Have you ever wondered why food in the 70’s – with its penchant for jelly, mayonnaise and fruit in all the wrong places – was so very…interesting? The International Ghost Society certainly has and we decided we wanted to learn more about the subject.
Things like: what were some of the recipes of the time; how might they taste if you made them; and why, god, why would anyone put mayonnaise on a banana?
With that in mind, on Thursday 19th September 2024, we got a bunch of intrepid explorers together at the excellent Edinburgh New Town Cookery School and embarked on what we can confidently say was one of the weirder cookery classes people in the Midlothian area were up to that night.
Together we crafted a series of choice recipes from the era. These included, among other things:
The aforementioned and somewhat infamous banana candles:
The actually not-too-shabby Spam and Lima Bean concoction:
The brightly coloured and very aptly named Try and Guess Salad:
Fun fact about the above picture: it does indeed house both jelly and mayonnaise.
And an IGS firm favourite, the Frosty the Slaw Ghost salad:
(This one manages to boast mayonnaise, gelatine AND cottage cheese – otherwise known as the 70s food trifecta – in its ingredient list. Despite some comments on the night, coleslaw can continue sleeping soundly in the knowledge that Frosty here won’t be nipping at its heels as a contender anytime soon.)
So, what was the outcome of our latest investigation?
Short version: a ridiculously fun evening with a group that managed to pull off stellar feats of ingenuity to recreate recipes that would have done their 70s counterparts’ proud. They were genuinely surprisingly edible.
Slightly longer version: We also learned about the history of how these kinds of recipes came to exist in the first place, and if you’d put money on the phrase ‘harking back to the middle ages’ being relevant, you would be very much quids in right now. Our foray into food hell drew us into a frankly astonishing number of subject areas, including culture, psychology, technology, maths (turns out converting liquid measures into other liquid measures was harder than it looked) and of course history: leading to the aforementioned Middle Ages quote (where they would have killed for packet jelly, let me tell you).
One of our favourite parts of the events we do is learning something new and subverting our own – and maybe even other peoples – expectations of the thing we’re eventing about, and this excursion did not disappoint.
Do we feel more forgiving of what we’d previously considered to be abominations that laughed in the face of decent law-abiding recipes everywhere? Plot twist: yeah, we actually do!
Will we be incorporating Frosty the Slaw Ghost and his gelatinous mayonnaise-y pals into our day-to-day meal plans? Probably not, no. But we’ll certainly look back fondly at the night we gave it a damn good try.