometimes she even called them that.
“Roger and Carol are being so annoying lately”, she’d sigh in the playground at lunchtime, and we’d all try to join in by agreeing that yes, our parents Shane and Beverley were really irritating too.
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Anyway, I was very excited to go to the glamorous Roger and Carol’s house, and can I say they did not let me down, particularly at dinnertime.
There we were, gathered around the table when Carol walked in proudly carrying a meat loaf on a tray surrounded — and I swear this is true — by pineapple rings.
Clearly we had reached peak glamour.
I looked at my friend, wild-eyed — what was this delicacy her mother had brought forth?
“It’s meat loaf”, she told me, then added triumphantly “It’s meat you can slice!”
Suffice to say “It’s meat you can slice” has been my go-to-phrase to capture the 1970s ever since.
Aah, the seventies, probably not the most amazing decade in terms of gourmet food and yet …
and yet lately, when I look at a menu and I see I can have the slow-baked, triple-seared tuna with glazed macadamia jus with organic garlic aioli, and curled kale with chopped watercress and roasted walnut salad, I find myself longing for the days of apricot chicken.
Remember apricot chicken?
It was chicken your mother had poured a can of tinned apricots over, and bunged it in the oven.
I’m not sure if it’s nostalgia, but lately I’ve had a bit of a hankering for food from my childhood days, otherwise known as the 1970s, otherwise known as the decade where French Onion dip was king.
No dinner party was complete without a bowl or two of French Onion dip, straight out of the packet mix and, if my culinary memory serves me correctly, absolutely delicious.
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My parents would occasionally give dinner parties, and my mother never wavered from her sure-fire hit menu … which I can faithfully recall here.
On arrival: tropical punch with mint, French Onion dip, cocktail onions (various colours).
Entree: in summer it was prawn cocktail with iceberg lettuce and seafood sauce. In winter, pumpkin soup with garlic bread.
Main: Summer or winter is was beef stroganoff with swirl of cream on top (fancy)
Dessert: Trifle.
No wonder her dinner parties were such a hit, particular at the end of the night when she brought the big guns: after dinner mints, followed by everyone smoking their heads off and talking loudly about Gough Whitlam.
Remember after dinner mints? They were so glamorous, weren’t they, individually nestled in those dark chocolate, paper sleeves?
And what about garlic prawns, served on a bed of white rice? Or the arrival of the carrot cake, with the cream cheese frosting? Or the cob loaf? Who doesn’t love a cob loaf at a party?
No, the more I think about it, the more I think the widespread derision that has been aimed at the food of the 1970s may be undeserved.
After all, this is the era that gave us “meat you can slice”.