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.

Got to agree with vienetta. That was always a very special treat, now available for £1 at the coop!

Courgettes
Aubergines
Broccoli
Sweet potatoes
Mangoes
Fresh pineapple
Avocado
Spaghetti
Yoghurt

Anything that wasn't meat and veg was posh.

But I'm from the South Wales valleys. Every village had its Italian cafe selling frothy coffee and proper icecream. You can keep your Costas: we've had the real thing for a couple of generations.

This is why I love watching Delia Smith's Christmas, when she does things like carefully explain what pesto is, and how you can find liquid glucose in the chemists (dr oetkar does tubes of it in the baking section now!)

Viennetta and Artic Roll.
I hadn’t heard of hummus before I went to university. It’s my dc’s go to snack when they are starving (which is pretty much all the time).

Any kind of "TV dinner" was very downmarket.

Until M&S started doing food, around the mid-'70s. Then it became quite acceptable.

Yes @flyinggiraffebox I watched the one where she put mozzarella and cherry tomatoes on skewers and thought how times had changed!!

Oh yes loads of these (was born in 1964). Avocados were a treat for Mum and Dad when I was a teenager. Pasta with pesto - got given it at a friend's house when I was about 16 (her mum was American). I thought I was terribly daring for eating that much garlic.
When I was 18 I had a part time job in a wine bar and got to taste all these incredibly exotic things like hummus, taramasalata and shish kebabs. (Shish kebab was quite posh then. Doner kebab was a total mystery to me until I was a student.)
I also remember chicken being a rare treat and the usual Sunday roast being either beef or lamb because chicken was so much more expensive.

Also I don't remember broccoli as a kid. Not sure why, though. My grandmother would have 'spring greens' but we didn't - I think my mum didn't like them.

I always thought cathedral city cheese was dead posh. Granny had it and we had asda own brand cheap stuff. Ditto anchor butter.

I only have cathedral city for cheddar now.

Quinoa was a bit fancy when I was a child. Champagne
Caviar (although we had this in our house as standard because my parents were from the USSR but it was hard to find the good stuff in supermarkets)
Soft cheeses (Australia, they didn’t permit the import to soft cheeses over safety concerns so choice was limited)
European wines (Again because Australia, import duties plus alcohol taxes made European wines less competitive against local rivals so less of a selection available)
Macaroons

Prawns, scampi, smoked haddock, Lurpak, fresh cream, cream cakes, cheese that’s not cheddar, steak, strawberries, avocado, olives

Orange juice (and I'm not talking fresh - just Mr Juicy from black tetrapaks with a cartoon orange on the front)

Phileas Fogg crisps - bought from Waitrose and taken home with reverence

Sun dried tomatoes

Non food treats included hair conditioner (seen as a possibly over the top indulgence), using a hair dryer, and new items of clothing outside of Christmas/birthdays.

Fresh herbs. I’ve never had a steak either to this day. It was too expensive as a child and I became veggie at 14!

Asparagus -Nobody knew how to cook it so was generally floppy and shrivelled.
Prawns - dinner party fare only used for prawn cocktails.
Steak - for high days and holidays only,
Tinned salmon and that revolting Ye Olde Oak ham that came in a tin all salty and covered in jelly [yuk!]. These two reserved for Sunday tea along with tinned peaches and the height of sophistication evaporated milk.
A packet of crisps all to yourself. Unknown in our house as one packet was shared between everyone-so three if you were lucky.
Any kind of fizzy drink either lemonade or cherryade reserved for Christmas only.
Gateau -something only other people had and only seen on T.V
You can tell I was a child of the 50's can't you?

Smoked salmon was very posh, now I have it for breakfast with my scrambled eggs.

For me, a more recent one is prosecco. Used to be a drink for a special occasion but is now drunk as much as anything else. DH and I polished off a couple of bottles last week - on a Wednesday night, no less!

And going out for a meal was a very special occasion. Now it's so much cheaper, we go out for tea at least a couple of times a month.

I like wombs info regarding pineapples. We were discussing this the other day and apparently people used to rent pineapples to take to parties as it was a status symbol.
Tinned salmon was fancy and was only eaten as a treat on Sundays, mixed with vinegar in sandwiches.
I had a boyfriend at 18 who used brown bread and ate courgettes (not together). I'd never known anything like it and I practically tripped over myself in the rush to tell my mum all about it.

Lucozade in a big bottle with crinkly paper on it was only for people in hospital.
I remember going to a restaurant when I was a child in the 80s and having a curry it came with sliced bananas, desiccated coconut and currents in little dishes around the plate. I thought it was the height of sophistication.

Brokenribses. You beat me to it, I was going to say spaghetti in ridiculously long blue paper packets - I was fascinated by the way my mother wound it into the pan of boiling water as it softened.

Wine in pubs, unheard of.

Actually, wine anywhere except in restaurants. At home, people drank spirits or beer, but not wine.

I'd also have to say boxes of chocolates. Remember how posh a box of Milk Tray were! Now chocolate is just cheap and not very nice.

I remember being totally jealous because when my little brother had his tonsils out my mum bought him a cream egg as a special treat. I had never had one. I must have been about 9.

Back in the 60s courgettes were exotic. We used to have them as a course on their own, cut in half lengthways, dipped in egg & breadcrumbs and fried till golden and crispy, with mayonnaise to dip them in! Heaven!

Other exotic and rarely seen items were peaches, kiwi fruit (often called Chinese gooseberries) and aubergines. By the 80s things were changing fast, mangoes and papayas, everything your heart desires!

Something worth remembering is just how seasonal foods were even a short while ago. Pomegranates and dates only appeared around December, new potatoes in spring, asparagus in May for about a month, strawberries signalled summer, plums in September, fish varieties were seasonal too.

Bananas. We'd get 1 a week and as a real treat in sandwiches for school trips. They were so expensive.

Half the supermarket shelves - my dh had broccoli for the first time at my mums house, I remember mum buying asparagus to impress him too. I remember my first trip to Pizza Hut, I remember the introduction of microwave meals, fresh pasta etc. Our diets were really boring quite frankly - chops, mash & veg, repeat ... Chinese takeaways and Indian restaurants were around (London) but a very rare treat, I remember the kebab shop opening and we were blown away by doner kebabs well the meat cooking on the spit (didn't eat one until I had a Saturday job as my mums exotic was spaghetti bolagnase (made with an oxo cube of course!)

Some of these things I would still class as luxuries though. Cathedral city is quite expensive, and steak and smoked salmon are really expensive. Lurpak costs a bomb!