This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
The post 10 Things Every 1980s Kitchen Had first appeared on Crafting Your Home
Walk into an average American kitchen in 1985, and a few things would hit you immediately. The colors were warm and a little strange by today’s standards, the phone had a cord long enough to reach the next room, and the microwave on the counter still felt new enough to be a little like magic.
It was a kitchen built for families who cooked at home most nights, and it left behind a set of objects that anyone who grew up in that decade can still picture without trying.
The 1980s kitchen was full of cooking gadgets, floral dishware, and appliances that weighed as much as a small car and lasted just about as long. Here are ten fixtures that showed up in nearly every one.
The Look of the Room
Avocado green or harvest gold appliances
These earthy tones defined kitchens for two decades running. What began as a 1970s trend carried straight into the next decade, since avocado, harvest gold, and burnt orange appliances were still going strong in middle-class kitchens a full ten years after they first appeared.
The colors showed up everywhere, not just on the big machines. One retrospective on the era notes that harvest gold’s warm yellow was featured on ranges and dishwashers, and could even be spotted on smaller kitchen items like mixing bowls.
Families who bought these appliances in the 1970s often kept using them well into the 1980s, since the machines were famously durable even after the color went out of style.
A rotary phone on the wall, with a cord that could stretch across the room
Before anyone could walk away from a call, the kitchen phone kept everyone tethered to one spot, and that was half the fun.
One nostalgic list calls the tangled cord of the kitchen landline the decade’s version of a mobile phone, since it let a teenager wander as far as the cord would allow while still technically staying put.
The wall by the phone usually held a notepad, a pen on a string and a calendar, because that single phone was the household’s entire communication system.
A ceramic cookie jar, often shaped like a goose
No countertop felt finished without one. A retrospective on middle-class kitchens of the decade puts it plainly: the room was warm and welcoming, and there was always a jar of cookies on the counter.
The specific bird-shaped version became something of a cultural fixture, with the same source crowning the huge ceramic goose cookie jar as the king among the era’s countertop tchotchkes, often dressed in a little bonnet and a blue bow to match the rest of the kitchen’s country decor.
A country-themed wallpaper border
Whether the room leaned toward fruit, geese, or gingham, a decorative strip usually ran along the top of the walls.
The blue-and-white geese with their little bonnets waddled into nearly every kitchen of the decade, appearing on hand towels, wallpaper borders, and the knick-knacks that filled the shelves.
Fruit had its own devoted following too, and the same nostalgic account jokes that there were two types of moms in the 1980s: watermelon kitchen moms and apple kitchen moms, both equally devoted to the country-kitchen look and its ever-present wallpaper border.
The Countertop and the Cabinets
A rainbow of Tupperware
Every cabinet had a stack of mismatched plastic containers, and no two lids ever seemed to fit the bowl beneath them.
A roundup of decade-defining kitchen items describes the containers as iconic now precisely because everyone had them, whether they held mystery leftovers or a molded Jell-O salad.
The Tupperware party, where a neighbor sold containers out of her living room, was as much a social occasion as a shopping trip, which helps explain why the brand ended up in nearly every home on the block.
A Jell-O mold
Gelatin desserts peaked a decade earlier, but the mold itself stuck around as a kitchen staple straight through the 1980s.
A history of vintage kitchen tools explains that a Jell-O mold let cooks chill flavored gelatin into decorative shapes overnight, usually with fruit pieces or mini marshmallows suspended inside, and that the molds came in metal or brightly colored plastic.
The finished dessert doubled as a centerpiece for potlucks and holiday dinners, since for much of the twentieth century, molded gelatin salads were treated as the shimmering crown jewels of entertaining.
A big, loud electric can opener
Nobody was opening a can by hand if they could help it. A look back at the decade’s must-have gadgets notes that manual can openers were practically stone-age tools in the 1980s, since every kitchen had a bulky electric version on the counter instead, one that made a grinding noise loud enough to hear from the next room.
The gadget had been building toward that dominance for years, since electric can openers were already status symbols of modern convenience in the 1970s, when General Electric introduced a version that paired the opener with a built-in knife sharpener.
A recipe box, usually Betty Crocker’s
Before anyone searched online for a recipe, the answer lived in a small metal or plastic box on the counter.
A retrospective on the decade’s essentials describes the iconic green box filled with Betty Crocker-developed recipes, noting that it first appeared in the 1970s and that by the following decade, nearly every middle-class mom had her own set, filled with index cards passed down or copied by hand.
The New Arrivals
A microwave, finally trusted enough for daily use.
The microwave had existed for years, but the 1980s made it a genuine kitchen fixture rather than a novelty.
One nostalgic list notes simply that microwaves had a renaissance in the 1980s, and by the end of the decade, nearly every kitchen had one sitting on the counter or built into the cabinets above the stove.
Families who once treated the appliance with suspicion now used it daily for popcorn, leftovers, and the occasional attempt at a full dinner.
A junk drawer full of fast-food glassware
Every 1980s kitchen had a drawer, or a whole cabinet shelf, that made no logical sense next to everything else.
One roundup of the decade’s fixtures notes that opening a typical cabinet meant finding glass mugs given away as fast-food promotions, featuring characters like Garfield or E.T., stacked with mismatched everyday dishes.
Add in the standard kitchen junk drawer, stuffed with rubber bands, matchbooks and half a dozen keys nobody could identify, and the picture of a working, well-loved kitchen was complete.
Conclusion
None of these items were particularly fancy, and that was the point. The 1980s kitchen was designed for a family that ate together most nights, answered the same wall phone for every call, and kept its favorite recipes on index cards instead of a screen.
The colors have faded from fashion and the gadgets have mostly been replaced, but anyone who grew up around a goose-shaped cookie jar and a Betty Crocker recipe box still knows exactly what that kitchen sounded, smelled, and looked like.
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