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.

Oranges, we only had them at Christmas.

Hummous

Pesto

Hummus

Kiwis

@rookiemere

Mushrooms and avocados ( born in 1970).

Are you from the UK? Mushrooms have always been eaten here, I mean they're even in a full English...

I remember being with a particularly stupid boyfriend when we first saw limes in a shop. He bought one and proceed to attempt to eat it walking down the street, as, you know, that's how you're supposed to eat them.

Uneducated in the ways of the lime as I was, his face told me that was probably not the way to eat them!

Asparagus
Avocados
Smoked salmon
Mango

Not so much exotic as i grew up with a GreekScottish diet but in the early 80s Findus made French bread pizza and i thought it was such a treat to have one every now and then.

Pesto
Hummus
Sushi
Lentils

I made my mum a paneer curry the other day which she’d never heard of and it blew her mind,

Pizza and orange juice in the 1970s
Kiwi was a new fruit in the 1980s
Pesto in the 1990s

Now I'm wondering when I first had hummus! Not until the 1990s or 2000s but it's now such a staple in this house.

Definitely Vienetta and the mint one for an extra special treat.

Also randomly orange cheese and my mum made moussaka and was so chuffed with it but she made it with potatoes instead of aubergines as she couldn't get them and that's how she always made it after that

After Eights. I remember begging to have more than one and I was always told no because they were the special chocolates.

Curry, tagine, pesto and different pasta shapes - Chinese food too- I was given a wok

I remember first trying kiwi fruit. And avocado. My first Chinese meal - in a restaurant for a friend's birthday. Lasagne pasta used to be thick green strips, not the sheets we get now, when it was first available to buy in the UK. I remember Delia Smith first making pesto. She's been responsible for introducing people to so many different foods. When I was a student a spent a year in Spain. There was no way near the variety of food available there as there was in the UK at the time, it was very much Spanish with one Indian restaurant in the city I lived in. It was expensive compared with the UK.

I was born in the 70s but my mum was a very adventurous cook (her mother had been a chef for M&S). She went through a phase of making amazing curries, then Greek food, African food and occasionally Chinese food.
The only thing I didn’t like that we used to have often was Bobotie. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobotie

Even now, when she is just cooking for her and Dad, who would eat anything she will still search out unusual ingredients. What I have noticed is that whenever she gets it into her head that she needs something it becomes super popular a couple of years later and you can get it everywhere.
Where I live we have a few ‘world food’ shops and she will send me in there in search of stuff. About 15 years ago it was pomegranate molasses, you couldn’t buy it anywhere. Can’t move for the stuff now.

I remember in the 70s having cheesecake at a restaurant, we loved it but were puzzled by the name. We concluded the cheese ( if it was there at all and not just a strange name) was in the biscuit base , not the lovely creamy fruity bit on top.
In the 70s all cheese was cheddar .
Also my big sister went to a very sophisticated friends for the night , her mother had been to university[ She came back and reported she has had white spaghetti for tea with meat and no toast!!!

Everything!

We were a meat and two veg family. Desserts and cake were bountiful but never had anything else until I was much older.

Yoghurt! My friend’s parents bought yogurt and had a home phone 😮

Pasta- I got introduced to it at university

My mother cooked from scratch. Would cut out recipe from magazines in the 60s onwards one dish we called bobbity found out decades later from SA friend it was bobotie

It was lasagna for us too. My mum used to make "lasagna" but it was just Bolognese between lasagna sheets and sprinkled with cheese, no bechemel sauce, she used to go mad that we liked premade better!

How old are people who say yogurt was exotic? We ate yogurt every weekend in the 1960s. I even remember the brand - Eden Vale.

I also think it depends on where you grew up and what background you had. I grew up in Greater London, and my German born mum was Cordon Bleu qualified (she achieved her diploma in Paris), so we ate a much more varied diet than our peers.

Her German background also infuenced what we ate, and my mum used to shop in a Polish delicatessen. We would eat Polish sausage and sauerkraut, fresh ravioli, home made pizza, spaghetti bolognese, chop suey, the occasional curry, chicken in caper sauce, chicken provencal, roast lamb studded with garlic and rosemary as well as stews, fish and chips, roasts, chops etc. This was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yoghurt too...tasted different to how it does now, can't work out why...the ski fruit ones were less sweet than they are now, which is surprising

Ha, I remember going to a wine bar with a friend in 1980 where lasagne was on the menu. She asked me, “what’s Las-a-gang?”
My mum was very modern with cooking pasta in the mid 70s, and going vegetarian. There was a restaurant in London called Cranks, with such unheard of things as couscous and mung beans

I grew up in a very working class household in Derbyshire in the 1980s so literally anything which wasn’t a potato, an onion, a carrot or a piece of overcooked meat was ‘foreign muck’ to be viewed with suspicion. It sounds like such a cliché, but we literally did have a bottle of olive oil in the bathroom which was used for pouring into blocked ears. We would no more have considered eating it or cooking with it than we would with washing up liquid. Things we didn’t eat :
Avocados
Kiwis
Fruit juice
Soy sauce
Chillis
Garlic
Aubergines
Courgettes
Any spice except pepper.
Any herb except parsley.
Any cheese except Cheddar.
Any bread except co-op white sliced.
Vegetable oil, we used lard.
Ground coffee, we had co-op instant.

Grew up in the 80s. Parents (never tried) didn't like "foreign food", and for that read pasta, pizza, curry etc. They wouldn't buy me the ingredients for things like that when it was home ec, as it was "a waste".

I remember crying in the shop once as I begged to spend my 30p on a 1/4 of a melon instead of sweets but wasn't allowed because apparently I wouldn't like it 🙄