Foreign food

I grew up only eating non British food. My parents had both lived abroad, my mother grew up in Egypt and attended a french school there (she was also half French) she lived in Canada as a young woman. My father had travelled around the world and had lived for 8 years in the South of France working for a French company my grandparents also travelled a lot so our food at home was an eclectic mix of French, middle Eastern and Italian cuisines. When I was 5 my mother and grandmother opened a cafe in Brighton and used to help the owners of the Indian restaurant next door with trips to the cash and carry in return for a weekly family meal with them which gave me an early love of Indian cuisine and all things spiced! My first taste of British food was when I went off to uni and a real culture shock it was too😂 I still dont eat British meals to be honest as I find them often tasteless, even my occasional fried breakfast has chilli jam and mushrooms cooked in garlic pepper😂

I think I'll have a look in poundland ot B&M.
Perhaps they might stock them?

MissAdventure

I'd really like to try a Vesta meal.
I feel I missed out.

I wonder what we'd all think of them if we had one nowadays?

I remember going to a friend’s house and her dad was cooking spaghetti. I had never seen proper spaghetti before and I was fascinated by the dry noodles bending into the water as they softened. The first time we went into a Chinese restaurant was when we were supposed to be staying half board in a bed and breakfast, but the evening meal left a lot to be desired so Mum and Dad took us in search of a restaurant. The Chinese was the only place we could find open on a Sunday. We all ate from the “English “ section of the menu.

It's those crispy noodles I'd like to try, I think.
Did they come with the curry?

I don’t recall a time we didn’t have foreign food as my dad spent time in Egypt during has national service. He was a great cook unlike my DM who could burn water.

my mum would not make foreign food in the 70's always meat and two veg!

loved the vesta crispy noodles, but was never keen on the meals. didn't have real chinese food until i was about 16 and indian food not until i was in my late 30's - i had always just had an omlette when visiting an indian restaurant before then

My mum was born in Germany so we had a lot of cooked red cabbage and Frikadellen ( meat balls).
Vesta figured occasionally, curry etc very new at the time but Woukd really disappoint these days MissA.
As children we never went to a cafe or restaurant and the first time I went into a restaurant was after I started work and could pay for myself.
I keep telling my gc how lucky they are, but they don’t seem at all interested in my stories of the olden days. Can’t think why.

Does anyone remember Bombay Duck? Actually some sort of fish, I used to love it shredded over curry in restaurants, haven’t seen it for years.

We lived in India when I was a child and my mother had lived in Burma when she was young. We had loads of curries and other spicy food.

Every single Monday of my childhood we had a madras curry. My maternal grandparents lived in India during the 1930's. It was always followed by tinned mandarins. As my grandmother once read that the Queen Mother had them after eating a curry.
As children we knew which day of the week it was by the meal that was served. One dessert was macaroni pudding.

Classic French has many types of cuisine, from Alsacian to Marseillan and Corsican.

So it was not unusual to have a variety of Mediterranean dishes including Italian.

Asian (Vietnamese) and Moroccan were also quite common.

As I had gone off to study abroad however, was when I first encountered numerous foreign cuisines such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Spanish, Basque, Latin American etcetra.

32 Years married to a native Madrid born gentleman, we had seen a growth in foreign restaurants including Greek, Romanian, German, Mexican, Columbian, Fusion Spanish, etcetra.

However, most of our home cooked meals are Spanish in heritage or French classics.

Went with Dad to Coopers in Liverpool (1958 or so). The aromas were wonderful. He bought real coffee beans, and French brie - we don't even think of these as foreign foods now but they were then.

My grandmother used to dine at Veeraswamy's (sp?) Indian restaurant in London before the war, but my mother always treated that as a strange aberration. In the 60s my mother got quite daring and cooked spaghetti (in the long blue paper packets) with what she called a Bolognese sauce - actually minced beef and onion, with a squeeze of tomato puree because she didn't like tomatoes. We got a bit more adventurous with Vesta meals, but then I met my husband to be and his Italian family and found out about real food. Freshly made Ravioli bought from the deli, proper Italian Salami instead of the Danish stuff, and of course Panettone at Christmas when most people had never heard of it.

Just seeing the word Vesta brings back so many memories of my teenage years camping at the coast. A big group of us would spend weekends there often raiding cupboards at home for food to take and there was always a vesta box. Not sure how we managed on those tiny camping stoves but we did....

Loved the Vesta Chinese with crispy noodles. Even now Chinese food is my favourite, since the 60s, thanks to a well used neighbours reataurant. I enjoy trying different foods on my travels, but no curry. I'm sensitive to two of the chemical compound found in the spices used.

MissAdventure

I can't remember my mum and dad ever going out to a restaurant, GGravy.

A cafe on holiday was a real treat.

No, neither can I. Occasionally I would go into Edinburgh with my mum to meet an 'aunty' (really just one of her friends) and we'd meet in a cafe or tearoom, which was very much a treat.

A good read is Hungry by Grace Dent. She is a well known food critic who grew up on mainly tinned food and stuff called “sketty” which her Dad made. It’s nostalgic, funny and also emotional.

Catterygirl - you've triggered my memory .
The book was Great Dishes Of The World by Robert Carrier .
Now about £35 on Amazon -I'm really tempted to buy it .
I think it had photos of Robert Carrier's amazing kitchen as well as recipes .

paternal grandfather maternal

Yes I had lots of foreign food growing up, paternal grandfather was from Malta. Before the First WW he and my grandma met in France where they were living in the early part of the 20th century. That side of my family always embraced a Mediterranean diet. When my grandparents married and moved back to London, I'm told granddad sourced some of their food from Italian shops that had been established. His cuisine came down the line, my father and his siblings all embraced the flavours of the Mediterranean over standard British stuff. One of my aunts met her French husband who was part of the Free French during the war and afterwards settled in France and several of my grandmother's siblings stayed on in France and married French women so I have extended family there, I was always aware of the Francophile influence within the family. My paternal grandfather's father came from Alsace. Garlic, Olive Oil, long pasta in blue paper packages were part of my growing up. My father didn't think much of British cooking and was prone to comment "they can only cook one thing, roast beef and they still manage to ruin it by overcooking the meat and their idea of seasoning is an Oxo cube" Harsh! but my dad was a bit like that, when I commented as a young child, "isn't it nice that granddad has so many pet bunnies down the bottom of the garden" . Dad's response "they aren't pets!" and left it hanging, till I worked it out. Oh dear! Rabbit casserole was a speciality where he came from

The first Chinese restaurant in my home town opened when I was 15. The food was gorgeous!

We'd had an Italian restaurant for ages but money was tight so we were never taken there. The interior always looked very bohemian with candles stuck in /Chianti bottles

Food at home was plain, but mum would be willing to try daring new ideas, like rubbing a cut clove of garlic round the salad bowl..

I'll eat just about anything now, but I do object to chili in absolutely everything, including traditional British foods.

My mother always inveighed against 'foreign food', garlic, pasta, etc. , and she was not a good cook.

They did have big ones, didn't they? 🤭