Retro Recipes

Drugs and terrorism are the two dark sides of the 70s which also hit the 80s with their tail. Unlike the previous decade, however, in the 80s there was a lot of dancing. The era of advertising and frenzied purchases begins. Food and drink were massively sponsored. Along with all these economic changes, the world of food also underwent very strong transformations. To begin with, newsstands and bookshops offered an incredible number of cooking books and magazines which, interspersed with persuasive advertising spaces, offered easy, quick, exotic, creative recipes and completely devoid of those traditional traits that we carried with us in the nostalgic baggage of the past. Women, rightly tired of being housewives, began to work and domestic cooking was no longer a priority. In addition to time, the desire to cook was also missing, the oral handing down of recipes was lost and the sense of the seasonality of the ingredients was also lost. This meant only one thing: both at home and in the restaurant there was a lot, a lot of confusion. the frozen food department. The consumption of frozen foods recorded impressive growth numbers, in 1960 20 g per capita were consumed, in 1987 it reached 6 kg per person. Adding to the wonderful world of frozen foods was canned corn which became a real trend. Salad was the generic term used to call arugula in the 1980s. There was rocket everywhere, as a side dish, as a main course but also as a background, a lot of it was eaten and a very good part of it was thrown away. The era of salmon trout, carpaccio, the famous and unforgettable pasta with cream and salmon, porcini mushrooms, Russian salad (which had very little Russian flavor), veal with tuna sauce and caviar began.
Local fruit was snubbed in favor of exotic fruit with which compositions were also created that nowadays we could define as embarrassing. Pineapple, mango, papaya, passion fruit and kiwi not only changed our way of eating fruit and vegetables, but in possible cases made us among the most significant international producers in just a few decades. We no longer cared about taste and flavours, we just wanted to experiment and be trendy. There was also a boom in dishes that were quick to prepare and were more suitable for singles than families. However, there was then a break between the way of eating and physical appearance. Cheeseburgers flooded with sauces, fries and sandwiches did not always guarantee a slim and athletic physique as the models of the time required. So it's time for yogurt and cereals. Thus it was that Italian Sunday lunch suffered a hard, very hard blow.The new way of eating was fast, almost never nutritious and above all it did not focus on taste but on appearance. The first company canteens were also born, offering meters of cold dishes, Caprese salads, rice salads, chicken salads and, of course, yoghurt. Unknowingly (or almost) we found ourselves in the universe of buffets full of canapés, canapés and sandwiches. From the food point of view they were dark years, but at least he continued to dance to the myth of John Travolta.