‘Do you fancy yourself an epicure?’ the Observer tantalised in 1968. ‘Does your eye stray and your mouth water when you come across the small ads for smoked eel and tinned quail and brandied apricots?’ If so, you were about to be consumed with envy, as Jane Grigson and wine correspondent Cyril Ray tackled some of the year’s strangest, most decadent and priciest foodstuffs in a gargantuan tasting session.
Exotic food in 1968, when olive oil was only just escaping from chemists’ shops, appears fairly tame through a 2024 lens. It was assumed ‘most readers know what smoked salmon and Greek honey and olives tasted like’, but the tasting table was piled with tinned soups and potted pâtés, plus ‘munches of cocktail nuts and Japanese rice crackers, forkfuls of tropical vegetables, swigs of fruit juice, spoonfuls of fruit in liqueurs… washed down with some suitable wines.’
