Prawn cocktails, after-dinner mints: the food trends we once dined out on

THANKS to time, and MasterChef, some of our favourite foods have faded into obscurity as restaurants and dinner parties move on with the latest trends, but here is a sampling of forgotten favourites.

FOOD is like fashion — the things that were once acceptable become pretty dorky with the benefit of time and hindsight.

Still, it’s great to stroll down memory lane to recall the food fashions we enjoyed at restaurants, pubs and dinner parties with family and friends. Here are a few food trends we’ve left behind.

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PRAWN COCKTAILS

It’s hard to imagine, but this concoction of prawn meat, salad greens and Thousand Island dressing, served cold and often in a long, tall parfait glass, was once the height of sophistication at restaurants, pubs and clubs all over Australia.

While the daggy old prawn cocktail has fallen out of favour in the mainstream, it seems the hipster set has embraced them with gusto in recent years. Jamie Oliver has a recipe for them. So does Nigella Lawson, and cookbooks boasting a 21st-century prawn cocktail abound these days.

The hipster set has embraced the daggy old prawn cocktail with gusto in recent years.

THE AUSTRALIAN MENU AT CHINESE RESTAURANTS

Once upon a time, you could go one of two ways when eating at a Chinese restaurant. You could order your standard No.8, No.25, No.63 and No.89 with a little bucket of steamed rice to share or, if you didn’t fancy that “foreign” stuff, you could order from the Australian menu.

Yep. Sausages and chips. Lamb chops and chips. Steak and chips at the more salubrious Chinese eateries.

Thankfully, the Australian menu has disappeared from all but the oldest of old school suburban Chinese restaurants as Australian tastes have become more and more Asianised through the decades.

Once upon a time, you could also order from the Australian menu at a Chinese restaurant.

POTS AND PANS FOR CHINESE TAKEAWAY

In the days before plastic containers were available, it wasn’t uncommon for people to go down to their local Chinese restaurant with pots and pans to carry home Chinese takeaway for the family.

It was a great way to cart the food home and it could be reheated on the stove right away.

A prepared casserole was a feature of the popular ‘progressive dinners’ of the ’60s and ’70s.

PROGRESSIVE DINNERS

This was a favourite in the 1960s and ’70s but isn’t all that common today. It was dinner on the move. Your family might have prepared a casserole of some dish that was easily shared with a big group of guests.

Once the grub ran out at your place, everyone jumped into their cars and headed to the next house for more food. Then another house would put on a spread for the guests, and so on.

These progressive dinner nights were an absolute hoot once, but they seem to have fallen out of favour in the modern world.

When was the last time you saw cocktail onions at a dinner party?

COCKTAIL ONIONS

They’re still available, so someone must be buying them, but when was the last time you saw cocktail onions at a dinner party?

Cocktail onions came in red, green and white varieties and added a splash of colour to dinner party snack trays alongside cubes of processed cheddar cheese and slices of kabana.

Carpetbag steak was once a pub meal staple.

CARPETBAG STEAK AND OTHER PUB FAVOURITES

This one was once a pub meal staple. Take a slab of steak, stuff it with oysters and sear it on the grill. I haven’t seen a carpetbag steak on a pub menu for decades. I’d still give one a big, big nudge.

Ham steak and pineapple was once a pub classic, too. Those discs of processed ham and slices of thin pineapple would caramelise on the grill in the pub kitchen.

That combination was just meant to be. Add some iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato and a heaping helping of chips, and this was counter meal nirvana.

When was the last time you saw brains, or steak and kidney on a pub chalkboard?

And then there was basic old bangers and mash. Or rissoles with mash, drowned in thick, salty brown gravy. Magic.

Perhaps some of these favourites and others have largely disappeared because we’re all a more demanding bunch these days.

Once upon a time, there was only one pre-counter bread option, and it didn’t cost a thing.

A SLICE OF BREAD WITH YOUR COUNTER MEAL

The diners of yesteryear would have been baffled with the offer of a seeded mustard cob loaf, a medley of dips with Turkish bread or a platter of bruschetta with your counter meal, all at $12 a throw.

Once upon a time, there was only one pre-counter bread option, and it didn’t cost a thing — the trusty old slice of white bread with butter.

Our palettes are clearly more sophisticated now, but there was nothing better than a slice of white bread so soft and doughy that you could squish it into a ball and eat it like an apple.

Blue Nun was one of the favourite brands to pair with meals in the ’70s.

MORE WINE!

By the 1970s, wine was very much a part of our dining habits, especially once liquor laws were eased to allow bring-your-own alcohol consumption. Favourite brands included Mateus, Liebfrauwine, Ben Ean, Blue Nun, Black Duck or the trusty old cask of Coolabah that we paired with our meals. Very classy.

After-dinner mints added a bit of style and class to the evening’s repast. Picture: Rob Palmer

AFTER DINNER MINTS

Years ago, the folks from Red Tulip Chocolates were on to a winner with After Dinner Mints — the best way to finish a meal, whether at a restaurant or at home with friends and family.

These wafter-thin little slices of minty cream, enveloped in dark chocolate, somehow added a bit of style and class to the evening’s repast.

There was a time when crayfish was considered a working person’s pleasure.

A CHEAP CRAYFISH TO SHARE WITH YOUR MATES

They are a delicacy these days, but there was a time when crayfish was considered a working person’s pleasure.

In Melbourne, crayfish were once cheap and plentiful, and if you were dropping around to a mate’s house for drinks on a Saturday afternoon, it was probably considered rude if you turned up without a couple of longneck and a cray wrapped in paper tucked under your arm.

The status of the humble crayfish began to change in the 1980s when they became a target for the cashed-up Japanese market and, later, the Chinese discovered a taste for these crusty little gems.

Microwave meals were all the rage in the 80s.

MICROWAVE COOKING

The dawn of the microwave age brought with it a swag of hideous Frankenstein-esque food creations.

The microwave should be used to defrost or re-heat food.

At the beginning of the 1980s, though, folks were determined to roast meat, bake cakes and cook all manner of slices designed to be both healthy and hideously unattractive.

There was once a magazine recipe that called for microwavers to roast a chook in the rotating radiation box but to paint the skin with Vegemite so that it would brown.

I once witnessed a family friend bouncing a microwave zucchini slice on his kitchen floor like a sickly green square of rubber.

Real barbecues in the ’70s were brick fireplaces.

BARBECUING WITH FIRE

Forget about your fancy six-burner gas barbecues with rotisseries and a side burner

for your wok as the centrepiece of your flash outdoor kitchen.

Real barbecues are brick fireplaces at the end of your concrete patio with heat from kindling and firewood to get your single steel hotplate up to a searing temperature hot enough to blacken your meat in seconds flat.

Yep, pass the Cheezels, chuck me a tinnie and keep the garden furniture away from the flames so hot they’ll melt your banana lounges at 10 paces.

The menfolk gather to stare at the fire while the barbecue chops and snags burn ferociously, then drown the lot in good, old-fashioned tomato sauce and enjoy the charcoal flavour. Salad strictly optional.

@JDwritesalot