Food is often likened to fashion. As with clothes, appetites are formed by trends. They are also sentimental. We pass down recipes in the same way we might offer a sibling a once-loved jumper. Our fondness of childhood dishes is rooted in the same stuff that evokes nostalgia for someone’s perfume.
My mother doesn’t wear perfume but she cooks a lot of comforting food. Her greatest hits, all passed down by her own mother in the 1960s and ’70s, include trifles, chocolate mousses and coronation chicken. Her worst: tuna, leeks and béchamel sauce baked with crisps on top. Her culinary repertoire is what you might call “retro”. But increasingly I find myself harking back to her cooking – even the tuna.
Prawn cocktail with cocktail sauce and mayo. Ginori 1735 Diva dessert plate, £85, and butter dishes, £90 each. All other props throughout, stylist’s own © Chris Brooks
Nostalgia for the ’70s buffet is growing. Prawn cocktail, devilled eggs, cheese cubes on sticks – these are “a shorthand for a connection to the past”, says food historian Polly Russell. She considers retro cuisine as being anything that was popular in the mid-20th century.
Jamie Shears, executive chef at Mayfair’s Mount Street Restaurant, launched a “Retro Menu” earlier this year: dishes included melon ball cocktails, chicken vol-au-vents and Arctic roll. The menu, he says, was all “about flavour, but also tapping into a certain feeling”. And it was uncommonly popular: the Arctic roll has since gained a spot on Shears’s otherwise “modern British” à la carte menu.
