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

My first taste of "foreign" foor was when a Greek takeaway opened near our house when I was 12. At 14 I got a part time job there so we were never short of a hot supper when I came home. I worked there on and off for over two years and was always paid in cash straight from the till. It was a bit of a shock when I began my first full time job and had tax and NI deducted.

There were, of course, Chinese, Indian and other ethnic restaurants in the center of Liverpool. Liverpool has a very extensive Chinese quarter and Ive always enjoyed Chinese food. I can remember back to when pizza and Italian food was considered a novelty. I had a staff night out in a new Italian restaurant for my 17th birthday and to celebrate passing my first librarianship exam. That was the first time I ordered wine in a restaurant.

Yoghurt was a strange novelty when it arrived in our house in the 70's, treated with great suspicion by my very conservative Dad.

My sister went for a visit with our uncle and aunt when she would have been seven. She told us about yogurt when she came back.

When I was sixteen, doing O-levels and coming home for lunch after an exam, my mum bought me a kiwi fruit – first time she'd ever seen one. She couldn't eat any herself but wanted to know what it was like. She suggested I 'cap' it as one would a boiled egg and eat it with a spoon, which I did.

Callistemon21, when I was a small child in wartime my mother tried to make me eat rabbit. I think perhaps it was unrationed. I wouldn’t eat it. I had read too much Beatrix Potter! Anyway it has a very strange, strong flavour.

My mother made a curry on Mondays sometimes, with leftover meat from the Sunday roast.

The first time I ate Spaghetti Bolognaise was when visiting a friend's house whose parents were away and she cooked it for a few of us. I was 18 at the time.

At 18 I went to France and the French mother served what I thought was steak but it was viande chevaline, so when they told me I couldn't eat it.
The same thing happened a few years later when a friend cooked rabbit, my throat closed up and I couldn't swallow.

My parents had both lived in France before the war, so we were well aware of ‘foreign food’. The difficulty was finding the ingredients - even garlic was hard to come by in the 1940s and 1950s. My mother had a herb garden where she grew everything she could. We were inhibited for several years in the late 1940s and early 50s by the fact that my grandfather lived with us. He had visited my mother in France, and been shocked that he could not get rice pudding! Not an adventurous eater, so our food was very English at that time - good, though, because my mother was (unlike me) an excellent cook.

We had a couple of holidays in France in the1950s, where I eagerly ate everything. The first foreign food that I remember eating at home was spaghetti bolognaise, which my mother made for a group of visiting school friends in about 1957. It went down well.

In the early 1960s I lived in Liverpool, where I discovered Chinese and Greek food. We all tried, as young married people, to emulate Elizabeth David’s ‘French Provincial Cooking’ as far as we could.

Nothing apart from Vesta Chow Mein and Curry. My mother was a farmer's daughter who cooked mainly good meat and veg meals, which I still prefer to this day.

Chinese food. The Chinese supermarket always fascinated me and I still remember the smell.

My mother was French so we had garlic and mediterranean style dishes, but always home grown veg and fruit which she bottled and canned..

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!

Vesta Chow Mein!!

I love Indian curry but struggle to get a decent recipe
We never had foreign food when I lived with parents.

I was an army brat and spent part of my childhood in the Far East, so from an early age, early 1950s, Indian and Chinese food formed a part of our normal household diet. My mother was also open minded about trying new dishes and the cookery pamphlet that accompanied her Prestige Pressure Cooker, when she bought it, included a recipe for Hungarian Goulasch - and that is still a family favourite. Spaghetti Bolognaise at home also dates back to my hcildhood.

When we lived in the Far East my mother frequently visited the markets to buy herbs and spices and look for other food stuffs.

I was fortunate enough to have a Greek Cypriot mother, we lived in a road with families from India, Malaysia and Germany and Italy. My mum would give tasters to neighbours and the ‘foreigners’ would reciprocate (never the Brits, sadly) so we had a fantastic introduction to world cuisine.
I probably now cook more Middle Eastern food than British food and absolutely love going to east London to stock up on herbs, spices and fresh ethnic foods.