The terrifying world of 1970s party food | CNN (2024)

Seafood mousse -- While going through her mother's binders of recipes, Pallai uncovered outlandish, and often nightmarish, creations such as this fish.

Tomato Aspic -- Aspic, a savory jello rarely to be found on modern dinner tables, features heavily, often with meat or vegetables suspended inside it.

Piquant Meat Loaf -- Growing up in London in the 1970s with a Hungarian father, there was a lot of meat in Pallai's household. She's now a vegetarian.

Carrot Ring with Peas -- A lot of the dishes are a mix of the prosaic and the exotic. Here, elegant geometry elevates plain old carrots and peas.

Mushroom canapes -- On a diet? After you've eaten that grapefruit for breakfast, you can snack midday on plain crackers, limp mushrooms and a smear of tomato puree.

Tomatoes, sausages and peas -- To a British public as yet unaccustomed to fresh salads, some well-placed sausages provide reassurance that it is indeed a proper dinner.

Orange dessert -- These days, we can bore our friends with our food and our photos via social media. In the 1970s, you had to offer them a full dinner before unleashing the slide show of your camping vacation in France.

Launch party -- For the book's launch party, Anna Pallai hired food stylist Lottie Bone to recreate dishes featured in "70s Dinner Party."

Sandwich loaf -- This dish was Pallai's personal favorite. It's "an entire loaf of bread sliced horizontally with different fillings," then frosted with a "green-tinted cream cheese."

Cauliflower Surprise -- This, says Pallai, is "a whole cauliflower on a bed of white sauce, but sectioned into it are [frozen food brand] Bird's Eye beef burgers." Definitely surprising.

Cucumber and Grape Mold -- The mold here refers to the lime jello being shaped in a decorative container, rather than the greenish growth which develops on rotten food. We think.

Fanny Craddock's swans -- The garish heyday of notoriously flamboyant English cook Fanny Craddock was before the era covered by "70s Dinner Party," but Pallai couldn't resist including one of her recipes at the party. These boiled-egg swans, with inedible pipe-cleaner necks, are served on a lake of blue-tinted potato mash.