Let's Have A Seventies Party

And a nervous breakdown - in that order

While I’m beavering away in the background, polishing up my choices for the rest of my ongoing list of art I’d like to hang on my wall, I have been replying to your comments on my Drawing Pin Cassandra post and it has made me think deeply about the food and drink at the parties of yesteryear. There is a lot to unpack.

Jo Jo

posted a comment to say that in Australia, they also had cheese and pineapple on sticks at parties, but they were interspersed with cheese and cocktail onions on sticks and stuck in half an orange. In the UK, our cheese and pineapple hedgehogs were also stuck into half an orange, but for some reason it was de rigueur to cover the orange in tinfoil. I wonder why this was? Why was the hedgehog considered more realistic if it was silver? Surely leaving the orange au naturale would have worked better, with the orange skin of the orange matching the orange cubes of cheese? It’s a strong aesthetic but it was inexplicably shunned in favour of the hedgehog space race.

We also had other things on sticks stuck into oranges at our parties. Cheese and cocktail onions, small sausages and just naked cocktail onions, all on their own, separate, citrus islands. None of the other orange/stick creations were called hedgehogs though. They weren’t even called other, spiny animals. Why wasn’t there a cocktail onion sea urchin or a Sausage echidna? It’s not like we were thinking: ‘I can totally get on board with a cheese and pineapple hedgehog, but a cocktail onion sea urchin? That’s just a step too far. Are they mad? I’m boycotting the Party Foods Marketing Board from now on. It’s just political correctness gone mad.’

I never really understood the cocktail onion on a stick thing, to be honest. They were an absolute bastard to do. Diminutive, round, wet onions dripping with vinegar, slithering about as you tried to stab them with a sharpened stick. It was like harpooning a minnow. I can still recall the brutal sting as the inevitable flesh wounds from clumsily wielding a razor sharp stick, filled with tart vinegar. This is a job for professional mixologists (or Tom Cruise) who serve Gibsons in smoky bars where louche things happen after dark. This is not a job for a harassed mother with thirty, hysterical six year olds swirling round her ankles.

Things on sticks was very much a cornerstone of every party I attended as a child. It wasn’t just children’s parties. Adult parties also had sticks. I suspect that they were less weaponised at grown up parties than they were at the ones for kids. I once went to a party where two brothers terrorised all the attendees by using cocktail sticks like they were intent on fighting their way out of prison, armed to the teeth. Adults, who were conspicuous by their absence, lying on the floor in the kitchen having a breakdown as they undoubtedly were, were called in when all the injured kids were grouped on one side of the room, while the armed and dangerous brothers held the flag at the other. There was a mutiny as we all showed off an impressive range and depth of stab wounds and refused to ‘play nicely,’ with the diminutive Kray twins.

Every family I knew had a box of spilled cocktail sticks in their drawer of random, useful items growing up. If you were ever in need of a cocktail stick, there was always one to hand. Nowadays, it is a stickless desert. I wonder how many cocktail stick manufacturers thought they were set for life in the Seventies and Eighties only to find themselves begging for Family Tax Credits once the Nineties hoved into view and parties became the domaine of the hand friendly Cheese String?

June Girvin

reminded me of the fashion for carving tomatoes and radishes into crowns, or in my granny’s case, roses. These days, the last bastions of this dying art are certain Thai restaurants I’ve been to, where they take vegetable carving very seriously. I once had dinner at a place where they had carved what seemed to be a large chunk of swede into a strikingly realistic chrysanthemum. I have considerable respect for that. I once spent an incredibly bleak Halloween in Wales in the Nineties where six of us spent three hours attempting to carve a swede into a Jack o’lantern using a blunt pen knife. I am still triggered by the smell of warm swede.

Another showstopper on the party circuit was eggs. As a child I was led to believe that my future would feature far more boiled eggs than it does (see also quicksand and being sucked into the workings of a combine harvester - thanks, public information films). Along with the ubiquitous egg and cress sandwiches (cress, another strong feature of childhood meals that has fallen by the wayside), there were always plates with rings of naked boiled egg on, or if you were at a more socially mobile event, devilled eggs. Preparation for any celebration was always marked by the sulphurous whiff of eggs boiling. Limbering up for the seventh circle of hell that parties ushered in.

Dessert wise, there was jelly, in all its glorious shapes and sizes. My mum was an absolute mistress of the jelly and would make striped jelly, fizzy jelly and jelly in the shape of rabbits with jelly grass trembling around its swaying, gelatinous form. There was an absolutely lethal game which involved two contestants smashing up bowls of jelly and sucking it up through a straw which we discovered as teenagers and which made several parties we went to infamous, as we mixed jelly and alcohol to devastating effect. My friend Rachel’s, eighteenth birthday party got so out of hand that when her parents came home they found their cutlery drawer full of jelly, someone smothered in jelly attempting to swim in a pond the size of a wash basin and a several sticky traffic cones in their bed. Frankly, it’s amazing they still speak to me.

Finally, let’s give it up for the blancmange. You still encounter a jelly or two out in the wild these days. Those jelly wizards at Bompas and Parr made jelly architectural and cool for a moment or two. Even my mother at her creative heights never managed this.

But blancmange has fallen so far out of fashion that you can’t even hear it hitting bottom.

The picture of this package is seriously Proustian for me. You could buy blancmange in several flavours. Sometimes, if we had run out of custard, my mum would whip up a blancmange and just not let it set. I always ate this quickly in case it set inside me and caused lasting physical damage in my future life. ‘Oh, did you hear that she has to survive on air and Complan now? Yeah, she had a blancmange incident when she was a kid? I know, right? Who would think to eat it before it had set properly?’

It was weird. Sort of like a mousse but set like a jelly, and made with milk instead of water. For years I thought it had gone out of fashion because it was food for diabetics. I believed this because my great aunty Esther was diabetic and every time she came for tea, my mum would panic about what to feed her and make a blancmange, which she never ate, because it turns out that blancmange is not an appropriate food for someone with diabetes. I wonder now if Esther dreaded coming to visit us because she thought we were trying to slowly murder her, one blancmange at a time?

I’ll leave you with this link to the superb, John Hegley doing his brilliant poem about blancmange. Apart from me, he’s the only person I’ve ever heard talking about it since 1978,