The wife of a friend said she didn’t like crab. Then I went and caught a couple of Dungeness crabs, brought them home, cleaned them, and cooked them. Ooh! Sweet, sweet Dungeness crab meat! Friend’s wife discovered she liked crab after all. She was literally amazed. Cooking (just killed) live crabs are much better than what you get at the casino buffet.
My wife said she didn’t like lobster. Then we went to Puerto Rico and got warm-water spiny lobsters (spiny shells, no claws). That’s what I grew up with in San Diego. They’re so much better than cold-water (smooth shells, with claws, ‘Maine’) lobsters. She discovered she actually does like lobsters. She’d only had boiled cold-water lobsters before. I’m sure she’d be up for a trip down to Puerto Nuevo.
I never could understand how some Asian countries could serve doggy meat. I tried a tiny bite just to say I had done it. Without sauce it was bland but what flavor it had was not appealing.
Then one day last week a coyote appeared in my back yard…
There’s the coconut you find in US grocery stores, filled with juice (that can carry salmonella if it’s sat on the shelf too long, so check the date stamp on the coconut- oh, there isn’t one) and lined with fibrous meat (wears out the jaw in chewing); or there’s coconut sport, found in Asian grocery stores, by itself or in coconut milk products.
Eggplant. For years I just didn’t get it - it’s OK, sure, but so what?
These last couple of years we have been to Greece and Turkey for the first time, and man, what a revelation. The problem is, I’m sure, that it’s just so damn hard to get decent eggplants in the UK. You want a decent eggplant? You’re going to have to get yourself a polytunnel and grow them yourself.
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law didn’t like spinach. Then I invited them for dinner with some other friends. When people asked if they could bring something, I let them. A friend volunteered to bring a salad.
Well, it worked out that we had the salad as a first course. It was a spinach salad, and I had totally forgotten that BIL and SIL didn’t like spinach. (In my defense, the list of things they didn’t like was pretty large.)
Anyway, to be polite they each served themselves a small amount of salad. Then they had a much larger second helping.
Turned out they’d never had raw spinach before. They thought they could (in that mysterious phrase I’ve never understood) “tell by looking at it they wouldn’t like it.”
Once I was near a beach in Tahiti, and I had the brilliant idea to climb a tree and get me one of those delicious coconuts. Went fine, except everybody laughed at me since I had grabbed literally the worst coconut available and clearly had no idea what a good coconut is supposed to look like.
Not me; my grandfather found out the hard way that being picky could backfire.
My dad’s father and mother lived with us spring and fall, between summers in New Hampshire and winters in Florida. They took their meals with us.
One night my mother made porcupines: ground beef meatballs with rice mixed in, cooked in a tomato sauce. My grandfather took one look and refused to have any. The rest of us tucked in – they were good!
Toward the end of the meal grampa decided, well, maybe he’d try one bite. Well! It WAS good! “More, please.”
This happened many years ago but I grew up hating brussel sprouts. My dad loved them but everyone else hated them so he only got them on his birthday.
Then, my brother brought his SO over for Thanksgiving dinner and he was cooking brussel sprouts. I expressed my disdain and he just said try mine before you decide.
They were great! It was a revelation. They were not my mom’s boiled to mush brussel sprouts. (I love my mom but she was a terrible cook.)
Foods you didn’t like for (reason) but ended up likely later for (reason).
And
Foods you didn’t like for poor quality, poor preparation, or incorrect/abnormal application.
For me, it’s almost always been the latter, rather than the former. The few in the former category are almost all psychological in nature, the big one being my problems with pizza and related marina based foodstuffs.
The second one is much more common as I’ve grown up, but that way also lies a tendency to blame someone else for their tastes, the ever-so-common “Oh, you’ve just never had -blah blah blah- cooker properly/fresh/etc!”
Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest.
Fundamentally, my biggest example of the latter is tomatoes. Growing up in the 80s, every time I had a wet, cardboardy slice or wedge of tomato on something, I refused to eat it, causing a lot of food to be sent back (I’d ask for no tomatoes and they’d screw it up) or for me to go with some different option.
Many years later, during a trip to Mexico, I actually had fresh, ripe, in season tomatoes and loved the living hell out of them. But again, it has to be all three.
To this day I will not eat a BLT or have a tomato on my burger. I got used to the mealy, watery, bland crap tomatoes in the 80’s and I want no part of them. Maybe they are better now. I will not find out.
I had spinal meningitis as an infant. At the hospital, I was refusing to eat. My mother told the doctor, ‘Give him Brussels sprouts.’ The doctor thought she was mental because kids don’t like Brussels sprouts, but he ordered them for me. Of course, and to the doctor’s incredulity, I ate them up. I still like them.