Speak for yourself. 'Round here, they’re a delicacy. I can find thick cut pork chops, center cut pork chops, but very rarely thick center cut pork chops. When I do find 'em, I buy 'em right up.
I would not want to live in that world.
As for my choice, I’ll go with chocolate.
Watermelon. Sweet, crunchy, refreshing… but only available fresh a couple of months of the year. “Gift-quality” examples can be worth a small fortune in Japan, but luckily for us in North America, perfectly good ones grow like weeds.
On the flipside, my father finds it amusing how expensive canned herring is nowadays. When he was growing up in post-war Germany, herring was dirt-cheap (and often the only meat his family could afford).
Does coffee count as a food? There are plenty of people who’ll pay five bucks for a cappucino (made with unexceptional beans) even when it’s plentiful. As I type this, I’ve just poured myself another cup of french-press coffee and dumped a truckload of Coffee-Mate into it; I can just imagine some of you cringing or shaking your heads at my foolishness. Imagine if coffee were rare.
Bananas also used to be considered an exotic delicacy. Considering what a great healthy snack they make I’m not surprised.
I’d also vote for cherries but at $4 a pound during January and generally at least $2 - $3 a pound even in summer they probably still are a delicacy. I still gobble them down anyway because they’re my favorite fruit.
Same for oxtails. They used to be the wonderful dinner that Mom’d make when we were at the end of a pay period and broke until the next paycheck. Now they’re $6 a pound at the really cheap butcher shop! Their roasts and some of the steaks are cheaper! WTF? What are they using all those bony oxtails for that they didn’t used to?
Seconded. Did you watch Good Eats last night?
If it weren’t so easy to buy and/or make and store, I’d suspect that ice cream would top the list.
In the Little House books, a big deal is made about a chance to drink lemonade. Also, Laura goes to a nice party as a teen with good food & cake, but the thing that makes the biggest impression on her is that each place setting had an entire orange sitting on the plate, and they ate them with the cake. I’m sure from the way she tells the story that she had never eaten one before. (Of course, this is South Dakota in the 1880s, so no surprise that she had never run across any.)
Anything made with pure cane sugar is pretty rare these days.
In my own opinion…
•Applesauce.
•Salmon. (Well, it’s not spam-cheap, but it wouldn’t put me into hock if I wanted to stock up.)
•A Foster’s Freeze tripleberry smoothie.
•In the right place and time…a nice bowl of good, sticky, white rice. I could almost understand risking beriberi for the stuff.
It’s kind of amusing to me to see Copper River salmon hyped as this gigantic delicacy. I grew up in Alaska, and we had freezers full of salmon, and we’d groan every time we’d have to eat another salmon my Dad caught at Chitna.
This is kind of the opposite, really. But fish of all kinds are a lot more expensive nowadays than when I was a kid. When I was a kid we ate frozen fishsticks because they were dirt cheap. Have you seen the prices of frozen fishsticks lately? Fish used to be poor people’s food, now it’s a luxury food.
That’s because Mrs. Pauls made most of them into fishstix and there aren’t many left now.
Ice cream!
What foods would make delicacy status if it wasn’t so cheap or plentiful?
I’d have to sat apples. A centry ago, unless you lived on a farm, having a good apple was rare-most places, your apples would be half rotten by the time they got to market. Propbably, most people had dried apples, or preserved in some other way.
Huh? Apples are one of the most easily preserved fruits. Put 'em in a root cellar and they’ll last for months or longer. They might get a little soft, but they are definitely preservable without modern methods.
From what I’ve read about apples, they were much better a hundred years ago, before the Red Delicious took over. Nowadays we’re getting tastier types in the market, but I’ve read several accounts of apple varieties that used to be quite common but now are impossible to find because they fell out of favor because they couldn’t be easily grown/shipped/etc.
Crayfish too.
My family has a small farm with beef cows, so I may have said as a child, “Aw, Mom, do we hafta eat steak again?” When my parents came back from their first trip to the East Coast, I was baffled by their story of eating in a restaurant where steak was the most expensive thing on the menu, and lobster was the cheapest. (I’m one of seven kids, and we never could afford dinner for nine at the kind of restaurant that served steak or lobster, so I don’t think I was aware at that age that a restaurant steak was expensive.)
I’d say pineapple. It’s easy to get, and was almost ruined by all the canned pineapple, but I think if fresh pineapple was really hard to get, it would be coveted.
Case in point: Square watermelons to fit your refrigerator better.
Chicken. No lie. Before about the 1950s chickens weren’t raised in huge chickenhouses and cut up behind glass at the meat counter. They were raised in smaller yards or pens, typically fresh killed and plucked at the point of sale, and cost, relatively speaking, a lot more. Chicken was “Sunday food” then, and really meant something in the days when mac & cheese was considered a main course. (To hear old people tell it, the birds were a lot juicier and more flavorful, too.)