To ask which foods used to be super fancy but are now totally "normal"

[cheesenpickles]

I was chatting to my 3 year old today about how, when I was little, pizza was quite an exciting thing. It's what they ate on American tv shows and there was no way you could get it delivered to your house. Got me thinking about things that are ordinary groceries now which were the pinnacle of fancy/unthought of in the 80s and 90s (and earlier!)

Avocados are another one. My mum would buy one for her and my dad as a special treat to eat with vinegarette from their special "avocado pear" bowls.

Mexican food as well. Old El Paso kits were the height of fancy pants when I was younger.

Halloumi, gets and hummus were things only my family seemed to know about (parents were stationed in Cyprus) and trying to explain squeaky cheese to my friends when we brought a huge brine-filled jug of the stuff back from holiday was hilarious considering it's totally normal now.

When I was little (early 80s) we never had ice cream in the house, not even the ubiquitous Viennetta! It was strictly for beach holidays and even then it was usually vanilla. I remember on a couple of occasions being treated to Tutti Frutti flavour and thinking that it was the height of sophistication . Sadly seems to have vanished from the shelves now Also remember being really impressed with Muller corners when they first came out - there was a Rum and Raisin one that was AMAZING but has now gone the way of the Tutti Frutti ice cream

Loads of things - but one sticks in my mind which was bananas. I remember buying some with my Mum in about 1974 and she was saying that 17p per pound was huge money and that's why they were treats. Seems unbelievable now........

This has brought back lots of memories.
I visited my friend at uni in Bradford and went for my first curry. It was a traditional Indian restaurant and I was amazed when we had to eat with our hands. It was also non licensed but you could take your own alcohol.
Spaghetti Bolognese was also very exotic. So too were luxury ice creams such as cornettos.

Cilantro - first had it in Mexico when I was about 20. Now it’s everywhere and it’s too bad because I still hate the stuff!

Sushi available just about everywhere
Avocado
Asparagus
Raspberries, strawberries and pineapple being available year round
Abundance of Thai restaurants
Cote de boeuf
Fresh Grilled artichokes

Coffee. Our family just drank tea. I never had coffee until I was seventeen!

@angelfacecuti75 That was Anthony Head in the Nescafé adverts. Remember when he was in Buffy The Vampire Slayer?

@queenofthelurkers Tutti Frutti Gino Ginelli though? >>>>Vienetta

Funnily, when I saw the title of this thread, my first thought was pizza. I remember in the late 80’s my mum would get it in M&S and it was very exotic, and pretty expensive.

Pretty much everything thats been mentioned. My dad had very traditional tastes, and my mum, god love her, couldnt cook for toffee, so if it wasnt chicken and then angel delight... well , it pretty much was, every fuckin night. I remember Ski yoghurt appearing in the shops and it was the most exciting thing ever - I didnt get out much!

Ready meals

M&S chicken kiev, lasagne & moussakka very. Abigails parteh!

It was Lily brand spaghetti in the long blue paper wrapped packets, lovely. My granny was Lily, and we'd tease her that she wouldn't touch it, even though her name was on the packet.

My Mum is a really good and adventurous cook, but "foreign" was limited to French cuisine, spag bol and erzatz Chinese whilst I was still living at home. I've just googled that Delia's Summer Collection was published in 1993, when I was 20, so that must have been the first time I had pesto - in a rice salad, and grilled halloumi. I first had an avocado at University.

I loved Jess Phillip's speech this week when she said she thought she'd met posh people before becoming an MP, when in fact she'd just met people who ate olives. I'm from the Midlands too, and knew exactly what she meant.

I can remember our home tech class excitedly crowding round a mango that one child brought in. No one had seen one before.

Curry’s -the only ones we had we’re out of a Vesta box. I first had a proper curry aged 18 at uni.

Prawn cocktail was a Christmas only starter

French fancies a Sunday teatime treat.

All grapes came in a paper bag, with pips (not seeds, pips)

Lucozade in a clear bottle in orange wrap twisted at the bottle neck was purely for when you were ill.

Pot noodle was seen as a treat - split in half with brother we used to fight over who ate out the pot and who got the bowl

Coco pops we’re a rare treat

Reading this has just reminded me of how it's really not so long ago that you could only get things in season. I'm 34 and definitely remember, in the early/mid-90s, things like new potatoes, strawberries, asparagus, etc. only being around in season.

I always remember constantly pestering my mum for filled pasta when we went to do the supermarket shop. She never let us have it!

