My mom volunteers at a charity furniture and book shop run by the Victorian Order of Nurses here in Montreal called NOVA. She sometimes snaps up some vintage cookbooks and old Gourmet magazines for me when they come in, plus I can’t resist these things when I come across them in secondhand bookshops so I’m amassing quite a collection.

I found this article on pickling in the September 1977 issue of Gourmet. The article includes recipes for everything from pickled watermelon rind and dilled okra to damson plum pickles, chowchow (a 70s mixed-pickle staple) and Indiana stuffed “mangoes” (pickled stuffed peppers).

I loved reading the writer’s reminiscences of growing up in a country kitchen and helping her mom “put food by.” Another thing I dig about my musty-smelling Gourmets from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s: the ads. You can learn a lot about an an era from these bit-sized time capsules. I’ve been scrutinizing them more closely since being overcome with Mad Men mania like everyone else.

Here, then, is what I gleaned about 1977 (the year I was born), from reading that September’s Gourmet:

People still dressed sharp to fly and in-flight meals were still edible.

Salads were still inexplicably being hidden in gelatin molds and trout was stuffed with salmon mousse then decorated with ribbons of mayo squeezed from a pastry bag.

Karl Lagerfeld worked for Chloé and boasted that the modern woman of the ’70s “entered” his scent. They didn’t just wear it like some cheap pair of flared jeans. Mais non!

And the very cutting edge, the bright, super chic future of kitchen design looked something like this:

Lime green melamine heaven, basically.