This is what we ate in the 80s, part one
Practising fanatically with your Rubik’s cube (or picking all the stickers off), filling Bugles with cream cheese and perhaps ordering a Happy Meal for the first time – let’s refresh your culinary memories of the eighties.
Filling everything
In the seventies, it starts modestly with the classic deviled egg, but in the eighties things really take off: everything gets stuffed. Stuffed tomatoes, stuffed peppers from the oven, stuffed onions, stuffed aubergines, you name it. Stuffed bread? Check. Stuffed melon? Check.
Swedish chef, Danish chef
The Swedish chef who throws chickens and prawns into the pan while singing and makes the kitchen explode? Late seventies, early eighties. But the Danish chef, three flavours of spreadable cheese from a tube, also belongs to this era. You use that tube to fill the Bugles, then stick them together in long zips while watching the Grote Meneer Kaktus Show. Fortunately, the tubes with that chef’s hat as a cap are still available. Pay particular attention to the unforgettable ‘alpine herbs’ flavour; nothing about it has changed in the past forty years.
Big plate, small bite
In general, there is a lot of fussing and fiddling with food in the eighties. Take nouvelle cuisine, a reaction to classic French cuisine with heavy dishes packed with calories. Nouvelle cuisine is about light dishes, never too many ingredients and not large quantities. Dutch restaurants take inspiration from top French chef Bocuse. The result: enormous plates with a few tiny bites, one minuscule course after another. After an evening of fancy dining, baking a toasted sandwich at home is still completely normal.
Savoury tart every day
Home cooks discover quiche en masse. While this savoury tart was originally made with bacon, onions and cheese, in the eighties things couldn’t get too crazy, and savoury tarts were filled with mushrooms, leeks and diced ham, onion, feta and olives or spinach and quark. The combination of chicken, kiwi and Boursin pretty much marks the low point of this trend.
She called me sir
McDonald’s advertises something new in a big way: fast food. The first McDonald’s restaurant opens in Zaandam in the late seventies, and over the course of the eighties more and more golden arches appear, especially in busy shopping areas. In 1986, the first Happy Meal is served.
New new new: the microwave
In the 1940s, inventor Percy Spencer accidentally discovers the microwave: a chocolate bar in his breast pocket melts due to radiation from a device he is working on. The first official microwave food is popcorn, which Spencer’s assistant pops in the microwave oven. Second experiment: boiling an egg. Anyone with a microwave knows that this is not a success. In the eighties, the microwave becomes affordable for the average Dutch household. We are astounded that the food gets hot while the dish stays cold. Soon microwave cookbooks appear on the market (a real highlight: stewed pear with melted chocolate), microwave meals in the freezer aisle, microwave popcorn in the pantry and microwave-cooking workshops at the community centre. Ping!
Cora van Mora
Another new household appliance: the electric deep fryer. Much safer and more convenient than the wobbly deep fryer that has to be heated on the stove. The result: we start deep-frying more at home. Mora jumps on the trend, and in 1984 Cora van Mora appears on television for the first time. Alongside classics such as the croquette and frikandel, Mora also introduces a new snack: the kipcorn.
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