Should you visit your local Waitrose store this week – and hope you don’t witness an altercation between a shoplifter and a member of staff about to be fired for doing his job – you might be surprised by a new range of products. In what the company is calling ‘a vibrant, decadent celebration of pure noshtalgia’, Waitrose has launched a series of 80s-themed foods. These include everything from Scotch egg sandwiches and steak Diane-flavoured crisps to rhubarb and custard ice cream and – horror of horrors – ‘peach melba spritz’, which its blurb describes as ‘a delicious blend of juicy peach and ripe raspberry, lifted with sparkling crisp bubbles for a beautifully balanced summer spritz’. More likely, it will taste like most canned cocktails: over-sweet, oddly tinny and cursed with a sickly aftertaste.
The idea behind these profoundly resistible foodstuffs is, as you might expect, a commercial one. With the second Disney+ series of the ripping yarn Rivals coming to our screens next month – and, in the process, acting as a fitting tribute to its much-missed creator Jilly Cooper – Waitrose has clearly decided there is substantial crossover between its shoppers and the millions of viewers thrilled by the adventures of Rupert Campbell-Black et al. They might well be right. One of the joys of Rivals was its unashamed luxuriating in a Thatcherite era of big hair and loose morals, where ambition was something to be prized and serial shagging was de rigueur. But quite what this has to do with a thousand island prawn cocktail sandwich – yours for a mere £4 – is anyone’s guess.
I suspect that Waitrose thinks it has been very clever by doing this. But unfortunately what it has instead conjured up are traumatic memories of a decade that culinary good taste forgot. We are not talking about sumptuous dishes that have tragically passed out of fashion because of boring nanny-state restrictions – no foie gras here – but strange, rather bizarre combinations of flavour that never needed to be yoked together, somewhat in the style of an edible Frankenstein’s monster. I refer to cheese and pineapple, skewered alongside one another in unholy matrimony; the strange, syrupy mysteries of black forest gateau; the garlicky horror of chicken kiev; and, of course, buck’s fizz, a drink you give to people you actively dislike so as to watch their spluttering reaction.
Of course, some savvy restaurateurs have managed to create their own spins on some of the dishes that time (wisely) forgot. Having had excellent prawn cocktails over the past few weeks at Jason Atherton’s Berners Tavern and Jeremy King’s relaunched Simpsons-in-the-Strand, I would offer a stay of execution on this particular appetiser. And there is undoubtedly a retro vogue for bringing back some of these items, all wrapped in nostalgia for a decade that combined energetic consumerism and – let us be frank – a cheery abandonment of any kind of taste, good, bad or gourmet alike.
I’d rather not immerse myself in an era of Findus crispy pancakes, Viennetta ice cream and the dreaded vol-au-vent
But I remain unconvinced that frazzled shoppers heading into their local Waitrose will think they are taking part in some kind of historical re-enactment as they are offered the chance to buy a £6 tote bag, emblazoned with the words ‘decadently scandalously delicious’. If they were offering £100 miniatures of Dom Pérignon and miniature pots of caviar, then the words might be justified. But I am not entirely sure that anyone munching reflectively on a £1.50 packet of bloody mary prawn cocktail flavoured handcooked crisps will really feel they have entered the era of excess, flaming Ferraris et al.
Waitrose claims this retro embrace is all a bit of fun and it might well be right. Its PR claims: ‘The range reflects a continued focus on championing great food with personality; celebrating flavour, sparking conversation and giving customers something new to talk about. By spotlighting iconic 80s dishes in unexpected formats, it invites food lovers to relive the drama of the decade, one rivalry at a time.’
All perfectly innocent and harmless, then. Yet I can’t help but feel that I’d rather not immerse myself in an era of Findus crispy pancakes, Viennetta ice cream and the dreaded vol-au-vent. I’d rather just have dishes that I actually want to eat, rather than this situational immersion in the time that food forgot. Bring back Woolton pie and Spam fritters: all is forgiven.
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