Food History

Tonight my mind is in the 1960s. last night my mind was in the 1960s, too. I was at a birthday party, and the theme was ‘Swinging Sixties.’ Party themes mean party food.

We had sort-of sixties food amidst much talk of Dr Who (and a half sized blow-up TARDIS) – I let Calliope know about the Dr Whoness and she’s current dreaming of her own blow-up TARDIS. If anyone knows where to find one, please visit her blog and let her know.

What food fits the modern Canberran idea of the sixties? Cup cakes, of course, with pink icing and blue icing. Grilled marinated chicken wings. Prawns. Calamari chips. Ordinary chips and dips. The yummiest pastries: filo filled with blue cheese.

I compared this selection with one on a random website (using the gift to lazy research that is Google). An ezine article on running a sixties party suggests drinking cola with cherry or vanilla syrup.

Cola is so not a Canberra party. Cola with syrup is something I’ve never actually tasted. Canberrans last night drank the terribly unsixties red fizzy. ‘Red fizzy’ is not suitable for children and was probably not available at all in Australia in the 1960s, being red sparkling wine. For some reason we’re developing the habit of drinking cleanskins, too. I suspect it’s cost-related, but also due to the fact that we’re in one wine region and not very far at all from a second, so cleanskins are very readily available.

In the sixties, the most probable wine on offer would have been a chardonnay. Wine belonged to a particular set, then, though. Other people drank coke, or lemonade, or beer. Beer kegs sat in the kitchen or just outside and many blokes congregated near the keg and treasured it greatly.

This instructional information on Aussie drinking habits is from memory, which, since I was a young child in the sixties and didn’t get to parties is most likely to be memories of the seventies – I will do a proper post on Australian drinking habits over time one day, I promise, and in this promised post I will check my facts. Tonight I’m going on memory because I went to that party before I had recovered from my virus and so I’m more than a little tired.

To return to the US suggestions from the ezine, I don’t remember them even from children’s parties in the sixties. No corndogs. No malts. Absolutely no French fries, though chips were a possibility. What’s being suggested is sixties takeaway food, not food for a sixties party.

If we had been given Aussie sixties takeaway food last night it would be chips (not fries), hamburgers (with beetroot, of course), steak sandwiches, battered fish, BBQ chicken and chiko rolls. None of this was anything like any food the US restaurant ‘Outback Steakhouse’ serves.

All I’ve done with this post is remind us all that even the junk food of the sixties was very much localised. There’s just a bit more internationalism now. Real hamburgers still have beetroot, though.

I feel as if I’ve been digging in dirt and uncovered much potential gold: I need to seriously explore sixties food and drink one day (or over many days). There are so many rich seams to mine.