Vintage Seafood Dishes No One Eats Anymore

When you think of vintage — particularly 1950s to 1960s — seafood dishes, you might imagine a variety of fish entrapped in molds of vibrant Jell-O. The horror of gelatin-encased seafood has captured the minds of modern foodies, so it's often the first thing we think of when not just contemplating retro seafood, but weird retro food in general. (The crown roast of frankfurters, which is basically a ring of hot dogs surrounding a head of cabbage, might give the gelatin-seafood combo a run for its money.)

However, vintage seafood dishes go far beyond the reaches of fishy Jell-O salad. More horrors await, as well as dishes that really ought to receive a revival. Your parents or grandparents may think of some with fondness, remembering them from their youths or particularly hard times. Others were once the epitome of vintage fancy, the sign of a great hostess or housewife, or a fine dining favorite. Whatever their standing, these are some of the greatest vintage seafood dishes that no one eats anymore.

We really do have to kick things off with the most iconic vintage seafood dish of all: the beloved (or reviled) tuna Jell-O salad. Back in Jell-O's heyday, all sorts of interesting foods were paired with the instant gelatin. While the Jell-O salad may be linked to the 1950s in our modern consciousness, instant gelatin and the Jell-O brand are much older, patented in 1897. Over the decades, Jell-O and the Jell-O salad grew in mass appeal thanks to homemakers' desire for meals that were fast, easy, and economical. It took mere minutes to throw together a Jell-O salad. The salads required minimal dishes, were cheap, and could be made by tossing in just about any leftovers.

That said, in post-War America, homemakers still felt a need to show off their prowess in the kitchen, and so Jell-O salads became more complicated and extravagant — and that's where the fish comes in. In Jell-O cookbooks from the 1960s and 1970s, you could find recipes such as the one for Ring-Around-the-Tuna, which called for lime or lemon Jell-O set in a ring mold with tasty inclusions such as onion, cucumber, celery, pimento, olives and, yes, tuna. Recommended toppings? More tuna and mayonnaise.

Most foodies (or anyone for that matter) are in no rush to pair lemon-lime gelatin with tuna, but they may be more inclined to give this vintage seafood recipe a try. Lobster thermidor's history is about as long as that of the Jell-O brand, as the dish was purportedly created in the 1800s. It boasts links to Napoleon Bonaparte in some origin stories, but others suggest the dish came about in a Parisian restaurant. Whatever the case, lobster thermidor soon popped up on the menus of fine dining establishments on both sides of the pond, though it's now fallen out of favor.

So what exactly is it? At its most basic, lobster thermidor consists of halved lobsters, with the cooked meat combined with a cheesy, creamy sauce — sounds pretty good, right? Perhaps this dish is no longer a fine dining staple because of the old idea that you shouldn't pair seafood with cheese, or just because it's rather labor-intensive. Whatever the case, if it catches your fancy, you might just want to serve it at your next Parisian-inspired dinner party.

The original, 1970s salmon mousse is unmistakable. Don't go thinking that this is just a pile of pink fluff, served in a dish a la chocolate mousse. Salmon mousse was almost always served molded into the shape of an actual salmon, and then decorated with little olive eyes. Yummy! (And salmon wasn't the only fish treated in such a manner; you could find halibut and tuna mousses made the same way, molded to look like fish and then decorated in an unsettling display.) To make a salmon mousse, you would, of course, need more of that gelatin, to which you'd add your salmon and other savory ingredients such as mayonnaise and capers.

It was possible to find salmon mousse in cookbooks and on menus in later decades (and even today), but the ingredients and presentation have changed drastically over the years. The mayonnaise and gelatin are no longer requisites, and today's salmon mousse might look more like you'd expect: a dip.

Why eat your salmon in mousse form, though, when you can eat it as a loaf? Forcing protein into loaf shapes was a big thing in the mid-1900s, but while meatloaf, though still a bit retro, manages to find its way to the modern dinner table, you'll be hard-pressed to find a salmon loaf in any of your friends' weeknight meal rotations.

It's theorized that salmon loaf first came to the broader public's attention during the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The Alaska Packers Association was promoting its canned salmon at the fair and producing cookbooks instructing home cooks about how to use the relatively new pantry item. The cookbooks included recipes for salmon loaves.

