Food is often likened to fashion. As with clothes, appetites are formed by trends. They are also sentimental. We pass down recipes in the same way we might offer a sibling a once-loved jumper. Our fondness of childhood dishes is rooted in the same stuff that evokes nostalgia for someone’s perfume.

My mother doesn’t wear perfume but she cooks a lot of comforting food. Her greatest hits, all passed down by her own mother in the 1960s and ’70s, include trifles, chocolate mousses and coronation chicken. Her worst: tuna, leeks and béchamel sauce baked with crisps on top. Her culinary repertoire is what you might call “retro”. But increasingly I find myself harking back to her cooking – even the tuna.

Prawn cocktail with cocktail sauce and mayo. Ginori 1735 Diva dessert plate, £85, and butter dishes, £90 each. All other props throughout, stylist’s own © Chris Brooks

Nostalgia for the ’70s buffet is growing. Prawn cocktail, devilled eggs, cheese cubes on sticks – these are “a shorthand for a connection to the past”, says food historian Polly Russell. She considers retro cuisine as being anything that was popular in the mid-20th century.

Jamie Shears, executive chef at Mayfair’s Mount Street Restaurant, launched a “Retro Menu” earlier this year: dishes included melon ball cocktails, chicken vol-au-vents and Arctic roll. The menu, he says, was all “about flavour, but also tapping into a certain feeling”. And it was uncommonly popular: the Arctic roll has since gained a spot on Shears’s otherwise “modern British” à la carte menu.

Salmon and cucumber canapés, caviar canapés, endive and salmon canapés, devilled eggs, plate of pickles and Martinis with a twist. Dior Maison porcelain Gold-Tone Cannage Montaigne plates, from £150, and Gold-Tone Bal des Abeilles side plate, £110 © Chris Brooks

Jacob Keen-Downs has channelled a similar sentiment with his dessert trolley at the recently revamped Grill at The Dorchester, where highlights include baked Alaskas, banana splits and sherry-topped trifles. And at Carbone, a new outpost of which has just opened in London, the dessert trolley is wheeled around with a flourish and features the ritzy ’70s classic “Maraschino Cherries Flambé”, a tooth-achingly sweet confection of cherries, sliced almonds and ice-cream.

Inevitably the retro revival has been fuelled by social media. Just as colourful cakes and elaborate jellies are about pomp and showmanship, Instagram and TikTok have become windows via which to gawk at the extravagant creations of yore. Anna Pallai started posting pictures of her mother’s vintage cookbooks and ringbinders on Facebook 10 years ago, a hobby that led to the launch of her wildly successful Instagram channel @70sdinnerparty. She now has more than 177,000 followers. “The source material never seems to never dry up,” she says of the faded (and arguably revolting) images of spaghetti loaves and Scotch egg casseroles that fill her feed.

Fish and vegetable aspic. Georg Jensen stainless-steel Bernadotte dish on stand, £210. Ralph Lauren Home silver-plated Montgomery oblong tray, £575. Hermès Attelage steel dessert fork, £105, and cheese knife, £190 © Chris Brooks

Retro food is typically garish, eye-catching and occasionally quite frightening. The cultural movement reached its apotheosis with the restaurant critic and television chef Fanny Cradock, who emerged from postwar Britain with an array of outlandish and economical dishes that included green mashed potato and bananas baked in shop-bought filo pastry – and who has also been enjoying a second life on social media. “She believed that food should be fun,” says Kevin Geddes, a writer, researcher and Fanny “fanatic”. “She was strong and confident. She looked directly into the camera and spoke to people. She reassured them, but also gave them some aspiration to bring to meal times.”

Cradock’s self-assuredness spurred a wave of experimental cooks who had a more relaxed attitude towards “preparation” and combined convenience foods with an extravagant Cordon Bleu presentation (the period coincided with an increase in women enrolling in the workforce). Buffets were fuelled by frozen and pre-made ingredients (see the US-led trend for adding tinned soup and frankfurters to almost anything). Then came Delia Smith, whose 1971 classic How to Cheat at Cooking encourages the creative use of jarred sauces and packet jellies. “Suddenly you could make all these wonderful creations and they were easy,” says food historian and author Sam Bilton.

Cookies, cakes and blancmange. From top: Hermès steel Attelage coffee spoon, £100. Ginori 1735 Diva tableware collection, from £55 © Chris Brooks

Such culinary developments were not uniformly tolerated. Recently a writer told me about an editor who forbade their staff from eating vol-au-vents as they were considered gauche and “not classy”. It’s a petty snobbery that is brilliantly exploited in Mike Leigh’s 1977 television masterpiece Abigail’s Party. Food writer and presenter Stephanie Brookes believes that the more recent snobberies towards food – the modern tendency to reject not just the look of certain dishes, but also the sounds, smells and mess of them – is rooted in the rise of clean eating. “Our parents’ generation were a lot less hung up on food,” says Brookes, who grew up in the 1980s. “The retro way of eating was: how many layers, how much cream, how many maraschino cherries? Whereas now we’re in more of an era of: is that gluten-free, is that dairy-free? Everything has become restrained, restricted and smaller.”

Perhaps that’s why retro food has been re-emerging as a greedy riposte to a diet of smaller portions, food intolerances and healthy eating. Even the language of retro cookbooks is inspiring. “Unusual canapés – fingers of toast spread with steak tartare – can make your reputation as the best party-giver in town,” wrote American chef Robert Carrier in his 1977 cookbook Entertaining. For 20th-century British florist and host Constance Spry, hosting was about “[doing] what you please” and following “your own star”.

Fruit cocktail served on (top right) Brunello Cucinelli silver-plated-steel and buffalo-horn two-tier serving stand, £580. Bourg-Joly Malicorne openwork ceramic cake stand, from £78 © Chris Brooks

Food writer Tom Parker Bowles dismisses the idea that food is governed by whims and fashions. “A great prawn cocktail is a great thing,” he says. “It’s not just nostalgic, these are dishes that have endured for a reason – done well, they’re wonderful.” What is certain, however, is that “food is a social signifier. It’s a thing that tears us apart and brings us together.” He points to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French lawyer and politician who helped coin the phrase, “you are what you eat”. “Food is the great mirror in which you can see everything – society, history, economics, the whole thing.”

What does my love of kitsch cooking say about me? I like to think it makes me seem adventurous. In truth it probably says more about my pride in being the daughter of a single mother who never failed to make food exciting. For Parker Bowles, his appreciation of retro casseroles is rooted in ’80s rural Wiltshire, when pheasants were fair game and eggs came from the garden. “The food I love now, we rather dreaded then – all we wanted to do was go to the new Sainsbury’s,” he says. “Now I love stews. They’re economical, they’re nutritious, they taste good. We look back at the days of Constance Spry’s cookbooks. But they still sit in my mum’s house.”

It is pleasing to think of a copy of The Constance Spry Cookery Book sitting on a shelf in Clarence House. It is also pleasing to look at dinky canapés and fish housed in a perfectly turned-out jelly. If we are what we eat, I’ll happily be an enormous prawn perched on the edge of an extravagant glass vessel.

Photographer’s assistant, Ethan Greenfield. Stylist’s assistant, Katerina Liako. Set designer’s assistant, Nick Thalhuber. Digital tech, Will Wang