movies

Those look.like the old "bake n serve" Chicken Cordon Blue shit from back in the seventies. It is basically an breaded eggroll made of thin sliced chicken breast meat, filled with white cheese sauce and ham. Delicious for the seventies, but disgusting if you tried it now.

Source: 51 years old that got fed that shit a few times a month.

PS: They were foul at room temperature.

EDIT:

It’s Fish Cakes. 100%. We got fed these all the time as kids in the 80’s. I honestly haven’t seen them in the supermarket or even thought about them for years. I don’t even know if anyone makes them anymore. You could certainly make them from scratch pretty easily though. And they would almost certainly beat out the store-bought ones I was raised on.

EDIT: it’s These: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcake

Hush puppies? Not really a main dish, but idk.

I also can’t tell what is in the bowls beside Roy and his sons - to the top left of Roy’s plate, right hand side of Toby and top right of Brad’s plate. Maybe Ronnie and Silvia have one of these bowls too but I can’t tell. You can see Brad eat out of his bowl at one point and it looks like something pale (I wondered coleslaw or macaroni).

It looks like everyone at the table has a bowl on one side or the other. This was a time when a common middle-class American family dinnerware place-setting might include a salad bowl with a simple salad: chopped iceberg or romaine lettuce with a store-bough salad dressing (ranch, blue cheese, 1000 island, etc). Probably not the most appetizing thing in the world, but totally legit given the era and setting (with Roy being a electrical line worker).

At least one kid is holding one in his hand and there is no butter or white sauce, so not chicken kiev or chicken cordon Bleu. Hush puppies are spheres and the size of donut holes or bon bons. These are bigger.

They look like croquettes. As folks have been confirming in this thread, the 70s had a lot of fried food that was roughly hotdog/baseball shaped. Croquettes would be an easy way to mix protein and veg in a kid friendly way.

Toss a message at Scott Reeder (Scott Prop and Roll). I'd bet money he either knows folks who worked that set or knows someone who knows someone. I've no idea if he'd respond but he seems chill like that.

I’m gonna say fish sticks

Looks like rye dinner rolls to me. I originally thought chopped sirloin, but the roundness and how light they are makes me think bread.

I have a funny feeling that the prop department raided the crafts table, cuz that appears to be a meal of carbs and sides.

Looks like miced patties to me. (Faschierte Laibchen in German...) We Always have them with mashed potatoes.

Kind of looks like miniature corn dogs.

Mac and cheese and corn bread.

Thank you for posting!

It looks like there are 2 kinds of brown things.

One type that is a lighter brown looks spheroid, possibly potatoes or dinner rolls.

Another type is a darker brown, looks like fat cylinders, possibly deep fried breaded fish/salmon/crab cakes, as others have said.

The lighter brown ones could also be fish/salmon/crab cakes, but from a different manufacturer, or just shaped differently.