Pleased as punch to experience a '70s Dinner Party

Title: 70s Dinner Party
Author: Anna Pallai
Date of Publication: October 6, 2016

Company: Square Peg
Number of Pages: 176
Awards: #823 in Amazon.com Best Sellers Rank for Humor & Entertainment

I found Anna Pallai on Twitter before I knew about this book. If you’re a foodie, enjoy sarcasm, or find traditional gender roles just a bit on the ridiculous side, you should hop on over there now and follow @70s_party. Anna posts all sorts of delightful things, including abominations recipes from the good old days.

Anna’s book 70s Dinner Party was published in Fall of 2016. As soon as I found her Twitter account and noticed she had a book out, I bought it. It’s been an incredible conversation starter, perfect (ironically) for parties, which by definition are often crammed with awkward people who don’t know how to behave in public. If you’re equipped—and if you’re throwing a party, I hope you are—you’ll have some sort of pet about for these types of people to interact with. Or, you know, a copy of 70s Dinner Party. People love it. They sort of thumb through the pages and start giggling at the crazy photos and captions. Inevitably, they’ll show it to someone else—which breaks the ice. And the book has that gross factor; I mean, come on! Fish Whirls? that causes folks to screw up their faces in disgust but continue on in spite of themselves, chasing more culinary stimulation.

Maybe watching other people read this book is even more fun than reading it yourself.

Here are some of my favorite selections: Little Vegetable Towers, for one. These appear to be tricolored, striated blocks of chopped food stuffed into a rocks glass and then upended on a plate. The caption reads “I like my spinach, mushrooms and broccoli like I like my men. Boiled, puréed and in a tower.” Or, Salmon Pudding. Definitely a moulded, orangey, mousse-like thing studded with black olives and piped globs of mayonnaise.

My first time through, I didn’t read the Introduction and I wish I had. Pallai writes, “What weird is that, nowadays, most people’s dinner are far less interesting to look at—and yet they are far more likely to take photographs of them and force other people to look at them. There was a time when food was food. You cooked it, you moulded it, you let it set, and then you covered it with chopped boiled egg and olives. Then you just ate the lot and tried to put the whole horrible experience behind you.”

Before publishing 70s Dinner Party, Pallai worked as a publicist at Faber, managing the careers of comedians Harry Hill and Ricky Gervais, among others. She’s clearly got a killer sense of humor. The website It’s Nice That featured Pallai and her book in November of 2016, including an exclusive interview. She even shared her favorite recipe from the book.

“My favourite dish is the Cauliflower Surprise – a cauliflower which has had slits cut into it which are then filled with a Birds Eye beef burger, and then the whole thing is served on a cheese sauce. It looks like something from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’m also fond of the sandwich loaves which are ‘iced’ with green cream cheese and mayonnaise.”

Cauliflower Surprise, indeed.