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.

Pesto and hummus

@Pallisers I too grew up outside the Pale in 1970s Ireland!
It was incredibly plain fare & my mother did not like cooking at all so our meals were probably even painer than most.

We mostly had fried or roasted meat - chops / liver / bacon / lamb etc & potatoes featured in every single dinner.

Veg was mostly turnip / cauliflower/ cabbage / carrots / tinned peas / tinned beans & pretty much always boiled to mush with just salt added at the end. No butter or herbs or seasoning.

No sauces other than instant gravy or ketchup or salad cream

It was all fairly unpalatable & I thought I was not interested in food at all until I went to stay with a relative who is an excellent cook & even though I was only about 14 or 15 I can still remember everything I had to eat that weekend & what an absolute revelation of flavour it all was.

It set something off in me & I quite literally longed for food like that. Looking back none of it was in any way exotic but it was so well cooked & seasoned I thought I'd died & gone to heaven! And it was a grilled steak with garlic butter & baked potato one night, chicken pie the next...

I taught myself to cook as an act of rebellion & I am a very good cook now & I know my dc have had a radically different experience of food to mine growing up

Having been bought up abroad, many things like avocados, spices, garlic etc were all normal. I thought any processed English shit was exotic!!

@NalPolishRemover we had fairly plain food growing up. My Mum is a good cook and it was nice food. I’ve never been particularly adventurous with my food, where DH is. His parents are different to mine and are much more adventurous maybe that’s why.

Actually when I was little I thought Penguin bars and Monster Munch were exotic, because I was hardly ever allowed them 😂

@NailPolishRemover, I was lucky in that my mother was a decent enough cook and liked a nice dinner. We had the best meat she could afford, homemade gravy, nice veg, well seasoned. No processed food at all. Looking back, my aunts were chef-level cooks. I remember eating a homemade steak and kidney pudding on a tuesday lunchtime at one aunt - served in the traditional bowl with a napkin tied around it.

But there was nothing outside of good Irish food and yes the taste of other spices/herbs/garlic etc was a revelation. I also love to cook.

A whole Jaffa orange was a big treat, and something you might be given if you were ill and someone was feeling flush.
For the truly exotic, a sit-down Chinese meal in a small town restaurant. Chicken and pineapple. We felt properly cosmopolitan. With chips, of course. No need to go completely mad.

Green Peppers.
Garlic Sausage.
Brie Cheese.

This was late 1960’s.Also remember the first time I had steak and had no idea what to say when asked by waiter how I wanted it cooked!

Chicken pie - my parents aren’t from the UK so any traditional English dishes were exotic for us!

Born in the 70s.
The first time is saw an olive was on holiday in Spain when I was perhaps 10; I assumed it was a grape and thought I had been poisoned and spat it across the restaurant. 😬
My grandmother would buy in Babycham for the children, but Cherry B was strictly for the adults and very sophisticated.

Coconuts, I remember the excitement when my dad would bring one home. Piercing it with the corkscrew, sharing the milk between the 3 kids and then it getting bashed with hammer.
Pure orange juice, we'd get one pint delivered a week by the milkman and all had to share it.
Philadelphia whilst not exotic was quite a treat as we usually made do with Dairy Lea.

Courgette

Vienetta!!,
didn't eat hummus until I was 21 🤣
I thought garlic bread was fancy, my mum would cut it up and put it in a long basket with a cloth in which made it even fancier!!
Genuinely thought a roast dinner was the poshest meal of all though !!

Going out for dinner, starter was melon with a glacé cherry or a glass of orange juice.

I remember trying fajitas at a friend's aged 19 ish so 1997 maybe? I'd been to a Mexican restaurant in Manchester a few years earlier but only been flush enough for chilli con carne.

The Mongolian bbq in Manchester also about 97 blew my mind. I mean, in hindsight the concept was shit but flavour!!! My dad used to experiment cooking but only curries. Mostly far too hot.

Standard fayre at home was meat, potatoes & veg or casseroles. Or bacon & eggs. Or frozen pies. My mum wasn't much of a cook. She still isn't! But my dad came home fairly late so it fell to her during the week.

Pesto. Wildly exotic when I was about 10.

Avocados - DM thought DAunt was showing off when she served one as a starter (late 80s). And it was just served as a plain avocado, one per person.

Hummous - literally nobody ate this when I was a child, and I remember thinking it was absolutely disgusting the first time I tried it.

Thai food - green curry became popular when I was about 16. Hadn’t heard of red curry, pad thai or anything else, until I actually visited Thailand in 1997.

Prawn cocktail served in an avocado. Thai green chicken curry when the supermarkets started doing it. Smoked salmon.

Oh and it wasn’t exotic, but Lucozade was an Actual Medicine, and you only got it if you’d had d&v and couldn’t keep solids down. Even then it was measured out carefully. One bottle would last for months.

I do remember the arrival of the French Stick in the 80s North West! Never a baguette. Always a French stick.

@whattodo2019 it was foreign! From Sweden originally I think. I grew up in the 60s and early 70s!

Bagel

Wine.

Strawberries and cream. We lived in poverty but if my dad had a win on the horses then in the summer he would make me a bowl. He would shout of me in a feminine posh voice 'Stella, darling, come get your strrrrrawberrrriesss and creaaaam!'. I now do it to my children

Sorry for not exotic, luxury I guess. We didn't really talk about foods being exotic.

SKI yoghurt 1965
Matey bubble bath
Fruit gums and fruit pastilles in a box at the cinema also ice-cream in a tub
Screwball ice-cream