Extraneous “a” in my previous post. Grr. I know how to English, I swear!
espresso
Non-percolated coffee.
I remember the coffee wasn’t ready until you could see the water in the clear lid top turn dark brown!
Edit: When Mr. Coffee was introduced, it was heresy. Just pass the water over the grinds once???
Which casino is that, pray? It’ll help make up for some of the pain felt when the Silver Club closed and we lost its NY steak buffet.
Coffee. When I was a kid, instant coffee was for day-to-day (and the only type I was allowed to make), and percolator coffee was for when my parents had company over. No fancy-pants grinds were involved, just good ol’ “Good to the Last Drop” Maxwell House and a couple other pedestrian/i.e. “bleh” brands.
Most eating establishments didn’t serve coffee, they served swill (hint: if you can read the label on the bottom of the cup when the cup is full, that’s not a good cuppa.
Oh sure, the hoity-doity restaurants served good coffee, and of course the automat Horn & Hardart had the best (poured majestically through brass dolphin head spigots), but they were out of most kid’s budgets.
My first encounter with something beyond instant coffee was when I moved to Miami for 4 years. Café Cubano flowed like tap water down there. No matter where I went (barber, head shop, hospital…) I was greeted by, “cafécito?” Who was I to refuse? Si, cafécito! I got hooked on that rocket fuel fast and never looked back.
Years later, Starbucks exploded on the scene and need-a-second-mortgage-to-afford designer coffee became the norm. Unless my coffee comes from some place I can’t pronounce and comes out of an elephant’s butt, it’s not good enough for me.
It’s almost as good as Mom’s percolated Maxwell House.
Boomtown. West of town on 80.
Yeah. I was in college before I realize coffee shouldn’t taste like it was burned.
When we were little our Abuelo would give us a cup of Cuban coffee and a piece of Cuban bread slathered in butter for breakfast. Other kids would get grits so I felt very lucky. I hated grits.
I grew up with freeze dried “Taster’s Choice”. My mom used to bake the granules straight into cookies - surprisingly good.
I wonder if the following was meant to reference Jules et Jim?
Jules:
Mmm. Goddamn, Jimmie. This is some serious gourmet shit. Usually, me and Vince would be happy with some freeze-dried Taster’s Choice, right? And he springs this serious gourmet shit on us. What flavor is this?
Jimmie:
Knock it off, Julie.
Jules:
What the fuck did you just call me?!
Jimmie:
I don’t need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee is, okay? I’m the one who buys it, I know how good it is.
Winston knows how good it is too.
Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon. When I was a kid and KFC was first being introduced there in the late 50’s, it was only available in one place, a mid-scale sit-down restaurant called The Speck (I have no idea why). It was exotic because it was from Kentucky, some 2000 miles away. And it was good! I don’t remember much else about it, but that restaurant was always packed. Anyway, that’s the way I remember it.
In the late 80s, there were some Chinese restaurants (the Americanised style) in town, but it was considered exotic enough that we did a field trip to eat at one one day. I remember us kids fumbling with chopsticks and trying to figure out how you eat rice with them.
I have been advised about peeps
Gyros! Had it for the first time in my early twenties from a food truck at a festival (late 70s) in Indy. Thought it was the best thing I had ever eaten. Been a long time since I’ve had it…too long.
I can’t find it right now, but there’s a heart warming story from Mike Chen of OFTW and Double Chen about when goring up in China and his parents taking him to KFC. It was rare treat because it was expensive, so his parents would buy it only for him and watch him eat. *Sniffile"
I had my first taco at about age fifteen. On a cross country road trip with the family circa 1973. Stopped at a Jack In The Box (which didn’t exist where I was from). I had heard of tacos but never had one. Thought yeah, what the hell, let’s try one.
My first taco ever was from Jack in the Box, and to this day I adore them.
This was fascinating
I grew up in New England, and both were common. I even played “Hounds and hares” with my girl scout troop on a cranberry bog some years.
To me, real pineapple, that tastes good, was an exotic revelation. I think someone bred one that ships better. (I still ate a lot of pineapple and coconut when i finally visited Hawaii a year ago.)
My dad worked near China Town, and like to cook “exotic” food, so i grew up with Cantonese style food. But it was delicious and flavorful and i still like it more than Szechuan style. (I also don’t like anything with capsicum, so that rules out a lot of Szechuan.)
And my mom made tacos from that ubiquitous kit. But she used good ground beef, fresh tomatoes from my father’s garden, and a good local cheddar cheese. I never used the “taco sauce” (capsaicin) but i liked tacos.
I do remember the first time i had:
Pizza
Sushi
Yogurt
Pizza soon after became something horrible in school lunches. Sushi i didn’t try until college, basically because a friend dared me to try it, and i loved it. Yogurt suddenly became popular when i was in high school, and i liked that, too.
I don’t recall my first experience with mangos and avocados, or other several other tropical fruits, but they were certainly exotic (or just unheard of) in my youth.
Wow! We owe her an enormous debt.
Oh, good one! I remember my first cup of espresso, too. But it must not have been unheard of. I inherited my parents set of espresso cups, which my dad bought on their honeymoon. It was the China pattern he wanted (but didn’t get) and coincidentally the China pattern my husband and I selected. Remember when giving expensive China as a wedding present was a thing?
Pizza, when I was a child it was pizza. Nowaday you can find it in every corner
"Pizza, when I was a child it was pizza. Nowaday you can find it in every corner
I always knew it as pizza ever since I was a kid in the late 60s in the NYC suburbs, but always “pizza pie”. The two always went together to make it its de-facto title, kind of like “tuna fish”.
A great deal of the adults I remember, most of them of Italian origin, for some reason always referred to it as just “pie”, or just as often “hot pie”. You just knew from context they meant pizza and not apple or lemon meringue. When I heard them either in a pizzeria, or calling by phone to order ( for a pick-up ) it was always “…I’d like a large cheese pie…”
Later, when I’ve traveled around and located to a different area of the country a recall a lot of people thinking it was strange that I called pizza a pie. It’s like they’ve never considered the word pie as its unit of issue. It was just “a pizza” or maybe “a slice of pizza”, and of the latter, only when the whole pizza pie was present because most have never been able to go to a pizza place and order just a slice because chain pizza was all they knew.
When I was a kid in the 1950s, it was rare to get anything other than a simple marinara sauce/mozzarella pizza. Sometimes we might get pepperoni. The most exotic kind was Sicilian, with thick crust and square slices. By the 1960s things were getting more adventurous, and you could add things like meatballs, mushrooms, green peppers, black olives, and of course anchovies. But that was about it.
It wasn’t until much later I encountered things like white pizza, or bizarro stuff like ham and pineapple.
Now even my neighborhood pizzeria in the Bronx has a dozen kinds of gourmet pizza available, not only white pizza with spinach but pizzas like Buffalo chicken, chicken Caesar, and chicken vodka.