What everyday food did you not taste until you were an adult?

[Musicmummy63]

So I didn't eat any broccoli until I was around 20. Mum was a good cook, but we always had peas, carrots, cabbage etc, but never had broccoli. I first had it when I had a dinner with my future DH family (around 40 years ago), and it's been my favourite veg since. Just wondering if anyone else had a similar experience.
1st post here, so hopefully I've not created an AIBU vote!

Fresh figs. My mum always had dried figs at Christmas they were like eating a mouthful of sand. Fresh ones not any better.

Fresh salmon. We had canned salmon which I never liked. I first had Fresh salmon at my works Christmas meal when I was i. My early 20s, I was surprised how nice it was

Halloumi. It was only when I went to uni I heard of it from my flatmates and had no idea what it was 😂

I tried Stilton every Christmas and hated it, until I was 30 and suddenly loved it. Weird!

I first tasted chicken at the age of 42.

I never had fresh food made from scratch when I was growing up, apart from school dinners. My mum hated cooking and prided herself on preparing meals that involved stuff from the freezer or out of cans. I was a teenager before I realised that spinach didn't always come out of the freezer like a green brick.

This.

I think most of these weren't everyday foods at the time!

I didn't try crumpets till I was 19

Anything ‘foreign’ as Dad was a committed meat n 2 veg man. However, after he died, mum and I really enjoyed trying out loads of different cuisines. 😂

Pasta. My Mum did cook pasta dishes but only with tomato based sauces and I don't like tomatoes. So never tried it. Also pizza.

Fromage frais - 1985

Real butter!
I grew up thinking I hated butter, turns out I hated the cheap margarine my mum fed us.

Marmite wasn’t something we had at home so I might have been an adult when I tried that. I also had never been to a Pizza Hut until I was about 20.

We ate food from around the world at home and in restaurants though and there was a health food cafe in my very working class northern mining town in the 80s/90s so aubergine and pulses types of food were available.

So many for me ...I never had pasta. Or rice (except rice pudding as a 'dessert').
I had my first (of many) takeaways when I was 18. I didn't have curry until I was over 18 - I was blown away by how gorgeous it was.

I never had salad. We didn't even have fruit in our house growing up.

It was just Dad at home and he was (and still is) a really plain eater - pork chop and mash would be a typical dinner.

We lived on deep fried chips. Easy singles. Toast.

I've only had them once since as, like you say, very hard to get hold of. Our local market sells them so you need to go to yours, if you have one, when they are in season.
I am growing some in my garden so fingers crossed, next year we shall have some

Chicken and fish. My parents didn’t eat it, so neither did me and my siblings. Our meals were mostly beef or pork based.

My mother was Italian- so all the kids in our area had pizza and pasta when they weren’t usual foods in Britain. I do sometimes wonder if they remember why they had eaten “foreign” food when most of their contemporaries hadn’t!

Tiramisu, I still haven’t gotten round to trying it though

I didn't try tuna until I'd left home either. Apparently there was some kind of tinned fish that my Mum had to eat in WW2 - I think it was called snoek - that was really horrible. That experience left her deeply suspicious of "foreign" fish, especially in a can. We did have tinned sardines and, on special occasions, tinned salmon, but she thought tuna was something analogous to snoek and wouldn't buy it. I discovered that I liked it at University and eventually persuaded my parents to try it. Much to their surprise they liked it too!

I grew up in South Africa in the 80s. AND I had a mother who didn't like food that was particularly "adventurous". We had chinese and Italian take out/restaurants, but I definitely had never had Thai, Japanese, Mexican etc. I'm not sure I had Thai food until I moved here, nor Indian style curries (I did have, although not at home, South African style curries).

I don't know if you can (or could) get turnips, swedes, parsnips in SA in those days but if you could, we didn't, and I have to admit, I'm not devastated. I do not love those vegetables!

Olive oil. It was a rare (and eye wateringly expensive) ingredient we just didn't use.

And weird one - blueberries. I don't remember eating them, ever, until I was working in the City in about 2009.

Snoek is a South African fish - oily and very boney. Its cheap and plentiful and nutritious but is very much a love/hate type thing (like mackerel or sardines) and I have just googled and discovered it was widely available in tinned version post world war 2. I can't say I'd have loved it either!

Garlic. I tried it for the first time during my first week at university, and have had it most days since.

My mum was another who imposed her very restricted eating on everyone. She didn't even do most of the cooking 🙄

Sushi? But that wasn't really an everyday food when I was growing up. In fact it didn't even exist really until the 90s in the UK.
Whelks.
Crayfish.
Paella.

None of those are really everyday enough are they? I guess Farley's Rusks. I tried them when I was about 17.

Chowder- had it at a wedding as an adult- gagged my way through it😅

Pasta except for alphabetti spaghetti. I never had pasta until a flatmate made some when I was at university.

Mayonnaise (and of course anything made with mayonnaise). I don't even know when I started having that but we never had it in my childhood home (we did have salad cream but I didn't like it). My parents told me mayonnaise tasted disgusting and I believed them. I eat quite a lot of mayo these days (probably too much).

Nuts and tuna. My parents didn’t like them so we never had them in the house.

There’s quite a few newer foods by modern standards too but they didn’t exist in most of England in the 80’s and 90’s so not counting those.