Yes. I had never heard of bagels until I was a teenager in the '70s. Then, suddenly they were everywhere.
The one thing I never heard of until the mid-90s was “peeps”. I have been told that my childhood was one of severe deprivation because my parents denied me peeps at eastertime, but I am not convinced that we had them anywhere nearby. I still have not actually seen one.
I suspect that part of it is a relative lack of Mexican immigrants to the UK. Many “ethnic” restaurants, in any country, are ones that are started by immigrants, and those restaurants are an important part of how that cuisine gets introduced to a country and its residents.
England has a lot of Indian restaurants, and Indian food is common in England, in part, because England has had a lot of Indian immigrants. The U.S. has a lot of Mexican restaurants, in part, beause we have had a lot of Mexican immigrants.
Ohhh…La Choy!
I remember seeing the commercials and always wanting to try it, while at the same time confused because it looked nothing like the Chinese food we ate, granted, limited mostly to beef broccoli with oyster sauce, fried rice and chicken or shrimp with vegetables.
Things would get a bit more adventurous when I’d go with my parents to their annual bowling 10 course Chinese banquet with things like bird’s nest or shark fin soup (which even after I found it really was true to it’s name) loved, roast duck and kau yuk.
Edit: Speaking of roast duck, the only other time was had it was when someone would bring one of those frozen ones from San Francisco. I knew they were available from Chinatown, but it wasn’t until decades later that learned it was supposed to be juicy and succulent, not dry as a bone like my Mom would bake it.
Another memory.
I was shocked when the ‘secret’ ingredient in the beef broccoli noodles with oyster sauce was oyster sauce that you could buy in a bottle at the supermarket. My Dad told me this because, the oyster sauce noodles cost more than the regular brown gravy noodles.
GASP Nooooooo, oyster sauce was some mixture of 20 different ingredients that only the Chinese restaurant had!
British Indian food is significantly different from the Indian food you get in the US. There seems to be a lot of variation in quality between Indian restaurants in the US, but I do know of at least one visiting Brit who complained that he could not find decent Indian food in our area.
I have never had the British version of Indian food, but the local stuff seems quite good (except when the restaurant is run by white people, who will invariably screw something up, like by making the lassi way too sweet). I know it must be different, because our vindaloos are always red whereas Dave Lister’s are tannish.
When my kids were little, I was fairly certain they’d never heard of blood oranges, so when I saw them in the grocery store I bought a few. I waited for the right time, then told them that a gypsy woman had taught me a little magic.
I had my daughter hold an orange in her hands, told her to close her eyes and think of someone she did not like. I told my son to close his eyes, put his hands over his sister’s, and think about someone he didn’t like.
I mumbled some incantation sounding words and acted serious. Then I had everyone open their eyes and I carefully took the orange, telling them that the blood of their enemies was now in the orange. I took a knife and cut the orange open and my daughter SCREAMED, while her little brother looked on the verge of tears.
I explained it was a joke and told them about blood oranges.
My mom made the BEST sweet and sour pork. There where no Chinese or Mandarin restaurants near us.
We have no Asian heritage at all. Not sure how she came up with that dish. Most everything else was standard 60’s-70’s food.
The stuff was amazing. I have tried, but I just can’t get the breading right. I have yet to find a restaurant that does it as well as my mom did.
Lobster was fairly hard to come by and very expensive if/when it was available in NE Wisconsin. We’d go out to a “supper club” (a very Wisconsin thing) where parents would have lobster but we kids weren’t allowed to have it. They said that lobster is “icky” and we wouldn’t like it. Might even make us sick! So they’d eat lobster and we kids ate hamburgers or some other down menu, cheap food. Upon my high school graduation my parents took me to a supper club for a celebratory meal. They ordered lobster tail and I did too. Since it was a special occasion my parents didn’t bat an eye. Turns out I LOVE lobster. My parents lied all those years. Imagine that!
Lobster is pretty ubiquitous now at the store and in most finer dining establishments. But it’s still almost always the most expensive item on the menu.
I have never eaten Indian food in the US. I have eaten it in India, the UK and Canada. I know how to cook all the principal dishes myself.
In the UK, it is traditional “post drinking” food. In addition to decent restaurants, there are a lot of places selling very good, moderately priced and spiced stuff. It’s great.
