If You Ate Macaroni Salad At A '70s Cookout, It Was Probably Made This Way

Summers of the 1970s were colored by long drives listening to the radio or the 8-track tape player. Carole King's "I Feel the Earth Move" and The Knack's "My Sharona" were the songs of the summer. When folks weren't spending the day at the community pool, disco club, or rollerskating rink, they were often lounging at a backyard cookout — which meant frisbee and macaroni salad. More often than not, that old-school macaroni salad followed the same assemblage. For foodies of the era, pasta salad offered an affordable and kid-friendly way to feed large crowds during summertime parties (and, notably, during the gas crisis). A recipe for it also happened to be printed on the back of the Kraft macaroni and cheese box.

The Kraft macaroni salad that fed the Disco Decade was crunchy, technicolor, and veggie-based. A recipe by the name of "Swingin' Summer Salad" appears in a Kraft TV recipes mailer from 1971. To make it, the boxed macaroni and cheese was prepared using package directions, then mixed with sour cream and Miracle Whip "salad dressing" (another Kraft Heinz product). To complete the dish, the mixture was loaded up with diced tomatoes, cucumbers, green bell peppers, and radishes, seasoned simply with salt and pepper, and chilled to set. The result was a colorful, chunky, meatless bowl that shone on picnic tables and lunch counters. 

Over the years, the printed versions of that Kraft macaroni salad recipe have taken on some slight differences. A recipe for "Family Reunion Macaroni Salad" currently listed on the official Kraft Heinz website adds celery, green onions, and chopped hard-boiled eggs into the mix.

Kraft boxed macaroni and cheese dinner debuted during the late 1930s, finding a fast fanbase among foodies stricken by the Great Depression. This cost-effective, shelf-stable offering remained popular during the food rationing of World War II, and when households finally emerged from those periods of scarcity, Kraft dinner was still a popular choice. Nowadays, while plenty of fans of Kraft mac remain, fans of the brand's signature '70s pasta salad are decidedly fewer. Still, some longtime fans have taken to social media to share their takes on this widely known retro recipe. 

Some interpretations remain pious to the original "Swingin' Summer Salad" lineup. A Facebook post dedicated to the Kraft macaroni salad recipe from the "Summers of the 1970s and '80s" adds only garlic powder and onion flakes to the original. Other posters highlight a recipe that more closely resembles the card published on the Kraft Heinz website today, adding chopped hard-boiled eggs into the mix. Some foodies even posit that the dry cheese powder included with the box of Kraft macaroni should be mixed into the mayonnaise before getting folded into the boiled pasta and other macaroni salad ingredients.

Ultimately, whether foodies add hard-boiled eggs or crumbled bacon to their unique interpretations of the '70s recipe, the defining characteristic of this iconic dish is the inclusion of all those crunchy veggies. Have we piqued your retro-inspired appetite? We've rounded up 19 more dishes that everyone ate in the '70s to keep it rolling.