70s Dinner Party: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly of Retro Food

(Hardback)

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Description

Spaghetti in aspic, anyone Revel in astonishing dishes from yesteryear- Stuffed Cocktail Grapes, Savoury Sausage Salad, a spunky Shrimp-Salmon Mould and so much more, from the cult Twitter account Spaghetti in aspic, anyone Revel in astonishing dishes from yesteryear- Stuffed Cocktail Grapes, Savoury Sausage Salad, a spunky Shrimp-Salmon Mould and so much more. Anna Pallai was brought up on 1970s stalwarts of stuffed peppers, meatloaf and platters of slightly greying hardboiled eggs. When she rediscovered her mother's grease-stained 70s cookbooks, she knew she needed to share them with the world, and so the hit Twitter account @70s_Party was born. Harking back to a simpler pre-Instagram, pre-clean-eating era, when the only concern for your dinner party was whether your aspic would set in time, this is a joyful celebration of food that can give you gout just by looking at it. Covering all the essentials, from starters through to desserts, dinner party etiquette (just how does one start to eat a swan fashioned from a hardboiled egg) and the dreaded 'foreign' food, there's no potato-fashioned-as-a-stone left unturned.

Reviews

The funniest book Ive seen so far this year Perfect deadpan wit. Part social history, part Dadaist artwork. -- Jonathan Coe * Guardian, Book of the Year *
The 70s Dinner Party book is stuffed to the gills with jaw-dropping images that feel like theyre from another world, never mind another decade. -- Louise Rhind-Tutt * i *
[A] hilarious new book. * Sainsbury's Magazine *
Each photo is garnished by Pallai's swift and witty take on the image in question, and the result is hilarious. -- Erica Wagner * Harper's Bazaar UK *
It is a book of photographs and wry, very funny captions. -- Rose Prince * Spectator, Book of the Year *

Author Bio

Anna Pallai is a PR and agent and formerly Publicity Director at Faber where she helped manage the publishing careers of Harry Hill, Ricky Gervais, Richard Ayoade, David Mitchell and numerous others. She was born midway through the 1970s and vividly recalls the period of 1975-80 as being a personal culinary nadir. Having been forcefed devilled eggs, stuffed peppers and Hungarian meat stews of dubious origin from birth, she went vegetarian aged twelve and hasn't looked back since.