In Canada, Indian restaurants are very good but relatively expensive outside of enclaves like Northwestern Toronto - where great fast food and very extensive buffet versions exist. There are more mediocre places elsewhere which tend serve a limited lunch buffet. (The best non-vegetarian places serve goat on the menu.)
In India, many restaurants do not serve meat. Meat varies widely in quality. Often very spicy, which is good later in the day. Indians like spicy versions of chips, yogurt, tea and bland food is hard to find. There is a much bigger variety of dishes than offered abroad.
When I was around 12 I got into a phase where I would try cooking stuff from recipes I saw in magazines. One was sweet-and-sour pork. I had never encountered the concept of sweet-and-sour before, not even in the local Chinese restaurants. It was pretty good, but I would probably consider it too sweet today.
I was probably in my 20s before I encountered fresh bean sprouts. Same for alfalfa sprouts, and the concept of putting them in salads. Likewise brown rice, which was something that my hippie friends got into.
I still can’t get that damn jingle out of my head, over 5 decades later. It’s a Cringe-worthy commercial.
When I read @Didi44’s post last night, that got stuck in my head, too. 
Yeah, the U.S. is so huge regional variation in quality is always going to be an issue. I can say that the one time I had Indian food in London (nice-looking place not far from the British Museum) it was not noticeably superior or different from what I have experienced back home. Better than some, not as good as others. However I live in an area with a very sizeable Indian and Pakistani immigrant population - near my old house there were multiple specialist Indian markets like spice stores and Sari shops in walking distance. I have no doubt the local Indian cuisine can be quite different in Duluth.
It seems like shrimp was well out of our price range in the late 70s, 80s and 90s. It’s much more common now.
We had shrimp often in the 1950s and 1960s in New York, even though we were pretty poor. The price may have gone up later, but at the time it was affordable.
Probably because we were in the Midwest.
Same reason that we, AFAIK didn’t have non-frozen orange juice in Hawaii. Packing and transportation methods and cost.
I think a lot of it comes back to immigrants. In Houston and Dallas (the two primary places I’ve had Indian food in the US), the food seems to be both very similar, and pretty authentic, if the food the Indian people at work cooked for the Diwali pot-luck lunch is any indication.
The Indian food I’ve had in the UK (Oxford & London) was pretty much the same. The same thing holds in both nations with Thai food as well. Again, all the restaurants are run by Thai immigrants, so it makes sense that it would be authentic.
The only place it gets really interesting, strangely enough, is with Mexican food. There’s a pretty long history of culinary syncretism on both sides of the Texas border, so people are inclined to say that stuff like flour tortillas are not authentically Mexican. Or dishes like fajita and chili. Flour tortillas are a northern Mexican thing in states such as Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, etc… and were adopted north of the border at the genesis of Tex-Mex because flour was a lot easier to source than masa. Dishes like fajitas and chiil are in the most pedantic and technical sense not Mexican dishes. But they’re even more Mexican than say… chicken tikka masala, in that neither was invented to serve TO Anglos; they were both dishes developed by ethnic Mexicans to serve to ethnic Mexicans who lived in the US. In chili’s case, it was developed over about two centuries by the descendants of Canary islanders who settled in San Antonio in the late 18th century. Fajitas were something that developed in the South Texas ranch land by the Mexican cowboys, who were given the less desirable parts of the cattle and the trimmings. So they marinated what we’d call skirt steak today and grilled it, and ate tacos made from it on flour tortillas with pico de gallo, guacamole, etc… Sure sounds Mexican to me. Some decades later, it ended up becoming a mainstream Tex-Mex dish.
Another weird one is the Vietnamese population along the Gulf Coast, and in particular in Houston- they’re basically syncretizing Cajun/Creole cuisine into something called Viet-Cajun. And since for some reason, the Vietnamese community isn’t so into opening Vietnamese restaurants aimed at the mainstream Anglo population, it’s something aimed at other Vietnamese-Americans. Interesting stuff.
If you’re ever in Reno, there is a casino that has a ‘Lobster Buffet’. Pretty easy to knock back a dozen or so lobster tails and claws. It’s the epitome of gluttony!
Peeps are small birds made out of marshmallow that taste like a small marshmallows made out of birds.
You aren’t missing much.