The decade that taste forgot! Hideous 1970s recipes revealed (2024)

Are you bored of seeing images of artfully-placed avocados, rainbow-coloured smoothies and gluten-free breakfasts on social media?

If so, 70s Dinner Party (@70s_party) offers an antidote to all the 'smug' Instagram snaps. Created by publisher Anna Pallai, 40, the feed features photographs of such vintage dishes as vegetables in aspic, an enormous fruit cake tower centrepiece and stuffed co*cktail grapes.

London-based Anna started the Twitter account 'for a laugh' after flicking through her mother's old recipe books and realising how 'hideous' the dishes looked.

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Anna's Twitter feed, which she is planning to turn into a book, is a glimpse into a lost world of hostesses swathed in chiffon, elaborate, over-the-top techniques and a love of stuffing ingredients inside each other such as prawn terrine in a lettuce or mince inside mashed potatoes.

And no meal is complete without the ever-present sprigs of parsley to give it some Mediterranean sophistication.

With 70s Dinner Party attracting over 9,000 followers, Anna told FEMAIL: 'I'd always liked looking through my Mum's old cookbooks and the older I got, the funnier the recipes seemed.

'I started off posting pictures on Facebook but realised that my friends might not appreciate a constant stream of ugly food.

'I thought a dedicated Twitter feed would be kinder on their eyes, but really I just did it for a laugh.'

The account has become a guilty pleasure for foodies. It features laugh-out-loud pictures of Seventies classics such as prawn co*cktail and cream cheese piped onto crackers.

Discussing the over-the-top presentation, Anna said: 'It's fairly shocking on the whole but that's not to say that people in years to come won't think the presentation today is just as awful.'

She added: 'And at least there wasn't seemingly the smugness attached to presentation then - certainly no clean eating hashtags.'

The collection of pictures have been taken from her 72-year-old mother Chris Payne's Robert Carrier and Betty Crocker cookbooks.

Ms Payne served up similar creations when Anna was a child.

The bio for the comical Twitter account reads: 'If it's ticked, my Mum's cooked it. May contain nuts and food from other decades.'

She has also had a go at some of the elaborate dishes herself: 'One of the first things I remember making is a shepherds pie that had sliced sausages for the walls and peas for the roof.

'I think that would still be a standout dish for any Michelin star restaurant.'

Social media users have been quick to comment on the dishes.

One wrote, 'I remember some of this horrific stuff. It lasted well into the '80s in many troubled, middle-class households.'

While another added, 'If you don't follow @70s_party you will never know the meaning of fear.'