What is the food eaten in Close Encounters during the infamous mashed potato scene?
What is the food eaten in Close Encounters during the infamous mashed potato scene?
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:
To be fair, chicken is fowl at any temperature.
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
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.
We don't have hush puppies here (or at least here, they're shoes, not food lol). What pictures I have seen of food hush puppies show them as being more yellow inside than pink?
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 did wonder if it could be a very plain lettuce like iceberg with a white coloured dressing. When Brad eats some, it looks thin and round which doesn't track with coleslaw but does make more sense if it's pieces of lettuce.
At least one kid is holding one in his hand and there is no butter or white sauce, so not chicken kiev or chicken cordon Bleu. Hush puppies are spheres and the size of donut holes or bon bons. These are bigger.
They look like croquettes. As folks have been confirming in this thread, the 70s had a lot of fried food that was roughly hotdog/baseball shaped. Croquettes would be an easy way to mix protein and veg in a kid friendly way.
Toss a message at Scott Reeder (Scott Prop and Roll). I'd bet money he either knows folks who worked that set or knows someone who knows someone. I've no idea if he'd respond but he seems chill like that.
Done lol.
Mac and cheese and corn bread.
Looks like miced patties to me. (Faschierte Laibchen in German...) We Always have them with mashed potatoes.
Thank you for posting!
It looks like there are 2 kinds of brown things.
One type that is a lighter brown looks spheroid, possibly potatoes or dinner rolls.
Another type is a darker brown, looks like fat cylinders, possibly deep fried breaded fish/salmon/crab cakes, as others have said.
The lighter brown ones could also be fish/salmon/crab cakes, but from a different manufacturer, or just shaped differently.
This would be my take, some sort of fish cake (tuna, since they were Midwest, salmon cakes more likely on the Pacific coast).