Salmon loaves are pretty identical to a meatloaf in terms of the types of ingredients you need. Of course, you have your salmon instead of beef (or chicken or turkey). Then, you have binding ingredients, like breadcrumbs or crackers and eggs, plus a few seasonings.

So much of 1950s cooking (as is the case today) was about convenience. Clam dip was easy and cheap, as it utilized canned clams, cream cheese, and just a few other common pantry items, like Worcestershire sauce. The dip popped up in cookbooks ahead of the 1950s, but the 1950s version was what really became popular. It was thanks in part to the Kraft Music Hall show, which was a musical variety show sponsored by Kraft Foods that also happened to present Kraft-related recipes, like a recipe for clam dip that prompted hordes of homemakers to go out and buy canned clams.

Over the years, recipes changed and shifted. Some clam dip recipes contained cheese, while others added in another favorite canned item of the era: condensed soup. Eventually, grocery stores began selling premade clam dip. No matter how it was made, the consensus was that the dip should be served with potato chips and always contain those canned clams, never fresh.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, craving an amazing home-cooked breakfast, and think, "Wow, I should make some tuna and waffles"? Well, someone did at some point in the last hundred years at Campbell's, because the company released a recipe utilizing its cream of mushroom soup for just that. Not only did the recipe urge you to add tuna to your waffles, but also a can of cream of mushroom soup mixed with milk and some stuffed olives. The whole mixture, heated, could be poured over top instead of syrup. At least the brand advertised the option as dinner rather than breakfast.

Campbell's encouraged home cooks to use the brand's condensed soups in a range of potentially eyebrow-raising (at least for today's standards) recipes such as this. You had tomato and peanut butter soup, which was just tomato soup mixed with peanut butter and topped with parsley. There were Jell-O salads with Campbell's soups, such as a chicken tomato Jell-O ring. Still, some condensed soup recipes from this period have held up, even if they haven't persisted, such as Campbell's tomato soup spice cake recipe, which is one of the top vintage cakes you need to make.

Creamed tuna was a relatively simple mid-1900s recipe that you could make using canned pantry items like Carnation evaporated milk and canned tuna. All you had to do was make a roux using butter, flour, and evaporated milk, before adding in the tuna (some recipes included peas as well). Voilà — creamed tuna, sometimes also called creamed chipped tuna or tuna gravy. Then, you could serve the creamed tuna on toast or crackers.

The dish's origins date back to the Great Depression when home cooks were looking for cheap, shelf-stable dinner options. After the Great Depression, though, the recipe stuck around, particularly as World War II rations made getting your hands on fresh meat a little more difficult. However, a version of the dish that contained salmon instead of tuna can be traced back even further. Today, like many Great Depression-era dishes that have stuck around as family heirlooms despite improved economic circumstances, creamed tuna remains a comfort food to some, though an oddity in the mainstream.

Seafood Louie (or Louis) comes in several different variants, but some of the most popular are shrimp Louie and crab Louie. While most can agree that the salad was a West Coast creation, its exact origins are very muddy, with multiple cities laying claim to the invention, including Seattle and San Francisco. Some say the salad, like many famed dishes, first appeared on hotel menus in the early 1900s. Others say that a chef named Louie crafted the salad at their restaurant. 

However the salad came about, it grew in popularity into the 1960s. While you won't find it on many menus or cookbooks nationwide at this point, this is one of the handful of vintage seafood recipes worth your renewed attention. The earliest seafood Louie salad recipes called for a simple salad of lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, and crab meat, topped with what was called a "Louis" dressing: a mixture of oil, vinegar, ketchup, Worcestershire, mustard, and seasonings. What else could you want in a simple, summer-ready seafood salad?

Ask someone if they remember shrimp puffs from decades gone by and you'll get a few different answers. Some say that they remember a concoction in the 1970s or 80s that was very similar to a cream puff — which is basically just choux pastry filled with cream — but with a filling made of cream cheese and shrimp in place of the whipped cream. 

Other vintage recipes from the 1980s call for a cream cheese and shrimp mixture, but instead of piping it into choux, the mixture was placed atop Ritz crackers (a much easier, time-sensitive, and economical option). Still others recall a 1950s variant that placed a mixture involving cheddar cheese and Miracle Whip on bread rounds. Today, you can find similar recipes that swap out the bread rounds for canned biscuits. 

