My kids haven’t seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind yet and I thought it would be a fun surprise to recreate the meal eaten in the mashed potato scene and watch the movie with the movie dinner. (I can’t wait to see if they put two and two together when that scene comes up lol.)
Obviously there’s mashed potato. And I can see sweet corn. Kids are drinking milk. But I can’t tell what the little meat things are. I assumed they were crumbed rissoles but having not been raised or lived in the US, I’m unsure if I’m missing a common protein that was eaten at dinner around the late 1970s. Meatloaf has also been suggested but in my country we never have mini meatloaves that I’ve seen so I’m unsure how accurate that is.
EDIT: Middle bottom, you can see a partially eaten meat thing which looks pink inside:
I also can’t tell what is in the bowls beside Roy and his sons - to the top left of Roy’s plate, right hand side of Toby and top right of Brad’s plate. Maybe Ronnie and Silvia have one of these bowls too but I can’t tell. You can see Brad eat out of his bowl at one point and it looks like something pale (I wondered coleslaw or macaroni).
EDIT: Screenshot of side
Anyway, anyone know or have an idea of what the little meat things are and what are in the side bowls?
Those look.like the old “bake n serve” Chicken Cordon Blue shit from back in the seventies. It is basically an breaded eggroll made of thin sliced chicken breast meat, filled with white cheese sauce and ham. Delicious for the seventies, but disgusting if you tried it now.
Source: 51 years old that got fed that shit a few times a month.
PS: They were foul at room temperature.
EDIT:
My father’s speciality was chicken covered in cream of mushroom soup and baked, served over egg noodles. It was his best dish.
Mine was similar. It was chicken breast, cut into thin strips and sauteed with onions green pepper, and heavily seasoned with black pepper and some salt. Once browned, dump a can of cream of mushroom soup into it and let it simmer until the onions are practically melted. We used to eat it with a baguette.
It’s Fish Cakes. 100%. We got fed these all the time as kids in the 80’s. I honestly haven’t seen them in the supermarket or even thought about them for years. I don’t even know if anyone makes them anymore. You could certainly make them from scratch pretty easily though. And they would almost certainly beat out the store-bought ones I was raised on.
EDIT: it’s These: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcake
Fish cakes sounds likely, but I remember eating lots of pre-prepared Chicken Cordon Bleu that looked a lot like that.
Those are not fish cakes. Those are crab cakes. You can tell by the words “Crab Cakes” on the package.
Are fish cakes normally pink inside in the US? Here fish cakes are white inside.
Sorry, I usually use Fedia.io but for some reason it’s not federating very well. Here’s the one where you can see a partially eaten one and it’s pink inside.
Hush puppies? Not really a main dish, but idk.
Definitely hush puppies. The ones in the movie would likely be frozen ones in a box from the supermarket, 350F for 25 minutes.
I also can’t tell what is in the bowls beside Roy and his sons - to the top left of Roy’s plate, right hand side of Toby and top right of Brad’s plate. Maybe Ronnie and Silvia have one of these bowls too but I can’t tell. You can see Brad eat out of his bowl at one point and it looks like something pale (I wondered coleslaw or macaroni).
It looks like everyone at the table has a bowl on one side or the other. This was a time when a common middle-class American family dinnerware place-setting might include a salad bowl with a simple salad: chopped iceberg or romaine lettuce with a store-bough salad dressing (ranch, blue cheese, 1000 island, etc). Probably not the most appetizing thing in the world, but totally legit given the era and setting (with Roy being a electrical line worker).
I’m gonna say fish sticks
