Retro Apricot Chicken

In the 1970s and 80s, if you were invited to a dinner party at someone's house in suburban Australia, there was a reasonable chance you'd be served Apricot Chicken. Alongside other classics like prawn cocktail and Black Forest cake, Apricot Chicken represented suburban sophistication - something "exotic" and "gourmet" made from pantry ingredients that cost under ten dollars to feed eight people. My mum made it for every dinner party from 1978 to 1995, and it was always a hit.

The recipe appeared in Australian Women's Weekly and countless community cookbooks in the 1970s. Its appeal was obvious: four ingredients (chicken, apricot nectar, French onion soup mix, sour cream), one casserole dish, minimal effort, maximum impact. The sweet-savory combination was considered sophisticated at the time - before we discovered Thai and Vietnamese cuisine, pairing fruit with meat seemed daring and continental.

Mum's dinner parties were legendary in our street. She'd lay out her "good" crockery, light candles, make prawn cocktails for entrée, serve Apricot Chicken with rice for the main, and finish with pavlova. The whole menu cost about fifteen dollars and impressed guests thoroughly. "The secret," she'd tell other suburban mums, "is the presentation. Serve it in a nice dish, garnish with parsley, and nobody knows it took you fifteen minutes to prepare."

The beauty of Apricot Chicken was its forgiving nature. You could make it hours ahead and reheat it - the flavors actually improved with time. You could double or triple it easily for big gatherings. If unexpected guests arrived, you'd stretch it with more sauce and rice. It was foolproof: chicken pieces, tinned apricot nectar, French onion soup mix powder, bake until tender, stir through sour cream, done. Even complete novice cooks couldn't mess it up.

For decades, Apricot Chicken was considered deeply uncool - the epitome of outdated suburban cooking, mocked by food snobs who'd discovered modern Australian cuisine. But recently, it's experiencing a nostalgic resurgence. Food bloggers call it "retro chic" and "comfort food gold." Mum, who stopped making it in the late 90s, was vindicated. "I told you it was delicious," she says smugly, pulling out her stained recipe card from 1978.

This recipe represents a specific era of Australian cooking - the suburban dinner party, the creative use of convenience foods, the belief that exotic meant sweet and sour in the same dish. It's wonderfully dated, delightfully straightforward, and surprisingly tasty. When I make Mum's Apricot Chicken now for my own family, I'm not being ironic - I'm celebrating honest suburban cooking that fed families and brought people together over shared meals, even if those meals came from a can.