In short, the shrimp puff was once a popular canapé that seems to have evolved over the years to take advantage of grocery store convenience items. Now, you're left with a dish that's little more than mayo-covered shrimp on a biscuit — an app option that's not the most appetizing.

It doesn't boast the most enticing name, but that did not stop this dish — also more appealingly called salt cod fritters — from gaining momentum throughout New England for a substantial amount of time. To make this dish, preserved Atlantic cod is rehydrated (a process that requires hours of soaking), combined with mashed potatoes and eggs, and then fried in ball form. It's quite a simple recipe, but there are many reasons why it's not as popular as it once was.

Centuries ago, salt cod was a vital part of Atlantic trade, and thus popular in the countries along the Atlantic, partially thanks to its ability to remain edible for a very long time due to the salting and preservation methods used. However, with the advent of modern preservation methods and refrigeration — plus the reduction of the world's cod populations — salt cod fell off and now it's not nearly as widely available or as affordable as it once was, at least in the U.S. Still, codfish cakes remain a staple in places like Portugal and Brazil.

If you're not from certain mid-Atlantic states (or even if you are), you're probably wondering, what even is shad? It's a type of fish in the herring family, known for being very bony. It's available fresh for only a short amount of time, with shad season running for just a few months on the East Coast. Americans have been eating shad since the country's founding, with George Washington reportedly being a fan, and recipes circulated as early as the 1700s. In fact, shad has been called America's Founding Fish. Even before the colonists, Indigenous populations were eating shad — so why has it become so uncommon that many Americans wouldn't even know the fish's name?

Shad has waned in popularity for numerous reasons. Overfishing has prompted prohibitions on shad harvests, while commercial processing of the fish has declined along with demand. Pollution and shoreline development had a negative impact too (and that's not just a recent problem; it's been documented as early as the 1800s). All of this has added up to America's Founding Fish — which was once enjoyed roasted on a wooden plank over an open fire — becoming obsolete.

Aspic is Jell-O's meaty cousin. You make aspic by taking a bunch of fun animal parts and boiling them way down, until you get a gelatinous substance. This substance then encases a whole array of ingredients, both sweet and savory, for what is essentially another version of the Jell-O salad. The main differences between Jell-O and aspic are that aspic is always meaty, whereas Jell-O can be flavorless or come flavored, and making aspic is obviously much more time-consuming than opening up a packet of instant gelatin. Aspics often consist of layered ingredients as well.

This time-intensive process, though, didn't deter some home cooks of the mid-1900s, and that's why you'll find recipes for various seafood aspics in publications and cookbooks of this time, just as you would Jell-O salads. A trout in aspic recipe published in The New York Times in the 1970s called for home cooks to trap an entire, whole trout (minus fins) in aspic.

Who better to tell you the best ways to use your seafood than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or as it was known previously, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries? Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the bureau actually published a cooking magazine called "Test Kitchen," which did just that. As you can expect, the seafood recipes contained in this magazine were slightly suspect, given the time period.

For example, forget the anchovies on your pizza. Why not just go for shrimp? The organization's shrimp pizza recipe called for topping your pie with the little crustacean and nothing else. Shrimp pizza was also popular at pizzerias throughout various parts of the country in the 1970s. Today, though, if you see a shrimp pizza on the menu, it's not because it's standard; it's a novelty. In fact, when you look at a 2023 YouGov pizza topping survey, the only seafood that even makes the list is anchovies — and they don't make it in the ranking of Americans' favorite pizza toppings ... quite the opposite!

You sit down to a stack of griddle cakes or pancakes and take that first, amazing bite ... and chomp right down on a nice serving of minced clams. Naturally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "Test Kitchen" publication included a recipe for clam corn griddle cakes, consisting of a batter made with clams (both minced canned clams and the liquid from the can), for a pancake with a true twist. The publication's recommended topping? A mixture of cinnamon, applesauce, and cranberry sauce. If you didn't care for that breakfast option, you could always go with another "Test Kitchen" breakfast suggestion: salmon French toast.

Today, if you want to get anywhere close to a seafood pancake, you ought to try the Korean haemul pajeon, which translates to seafood scallion pancakes. Seafood like shrimp or clams is combined in a thin, savory pancake, and the scrumptious bites are dipped in a soy sauce-based mixture. The result is much more appetizing, and there's no cinnamon or applesauce anywhere in sight.