What ‘foreign food’ do you remember as a child?

I also remember Ski yoghurt with real fruit ! I worked in Sloane Square in London on Saturdays when I was 15 and spent most of my meagre wages at the supermarket in the king's road. So sophisticated!. It would have been 1963.

At home we had vesta curry and Vesta chow mein. Spaghetti Bolognese made from scratch, occasionally.
Oh yes. We knew how to live

For me as a teenager the Kentucky pancake kitchen was exotic. They served Russian Blinis.

Callistemon* Gogonzola was an everyday product, certainly in the 1950s and later.

As i said the standard 2 cheeses served on a cheese board if you ordered 'cheese and biscuits' rather than a dessert was cheddar and gorgonzola. It was harsh and acidic and completely put me off blue cheese, until the 1980s and I tasted stilton and then later roquefort, and now innumerable other blue cheeses, but i di try some gorgonzola recently and it was a s nasty as I remembered.

My father loved it.

If it was popular it can't have been that nasty.

Nasty is relative

A lot of jello concoctions in the past are very side eyed and considered nasty now - all the rage then

Hithere

Nasty is relative

A lot of jello concoctions in the past are very side eyed and considered nasty now - all the rage then

DH still bemoans the fact that we don't have jelly and blancmange any more, remembered from parties when he was young.

Vesta risotto or packet dried curry.

Vol au vents are most certainly French

Wenmore

Vol au vents are most certainly French

They just seem so Abigail's Party!

I did make some earlier this year for a party 😃

Despite being invented by Antonin Carême (1784-1883) one of the most famous French chefs , vol-au-vents are as British as cucumber sandwiches, especially when filled with egg mayonnaise. Or mushrooms in cold white sauce.
The stalwart of many a Bridge evening or church social.

Hithere

Nasty is relative

A lot of jello concoctions in the past are very side eyed and considered nasty now - all the rage then

Can you explain side-eyed ?
And why is it called jello in the US?

We had a Polish neighbour in the flat upstairs when I was a toddler and she used to give me olives and stuffed vine leaves. Went to my first Chinese restaurant in the East End when I was 12 and easily handled the chop sticks.
My mum was a very frugal but adventurous cook. Her mum had been a chef. My dad grew all our fruit and veg and my mum bottled, pickled and made jam.
There was always good food on our table.

We had no ‘exotic’ food. Dinners usually consisted of meat, potato, vegetables. I remember when I had to take ingredients to a Domestic Science lesson, my father was horrified at the idea that tomatoes were sold in a tin.

Yoghurt made it to the shelves of my village Coop in around 1962, and I nagged my mother to buy me one, despite her prediction that I wouldn’t like it. How right she was - it tasted sour, of course, but worse than that, it had a horrible sickly strawberry crust on top. I felt obliged to force the ruddy thing down, having been told in no uncertain terms how expensive it was.

Germanshepherdsmum

None at all until Vesta came along in my late teens! I was the only one in the family who would eat it but thought it was wonderful!

Haha, me too. I first ate when I was training to teach.

My brother and his girlfriend took me to a Chinese restaurant when I was 12. Oh my goodness - it was very special - I thought I’d gone to another world! .

When we left school 1966, working in London just 16 yrs old, I met my friend for lunch. She said ‘there’s an Italian restaurant round the corner, shall we go?😳. It was the first time we’d had Pizza and it was delicious!

Arguing quietly with a friend when I wouldn’t eat the fish eye that was in his bowl at the floating restaurant in HK.
We were with a Chinese family and didn’t want to be rude and leave it.
He did step up to the plate and gulp it down.
We were about 16 and had both grown up there so we’re very used to the food but that was a step too far!

My dad was always adventurous with food. He had his eyes opened in the army i think when stationed in Africa during the war.

He went to London four times a year for work and came home with "odd" things - kumquat, aubergines, kiwi fruit (think then called Chinese gooseberry), persimmon, lychee (my favourite) and many many more including odd meats and strange fish.... he once brought a breadfruit which he had apparently eaten in Africa and didn't really like! He bought it because he saw it and wanted me to try it. He said I should "try everything at least once" - this extended to snails (which I liked) and frogs legs - which although chicken-ish I think I just couldn't do again.

He was a great cook and I remember having octopus and squid in his paella.

He often cooked curries and used a lot of beans and pulses which i think was more unusual then. I remember going with him on a London trip once and he took me to a market where lots of exotic foods were available and to my embarrassment (as a maybe 14 year old), quizzed the market trader and shoppers buying things how to cook them and what they were like. 🥺

I do that myself now I have to admit - and it does make me remember him with fondness.

I remember the day he took mum and I for pizza and asked if they could show us how they spun the dough (oh dear so embarrassing) and mum and I were dragged along to watch...

All things food were interesting to him.

Luckily we lived near a city with a variety of cuisines even when I was quite young. He was a kind, lovely man who would engage with everyone so easily and naturally. He had a shop when I was a girl and regular customers would bring lots of "treats" from abroad. One taught him how to make yogurt (which was not to his taste), a Jewish friend showed him how to make latkes, someone gave him a recipe for an Eid dish which was like a spiced very sweet bread pudding made with condensed milk - and another friend taught him how to make the fabulous wired sugar flowers that you see on wedding cakes.

I feel very blessed to have had him and been influenced by his openness to other cultures- and his genuine enthusiasm.
I now know how lucky I was.

Ha ha, PamelaJ1 I don't remember him bringing fish eyes home! I think I wouldn't have forgotten that!

The thing is our mums (well at least the older folks here) couldn’t cook foreign food because there was nothing in the shops to use I was born when there was still rationing
I only knew English grown foods meat and two veg the only fruit I remember were apples and oranges and pears
It was the sixties before I discovered other wonderful stuff

I lived in a street in the suburbs of Glasgow which had a lot of Italian and Polish. I remember some friends sucking eggs on the way to school, and of course pasta was a great find for me!

In the 50s we used to have a big Harvest Festival display at school, so of course we were asked to bring edible contributions.

At the time, my father worked in central London, Leicester Square IIRC, not far from what were then ‘exotic’ fruit and veg markets. One thing he brought for me to take to school was a green pepper (capsicum, not chilli). I had never seen such a thing, and still remember marvelling at its weird and wonderful smell.

I know it’s not foreign but when I was about 17 I was friendly (through weekend work) with a girl who was maybe late 20s. She was married and they invited me for a meal. She cooked Jugged Hare and that was the first time I had heard of it!

A couple of years later I had a boyfriend who was celebrating his 21st birthday and his posh parents invited me round for a meal. We started with smoked salmon and I had never had that before either.

There were that many knives and forks that I didn’t know where to start and watched to see what order they used them in. 🤣

We had a Chinese takeaway (the Indian takeaways came later) and once a month we used to have a 'Chinky' - you certainly couldn't call it that now!

Luckily my parents were quite adventurous when it came to trying 'new' foods.

Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch. My favourite foods from what you call foreign lands. Nothing spicy thank you. Did try my DB IL African stew, nearly blew my head off.