I didn’t know a cheesecake had cheese in it!

[CormoranStrike]

Okay, not these days, cos I’m a sophisticated and cultured woman now, but I can clearly remember being utterly astonished as a teenager to find out a cheesecake had cheese in it.

In my defence, the only cheese in my house till then had been blocks of cheddar, or cheese slices. I had no idea that cheese could be anything other than orange!

What were your WTF discoveries, which seem even more bizarre through the lens of time?

At school we where allowed to watch the opening of the channel tunnel so I knew it was underground.

@OhWhyNot

Because of the advertising it looked as though the whole of centre parcs was under the dome

And I’m sure they marketed it a holiday whatever the weather conditions

I thought it was all under one big dome and imagined it to be tropical heat

Oh. So it's basically Butlins but in the woods.

@passtheorange

I haven't had a London cheesecake for about 40 years, and I want one now

Me too, suddenly and I don’t even like them

With the channel tunnel... I thought DH was joking when he said he hoped we could take the car upstairs on the train. He wasn't... There are two car decks on the car trains.

I didn't think Colombia was a real country until my late teens. I have no idea why....

Oh no Centre Parcs was always classier that Butlins

I remember Cheesecake as being the pastry with worms one. No mention of London. Probably in the 60's/70's.

Nigella clearly has no idea - www.nigella.com/recipes/london-cheesecake

That’s a NY cheesecake! Or possibly a Jewish cheesecake as practised in London, but FGS Nigella don’t muddy the waters further!

I thought the tunnel the Eurostar went through was like the walk through at the sealife centre...until I was about 25 .

That Robinson Crusoe discovered America.

That's AD stood for After Dinosaurs.

Years ago when dh and I first got together he took me to Paris for the weekend. I was so excited until I started freaking out in the queue to get on to the Eurostar. I tried to downplay it so he wouldn’t know I was suddenly really frightened about being stuck in a train under tonnes of water, and the tunnel forming a crack that suddenly gave way and all the water slowly filling up the tunnel, seeping into the train and us slowly drowning.
I breathed my way through check in and we sat down and blurted it all out. He laughed quite a lot, he tried to downplay his own laughter as he knew I was really scared and didn’t want to come across as not caring but he was flabbergasted that I didn’t know the tunnel is actually under the sea bed. I thought about it for a while and decided it was even worse, the thought of all that additional land/weight being on top of us too!

In French the Channel tunnel is known as 'le tunnel sous la Manche' (the tunnel under the Channel), presumably to avoid confusion that it goes through the Channel

When I realised that tongue and oxtail soup were what they say they are I stopped eating them.

Early 40s before I discovered flora and fauna meant plants and ANIMALS. I thought it was flowering and non-flowering plants. Somehow fauna, in my mind, was associated with ferns 🤷‍♀️

I wonder if you’re my childhood friend OP - I vividly remember the conversation where she said ‘isn’t it funny that cheesecake is called cheesecake when it’s not made with cheese’. After we had cleared that one up she said ‘don’t tell me carrot cake is made with carrots?!’ 🤣

I always thought Timbuktu was in India. Took me 57 years to discover to was in Mali , Africa.

I always thought Timbuktu was a made up country

@DenisetheMenace

When I was little, mid 60s on, we were given a bun sometimes, plain but with a blob of icing and shredded coconut on top. Bakery used to sell them as “cheese cakes”. Don’t think any cheese was involved. Does anyone else remember them?

Did you read any of this thread? Half of it has been discussing the very cheesecake you're asking about!

@ExitChasedByABear

There are bears in Peru Who knew?

Of course there are! That's where Paddington's from! (He is the sole reason why I know / assume there are bears in Peru).

I was quite old when I realised that lobsters are only red after they've been cooked though.

There's a saying: 'March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers' and when I was a kid my mum used to say it a lot during the spring when the weather was rotten.

I could never understand how the plants would know how to come out in flower on the 4th of May.

Here in Germany, we have "Leberkäse". Looks a bit like a meatloaf, can be warmed up whole, sliced thickly and fried, served with a fried egg or sliced thinly and used on sliced bread. It actually tastes very good. Literally translated "Leberkäse" means liver cheese. I lived here ten years and enjoyed the stuff and only then discovered that it contains neither liver nor cheese! Still, after more than 30 years here, I have never understood how it got its name!

I'm 54 and it's only since about maybe five years ago that I have been able to eat cheesecake because I was previously a bit worried that I wouldn't like a cake that tasted of cheese.

When we went to Abu Dhabi as a stop over to visit Ferrari World we couldn't quite grasp that the idea that the theme park was indoors. I mean we knew it was. We saw the walls. We walked through doors to go in, there was air on so it wasn't boiling hot like outside, but it just didn't seem to register fully in our heads.

Until I told him otherwise, my ex thought tuna was made out of dolphin meat as some of the tins said "dolphin friendly" on them.

I was 16 when I discovered several wasn't an unnecessarily complicated way of saying 7...
Also ditto on the Chunnel confusion/fear. I thought it rolled up on the beach and then dramatically sloped into the sea and couldn't get over the fact I crossed continents without seeing the sea!! I also had to have a large amount of vodka for the return journey- I was terrified about being under the sea again!

Not continents, land masses. Sorry, baby brain!
There you go, today I learnt that Britain is not a separate continent to mainland Europe!!

I still struggle to understand pork from pigs and bacon from pigs! How is it made different? When I was younger I thought there were two separate types of pigs and though I understand it’s about curing the meat I still don’t really get it - and all (non-patronising) help gratefully accepted!