A colleague of mine recently took part in a retro dinner party, where all of the food had to be popular dishes from the 50s and 60s. We had a marvellous conversation on this topic, dredging up all kinds of memories of foods of the era that we'd seen in films or on television, but especially from our own recipe collections. It was this conversation that inspired us to make blancmange this week :)

During our discussion, I reminisced about a set of old Weight Watchers recipe cards that my Mum once had. It was typical of the time period that every single savoury dish on the cards was pictured with a garnish consisting of a sprig of parsley and a wedge of lemon :) But what really stood out to me was the number of moulded dishes - in particular a garden salad in aspic. Yep. Lettuce, tomato and cucumber. In aspic.

I didn't hang on to that old recipe card, but I decided to have a look on Flickr to see if I could find something similar to show my colleague. To my eternal amusement, I discovered there was a whole Flickr group dedicated to kitsch aspic-based dishes! It's called Aspic Delight! and boy does it have some beauties!

Allow me to share some photos from the group with you:

Unfortunate Foodstuffs

Sea Dream & Vegetable Trio

Ham And Chicken Mold

unfortunate foodstuffs

unfortunate foodstuffs

P.S. I couldn't believe it when my colleague told me that someone had *actually* brought a salad in aspic to the dinner party!!

Photo credits to akbuthod, cbder and glen.h.