One Upmanship.

Oh good for you kitty and I hope they appreciate you.

I think the trick will be to coerce some friends to help kitty, and badger anyone including local wine merchants and supermarkets for donations if you can. Sainsburys recently gave us five platters of nibbles as a donation so worth asking.
Good luck! I actually enjoyed doing it

The last cheese and wine party I went to was a college fundraiser about 50 years ago.
I was going out with one of the maths lecturers at the time. He introduced me to a pretty blonde girl. 'Jenny, this is Rose, a friend of mine. Rose, this is Jenny, my fiancee'.
I drank far too much Hungarian Bull's Blood, ate too much cheese and was violently sick on the way home.

I used to have to attend a lot of dinner parties with DH, some were fun but a lot were a real pain. On one occasion a lady said to me that she was surprised to find that a city in the north of England had a restaurant that served decent food. "hello" not living in caves up here.

When I was at Uni. My mother had a Christmas morning drinks do. A rather snobbish woman looking me up and down, at my somewhat hippy attire asked where I lived. She was very surprised when I said, ' here, it's my home!' x

My late uncle was a bank manager in the days when they held the local purse. He and my aunt hosted a dinner for some important clients. One of the wives had prepared herself with rather a lot of Dutch courage and collapsed into her soup! X

Bull's Blood, Anjou Rosé (kept the bottles for candles) and Blue Nun were pretty much the only wines too? I'd forgotten that! And the lack of non-alcoholic drinks.....
With cheese and pineapple or silverskin onions on cocktail sticks stuck into a foil covered half grapefruit, sausages on sticks ditto (hence 'hedgehogs'), vol au vents, and twiglets or peanuts, the height of sophistication
Memories galore

Matteus Rosé for my mil!

The height of sophistication, that! Bought some for my mum and dad, not knowing what it was. I'd don't think I [or they] had ever tasted wine. Bet they poured it down the sink [Dad;'I'll stick to me Ansells bitter I think, duck']....

Of course! Matteus not Anjou
Really thought we were the bee's knees when fondue sets came out. My sister recently gave me hers so I should dust it off, loved the cheese version.
Do any GNs remember when drinking liqueurs were fashionable, not just after a meal? I remember drinking a Tia Maria followed by a Cointreau then a Cherry Brandy and falling over in a large puddle in the car park. My parents never drank (a bottle of sherry for 'visitors' lasted years) and I thought I'd been as quiet as a mouse creeping up the stairs but the game was up when I spent the next few hours being very ill. Mum was incandescent, mainly because a) I'd been in a PUB and b) even worse, she was mortified in case anyone they knew had seen me.......

I liked Creme de Menthe! x

What lovely memories of times long gone (in my case anyway) thank you all. We really did enjoy life then, have we all turned into snobs? Because we seemed enjoy every minute.

Another horror was the Sherry Party. We were invited to one before a buffet lunch (some fundraising do or other) Drinking schooners of sherry on an empty stomach meant that everyone was sh*t faced and the poor waitresses had to make copious amounts of coffee to sober everyone up!

My father used to come home from the pub with a 2 bottles of Babycham, one for mother and one for me.... I was about 16.

A friend was pretty high up in the retail grocery business. Regional Director responsible for xxx number of stores in the County etc. When out socially and asked what he did for a living he said he sold baked beans. To give any idea of his position meant being told how he could run the stores better, deal with customers better, and why wasn't ''' such and such'' on the shelves, and could he find a job for wee Jimmy.

J52, I was much more sophisticated than that - I drank creme de menthe frappe!

Oh la la kitty , wasn't it bright green?
I think life was simpler annsixty, and being young, we were having fun.
Chicken/scampi in a basket, Bernie Inn steak and coffee liqueurs, Brandy and Babycham......

Sherry parties were de rigeuer when I was at University. Excruciating when given by a lecturer I couldn't stand and who hadn't bothered getting to know his students by name.

I have never been to a cheese and wine party for which I am glad because it strikes me as a very bad combination.

Perfect combination, absent. Unidentifiable cheeses coupled with a rough old red wine that tasted like the inside of a monk's habit, What more could we ask for?

I have never eaten the inside – or any part – of a monk's habit either. Sounds foul.

An Advocaat snowball perhaps merlotgran?

Oh Snowballs. My mother in law loved them.

Noooo! I like my Advocaat [or, eggflip as my mum used to call it] unadulterated.

The foods that were considered very sophisticated in the late 60s - 70s were cheese and pineapple on sticks, cheese hedgehogs, (already described) anything at all with rice, curries, very basic, cheese straws, vol au vonts (can't spell it.) and Coq au Vin

My husband made chili con carne circa 1974 and one of the guests ended up in hospital, too much chili I guess.

The wine I remember being very popular was Liebe Frau Milche and Mattheus Rose.

Cooking rice meant putting the rice into a huge saucepan of boiling water.

Sorry about the bad spelling.

I used to bake every Friday and put the cakes into a cake tin. I can remember baking Ginger Sponge Parkin and raspberry buns.

I remember when a shop opened locally that sold a cake that could easily be passed off as home made and would fool even the mother-in-law.

With 3 sons I seemed to spend my whole life cooking.