What ‘everyday’ food was considered exotic when you were young?

[Splodgerbodgerbadger]

I remember the first time we had lasagne, it was a ready made one from M&S. It was considered very new and different by us. It must have been late 80’s early 90’s. We all loved it and had it every Saturday. Mum used to buy it, but then started making her own. It’s still one of my favourite dinners.

We never had curries or pasta growing up, it was generally things like mince beef, my Mum used to make that every Tuesday in gravy and we had veg and mash potatoes in the winter and new potatoes in the summer. I loved that too. Although the downside was we had tapioca for pudding as my Mum cooked it at the same time as the mince. I hated ‘frogspawn’, my Dad wasn’t keen either, but my sisters and Mum loved it.

@HilaryThorpe

I don't remember yoghurt being unusual in the 70s. We used to make our own because it was cheaper. No fancy kit - you cooled the milk until you could keep you little finger in for ten seconds. 😂

I only remember ski yoghurts.

Ski yoghurts appeared in the 70s. I remember life before them Yoghurt was only available in health food shops and was natural. No set or greek natural yoghurt either.

you have had a nice sheltered privileged life then, or are very young.

Wrong on both counts @ElftonWednesday. I'm 63, but had a European born mother. We were poor, but lived in Greater London so had access to many foods. We also had an excellent market where fruit and vegetables were cheap.

@RampantIvy You have always been able to get foods in London you can't get elsewhere. I knew people who had immigrated living in the town where I grew up who were desperate to be able to buy a mango. None were available. I had only heard of mangoes but had no idea what they tasted like.

Olive oil, pesto, sun dried tomatoes, filo pastry.
I grew up in a very diverse area, and when I went to uni in Scotland I would take back spices, fresh coriander, okra, and paneer to make curry as you simply couldn't get those ingredients where I was. This was in the early 80s.

Yes, that would make sense @RoyalFamilyFan.

I never had broccoli until I was an adult in spite of my mother's quite adventurous catering. I assumed she didn't like it, but maybe it wasn't available?

And I had my first mango abroad in 1985. Delicious!

Avocado. Only eaten an my grandma’s. I think I only thought they existed in Surrey 😂

I first came across okra in London in the late 1980's. I had never heard of it before and it was an exotic food only sold at independent shops.

Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s I had things like Chinese food and pizza early on, but curry, etc. was usually ready made by Birds Eye until more Indian restaurants opened up. Moussaka, lasagne, etc. again were supermarket bought.

Mum cooked more traditional food such as roast chicken with all the trimmings, stews, casseroles, etc. but really only added a bit of pepper. Other spices eventually followed as did her cooking things like Spaghetti Bolognese. As I learned to cook she enjoyed spicier and more exotic food that she'd not really thought about before.

I think with many older parents they were reluctant to purchase herbs and spices or didn't know where to get many of the ones we now have at hand like turmeric, etc. How many had spice racks to match the pine kitchens where the spices were never used?

I know at the local co-op which was the only place to buy spices in the town I grew up in, they had curry powder, but no individual spices such as turmeric.

I never had broccoli growing up either, or swede. My mum didn't like them, and I remember the first time I ate mashed swede at a friend's house aged 8. I loved it.

In the early 1990s one of my home economics recipes from school required soy sauce and bean sprouts.
None of us had heard of such things and had to go to the only forrin food shop in the town to track them down after much complaining from my parents that the school shouldn't put such exotic things in their recipes 🤣

I had moved away from London by the 1990s. Soy sauce was pretty mainstream in supermrkets by then. Ken Hom had a very successful cookery show on TV during the 1980s.

I was definitely cooking with soy sauce & bean sprouts in the 80s. I have a recipe I must have written out in 1985 & it wasn't particularly exotic then.

I would say that Ken Hom probably did for Chinese food what Madhur Jaffrey did for Indian food in the 1980s. Supermarkets started selling more exotic ingredients then.

It was possibly more that they weren't on my parents radar (and thus not on mine or siblings)
Safeways might have had them but she probably wasn't aware of that!

Oh yes, Ken Hom! Did you know that you can use dry sherry if you can’t get Chinese rice wine? He was so lovely when he did his MN web chat here a few years ago. 🥢 🍜 🥢 🍶 🥢

I met him at a book signing in the 1980s. He was lovely. Yes I knew about the sherry.

Ken used to say that every week at some point in his programme.

Safeway always had more exotic products and items that other supermarkets didn’t sell I remember seeing passion fruit in there and my nanny buying it for me

Tooting market always had lots is spices, okra and coconuts for sale

To be fair I was living near Bradford at the time and had access to Asian supermarkets, and we had Safeways.

Ken Hom was popular but was probably followed by more adventurous cooks at the time. I had a wok I had got from a shop in Chinatown and followed his advice to season it.

When I was a student in the early 1980s my best friend was Chinese and we would eat in several of the Chinese restaurants in Leeds. You could get a cheap meal at lunchtime. My friend would order off menu, and we ate all sorts of weird and wonderful (and not so wonderful) things.