Inspired “adult” party food of my childhood
Ah parties! In our little neighbourhood this meant it was either New Year's Eve or Election night. Us kids would be allowed to stay for a while to hand around the food and be patronised by adults before we were packed off to bed and the real fun started.
Memorable highlights of such suburban delights include:
The “snip, whisk, dip” dip: packet onion soup and reduced cream served with crisps
A cube of cheddar and a chunk of tinned pineapple skewered on a toothpick and artfully jabbed into half a grapefruit, hedgehog like
Crudités: always celery and carrot sticks, another hunk of cheddar and probably some gherkins
If things were a bit smaller or classier – the occasion would call for a round of prawn cocktails. Actually they were small tinned shrimps on a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce held together with this pink goo, misnamed as mayonnaise. The dressing involved condensed milk* and Worcestershire sauce. It was considered the height of sophistication
What forbidden grown up food did you use to covert as a child?
* the really scary is that if you search "shrimp cocktail" + "condensed milk" today you will get thousands of hits for cocktail sauce recipes ‘updated’ with exotic additions to the canned milk, like mango chutney or lime juice.
Memorable highlights of such suburban delights include:
The “snip, whisk, dip” dip: packet onion soup and reduced cream served with crisps
A cube of cheddar and a chunk of tinned pineapple skewered on a toothpick and artfully jabbed into half a grapefruit, hedgehog like
Crudités: always celery and carrot sticks, another hunk of cheddar and probably some gherkins
If things were a bit smaller or classier – the occasion would call for a round of prawn cocktails. Actually they were small tinned shrimps on a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce held together with this pink goo, misnamed as mayonnaise. The dressing involved condensed milk* and Worcestershire sauce. It was considered the height of sophistication
What forbidden grown up food did you use to covert as a child?
* the really scary is that if you search "shrimp cocktail" + "condensed milk" today you will get thousands of hits for cocktail sauce recipes ‘updated’ with exotic additions to the canned milk, like mango chutney or lime juice.
posted by GS at 8:38 am
5 Comments:
Any old sixties cookbooks have endearing photos of that kind of food.
Our parents baby-steps to sophisticated dining!
Everybody had special avocado shaped dishes into which half an avocado was placed with reverence and crowned with a prawn and some sauce which looked like mayo with a dash of tabasco ...
Green and red cocktail onions. I could never understand why they had to be green or red.
Back in the day, a party in the suburbs wasn't a true party until there were cheezels in a wooden bowl.
I didn't see an avocado til I was in my late teens. It was an exotic item in NZ and when we found it, we didn't really know what to do with it.
The other thing I remember were fancy breads - 1 crocodile shaped number comes to mind with maraccino cherries for eyes!
'Cheese Ball' - Philadelphia Cream Cheese mixed with french onion soup, chopped ham and gherkins. All mixed together, and rolled into a huge ball that you could dip the savoury shapes in to.
'Devils on Horseback', prunes wrapped in bacon and grilled.
'Porcupines' - an orange with toothpicks of kabana, cheese, gherkins, pickled onions stuck all over it.
'Curried Eggs' - with the filling piped back in.
Saveloys and dead horse.
And for dessert - chocolate ripple cake, followed by after dinner mints
Post a Comment
<< Home