This will impress them: baked stuffed salmon. Photograph: Recipe Card Curtin Publications

70s dinner party food: If only we’d had Instagram back then

This article is more than 7 years old

They call the 1970s the decade taste forgot. But that’s unfair – no one could forget these dishes

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.

Statement veg: cauliflower surprise with burgers and tomatoes. Photograph: Birds Eye Recipe Cards

My childhood dinner times were often bizarre, sometimes surreal and occasionally quite terrifying. What’s weird is that, nowadays, most people’s dinners are far less interesting to look at – and yet they are far more likely to take photographs of them. There was a time when food was food. You cooked it, you moulded it, you let it set and then you covered it with chopped boiled egg and olives. Then you just ate the lot and tried to put the whole horrible experience behind you.

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.