It all started when Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham were sitting around Lindsey's kitchen table in west London taking a break from a cooking session for Roast Chicken And Other Stories - their first collaboration which went on to win the Glenfiddich Award and the Andre Simon Award - and had cracked open a bottle of Alsatian wine.
"We got drunk really," confesses Lindsey, food writer for the London Evening Standard and adviser for the detective chef series Pie In The Sky. "We started having a giggle, a nostalgic giggle about food we had loved and lost." Out came a flood of names that hooked straight into a bygone era of dinner dances, candle-lit 1960s bistros and tiled 1970s trattorias: sole Veronique, beef stroganoff, mixed grill, profiteroles - and not forgetting prawn cocktail. "We just started writing them down and got carried away with the fun of it."
Four years on, the result is a splendid book, still full of fun. Its pages lead us effortlessly down memory lane, when going out for a meal was an occasion for having food you would never dream of cooking at home.
The timing couldn't be better, according to Simon who has been a chef since he was 17, ending up as head chef and partner at Terence Conran's first major restaurant, Bibendum. The hipper chefs and restaurateurs appear to have recently been leafing through their old cookery books and a 1970s revival is well underway. Simon should know. He gave up full-time cheffing to concentrate on writing two years ago, and has a weekly column in the London Independent newspaper. Mixed grill is currently on the menu at Marco Pierre White's new restaurant at Canary Wharf in London's docklands; at another of his restaurants chicken Kiev and Black Forest gateau have been spotted.
Some of those early restaurant hits have never been ousted from the roster of essentials, says Hopkinson. "Certainly steak au poivre has never been off the menu at Bibendum, and the recipe has not changed one iota in 24 years. I still think it's the best steak au poivre you could possibly eat." No cream, no green pepper corns, just best sirloin, ground black pepper and a sauce made from the reduction of meat juices, butter and cognac.
In these days of coriander with everything, when we're being bombarded with speciality foods from across the globe, it is hard to remember that in the period the book covers (1950s to 1970s) even such things as black peppercorns were thought exotic and hard to buy.
Simon opened his first restaurant on the Welsh coast in 1973 when he was just 21. London might have been swinging and the new vogue for Italian trattorias might have taken firm root, but in Fishguard he remembers that he couldn't even buy tomato puree. Garlic was also very risque (chicken Kiev, snails). Aubergines (moussaka) were impossible to find outside specialist food shops. Times have certainly changed. The result is that all the ingredients for the dishes in The Prawn Cocktail Years are now incredibly easy to find, though the recipes are not necessarily easy to prepare.
Chicken Kiev - for which a chicken breast is packed with fridge cold butter before being deep-fried - is an obvious example, says Simon, who remembers his first experience of cooking it in the 1970s. "I was so desperate that the butter wouldn't come out when it was deep frying. You have to keep a beady eye, and keep your ear open to hear that tell-tale whoooch in the fryer." But if it does, you've had it. He egg-and-bread crumbed it about three times, so it did not burst. "But you needed a chisel to get through this concrete coating."
"People are going to be surprised at how much better what they make is than their memory of it in many cases," Lindsey believes. Take their recipe for prawn cocktail, which, she says "will reconfirm in your mind and your mouth how delicious it should be". The earliest examples were probably pretty grim. "You wouldn't have been able to buy a jar of mayonnaise in those days. You certainly wouldn't have been able to buy a ready-made cocktail sauce. It was probably made from salad cream and a bit of ketchup. And they probably used bottled prawns, which are vile. It would have been exceptionally sweet."
However, tomato ketchup remains an essential ingredient of the true prawn cocktail. Tomato puree just will not do. But in the Hopkinson/Bareham version of the marie rose sauce, the mayonnaise is home-made and Simon has added a teaspoon of cognac "to give it depth". The prawns should always be the sort that still have their shells on.
The curiously eclectic cuisine of the period owes its range to Britain's ready assimilation of food that first made its appearance in immigrant family restaurants and was celebrated in the section called "the continental restaurant" - where, pre-EEC, continental meant "foreign". At core they were middle-European (goulash, Wiener schnizel) but their menus embraced everything from Greek to Italian and, of course French. Although Elizabeth David remains the midwife to the post-war cooking revolution, The Prawn Cocktail Years shows just how vital a role these restaurants played in introducing us to the marvels of foreign food.
"We didn't want it to be a great sociological tome and unearth every strange of history to every dish," says Lindsey. "But when we felt confident to talk with authority on some aspect, then we did."
The book is a true collaboration. The recipes were tested together both in Lindsey's small London kitchen, which shows no vestige of high-tech, and Simon's, a few miles away. The Hopkinson/Bareham approach to this treasure trove wittily reinstates these Cinderellas of the kitchen (quiche lorraine, spaghetti Bolognaise, garlic mushrooms, Wiener schnitzel) which were "slung out like old lovers while we shamelessly flirt with the flavour of the month". However, we are also reminded us of the horrors of eating out those days in the irreverant preambles to each section. A few recipes have been denied entry entirely: brown Windsor soup and steak diane peche flambee. "Every dish we have chosen to be included is a dish that both of us enjoy enormously, cooking, eating, remembering," says Lindsey. And they're all there, from 1950s hotel stalwarts (oeufs on cocotte, sole Veronique and coquilles St-Jacques), via nursery fare favoured by gentlemen's clubs (cauliflower cheese, kedgeree and treacle tart), through our first tentative steps in foreign food (taramasalata, goulash, cheesecake) to the heady days of the 1960s bistro, (French onion soup, cheese fondue, trout with almonds). Then came the Italian wave: (lasagna, osso bucco, zabaglione) and finally the emergence of the gourmet: (beef wellington, blanquette de veau, duck a l'orange).
What makes these recipes so appealing is their aura of familiarity and comfort. "They have a slightly nursery quality," says Lindsey, "and you don't have to have A-level balsamic vinegar to make anything."
The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham, published by Macmillan, £20.