Oh, yes! The Christmas hamper! Ye Olde Oak Ham! 🤢

Confession time, I have NEVER tried evaporated or condensed milk as it comes.

Being a Scot I've definitely had condensed milk in the form of tablet, I've even made this on occasion and still didn't taste the "raw" milk

So question - what do they taste like?

"any pasta that wasnt spaghetti or didn’t come in a tin" omg yes!

I used to LOVE tinned ravioli on toast and now have veggie version. Then of course there's gene hunts favourite "nearly dinner time. I'm 'aving hoops" 😂😂

What I do miss are proper "skooshy" milkshakes made with full fat milk AND cream and crusha syrup. I used to get a lime one with dark chocolate sprinkles on a Saturday at a local ice cream parlour when I was about 7/8. Flavoured milk is NOT the same.

"So many! I was born in 1951, and as a family we were vegetarian (which was extremely rare)" wow that must have been tough, I went veggie late 80's and even then there wasn't much around that was specifically for veggies. Basically beanfeast, veggie grills & veggie fingers. Other than that it was cooking from scratch. Making my own veggie lasagne, pies, making up sausages & burgers from dried mixes from the health food shop where I was also able to get veggie pate's - I still love the yeast ones in a tube, sadly the amazing chestnut one is no longer made. If eating out it was either bland soggy vegetable lasagne or "I'll ask chef if he can knock you up an omelette" unless eating at Indians where there was much more choice.

"The most exotic thing we had to drink was Britvic pineapple juice in a small (mixer) bottle" that reminds me of another 70's drink I still love - bitter lemon!

"Graphista I remember having an argument somewhere out in the sticks in the USA about French dressing - they'd got it entirely wrong. And American chop suey was nothing like ours, a big disappointment." I can well imagine! There are things with the same name that mean utterly different products across the 2 countries.

"Does anyone remember the posh bloke in the nescafe ads ? Or the flake ad* witb the bath?" Do you mean Anthony head in the ads with Sharon Maughan? Yes I remember both those

m.youtube.com/watch?v=3vtYRyAUcnM

m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMwMKJhaf7A

Queenofthelurkers - I miss tutti frutti ice cream too. You mention rum n raisin muller yogurt i miss rum n raisin ice cream too.

Evaporated milk is one of my favourite things in the whole wide world. Condensed milk is sickly imo but evap is like single cream only nicer.

@Perverse Greggs do sell bread. However no one buys bread from a traditional bakery any more except in small villages. My husband was bakery manager at Greggs, previously we had our own bakeries. When supermarkets started to sell loaves of bread in the 70/80’s for 10 pence that crippled our business. Greggs now only make s profit on daft food food like many other companies. Gone are the days when you went to individual shops for different foods.

I meant fast food.

Marscapone cheese. I had an italian boyfriend who was a chef back in the eighties. He wanted to make me this amazing dish called tiramisu but had to lower his standards, substituting marscapone with philadelphia. Everytime we had it this "speciality" he would sigh and say it isnt as good with this rubbish English substitute. I didnt care, i loved it. Fast forward to present day, I now make tiramisu for my family and everytime i pick up a marscapone pot from the shelf in tesco i am reminded of being 19, first love etc etc. All thats gone but at least i am now able to make tiramisu the way it should

I have a Delia cookbook where she talks about the advantages of freshly ground peppercorns "if you can get them" and recommends buying olive oil from the chemist. It's not that old

I also remember having tzatziki on holiday in Greece in the 80’s, and my mum got the recipe to bring home, and the Greek yogurt and olive oil were pretty “specialty” ingredients.
Oh! And coriander, my dad had a recipe for lamb kebabs (I think from a foreign friend) that used it, we had to go to a little Asian greengrocers to buy it, as it was unheard of in the supermarket.
And actually supermarkets as we know them. We had co-op but that was about it, and they didn’t have a frozen aisle, you had to go to somewhere like Bejam’s for that. (Gosh, makes me feel old, but it really wasn’t all that long ago..)

Northern Ireland didn't get it's first Tesco, it was a tiny city centre one, until 1998 (only local supermarket and m&s food hall until that point) it brought a load of new things my favorite was the butternut squash I was 17 and we were all killing ourselves laughing at the phallic nature of it's shape as nobody had seen them before!

Sainsburys opened in ballymena in 1995/1996 and before that ballymena had a coop superstore

I was also born in 51 so remember a lot of these ( we were a family who believed the April Fools about the failure of the Italian spaghetti harvest). I also remember the excitement when, after swimming, we could buy cheese flavoured crisps. Previously they had just been plain with a blue twist of salt in the bag.