They call the 1970s the decade taste forgot. But that’s unfair – no one could forget these dishes
This will impress them: baked stuffed salmon. Photograph: Recipe Card Curtin Publications
I grew up in a house where no celebration was complete without a platter of greying boiled eggs stuffed with salad cream. The crockery was heavy and brown and the air was always thick with fag smoke.
I guess loads of people who grew up in the 70s or early 80s remember a similar sort of set-up. And mine was worse than most given that my dad was from Hungary – a land where it will forever be 1975. Our meal times in southwest London were heavily tinged with a taste of Budapest, and it was not for the weak of stomach. You know how posh people conclude their dinners with an espresso and a little Italian biscuit? In my house, we finished it the Hungarian way: with a slab of speck (basically smoked lard), a dish of raw onions and a glass of pálinka. It’s not that the food didn’t taste nice. It was just that it looked appalling. And eventually gave you gout. I decided to save myself by going vegetarian when I was 12.
This was the era of the showboat dinner party, where the upwardly mobile British family would invite peers and colleagues into their homes in a bid to wow them via high-voltage, brightly coloured three-course extravaganzas. It was a time of meals that didn’t just taste out of this world, they looked out of this world, too. In the current climate of clean-eating, social media fascism, the 70s seem to signify a happier, more honest time. We want something that has the balls to be shamelessly, completely and proudly crap. We want a good, old-fashioned 70s dinner party.
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