When surveys are done on the UK’s favourite dessert, it’s routinely (now) Sticky Toffee Pudding. It’s lauded as a national treasure, redolent of endless summers, empire, stiff-upper-lips and public (for which read “private”) school dinners.
But it’s not. When I first heard of it, I was already an adult with a pretty respectable grounding in our culinary heritage, and I thought it was a reference to a sort of generic old-fashioned stodge. Nope: apparently it was actually a thing, and one which was loved above all others. It didn’t first make an appearance till the 70s, and reached widespread acclaim much later…but, like Buffy’s little sister, somehow it’s always been there, forever and ever Amen. And once it’s been declared the favourite…well, everybody knows it’s the favourite now, so its position is cemented!
I’ve heard Nigella Lawson say that “Christmas just isn’t Christmas without salted caramel”. Really? A Brit who grew up in the 60s and 70s reckons that? Seems a little unlikely.
And Brits who think turkey isn’t turkey without cranberry sauce. West of the Atlantic, absolutely, but in the UK, that’s a pretty new idea in the grand scheme of things. And certainly not ubiquitous.
So. What interlopers have you encountered? A thing which appears to have gained a reputation as an all-time classic, but you can remember a time not too long ago when it simply wasn’t a thing?
The first thing that came to mind is people insisting that Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen is a cover of an original Elvis tune, although that isn’t exactly the same phenomenon.
Not sure if it’s exactly what the OP is asking about, but I hate it when a movie’s marketing campaign proclaims it “an instant classic!” (I’m looking at you, Disney!) It doesn’t work that way.
I’m sure it’s possible that ploughmen did eat hunks of bread and cheese with pickled onions for centuries - it’s an easily transportable lunch - but yes: a mid-20th century cheese marketing concept.
Werther’s Originals. Unless your grandparent is from Germany it’s unlikely they are sharing a sweet from their childhood, despite the big late-1990s ad campaign.
Again not an in-my-lifetime sort of thing, but “chai” is so iconically associated with India that it’s always a bit of a surprise to me that tea was introduced there during British rule and tea-drinking didn’t really catch on till the 1920s.
More recently, eating hagelslag or chocolate/candy sprinkles on buttered bread is perceived as quintessentially Dutch, but apparently wasn’t a thing before the mid-20th century.
(All the “classic American diner specialties” based on packaged convenience foods, such as Jell-O salads etc., also don’t pre-date the 1950s AFAICT.)
Yes and no. One of the earliest memories was of the elf we had. It’s the same exact style as what is now the Elf on the Shelf. He was already well established in my house with his own name when was old enough to remember. So it was around from the late 1960s. This is not a fake memory since my mother still has the Elf along will all our old Christmas decorations.
We gave him a name and put him sitting on a branch in the tree. The “tradition” of moving it every day and not being able to move it are recent and came from the book.
My grandfather was practically Dutch (parents from Netherlands, grew up in a Dutch-speaking household) and he always had Werther’s in the candy dish as far back as my memory goes, which is only the early '80s.
When those commercials began to air they seemed both perfectly natural while also somehow too on-the-nose.
We’ve got Black Friday over here now. It’s still known to be a recent introduction, I think, but it’s only a matter of time. I work for an online retailer and was contacted by a customer last year who was quite incredulous that we didn’t have a Black Friday offer.
We make to order and therefore have no stock, so it’s hardly practical for us anyway, but he seemed unable to grasp the idea that Black Friday is an incredibly recent import and he therefore shouldn’t expect it to be so widespread. Which implies it’s already getting pretty widespread!
Green bean casserole (green beans, cream-of-mushroom soup, and French fried onions) is an indispensable part of Thanksgiving in America, but there are people still alive who remember before it existed.
Unfortunately, here in New Zealand people are catching American holidays and festivals off television: specifically, almost certainly from watching The Simpsons. Halloween used to be barely a blip for pre-schoolers; now it’s a huge marketing exercise for lollies and bat-themed tat. Ditto St Patrick’s Day, which never even registered here until less than a decade ago, since Irish immigration wasn’t huge here: now there are parades.
Werthers Originals and the Coca Cola Christmas Truck are both the subject of (IMO cynical) marketing to try and establish them as ‘traditions’ in the UK.
I have my grandmother’s pair of “knee hugger” elves, red and green, that match a Google image search that might date them to the 40s. (The plastic heads make me think 50s at the earliest though.)
As for the Elf, I’ve only known it as a modern tradition, so I’m surprised some variant of it goes back farther. I certainly had never heard of anything like it growing up.
This isn’t that recent, but “blackened” Cajun/Creole foods like “blackened redfish” and “blackened chicken” are relatively nouveau New Orlean cuisine, being developed by Paul Prudhomme in the 80s, I believe. (Let me look that up. wait Looks like March of 1980 was the first time he did it.)
Actually, speaking of the Elf and Christmas traditions, what about the “German” Christmas pickle? I’m sure most of you have no idea what I’m talking about, but around here in Chicago and I presume elsewhere in at least the Upper Midwest where they have German Christmas traditions and Christkindlmarkts and that sort of thing, there is a Christmas ornament of a pickle that is popular and claims to be a German tradition. Something about finding the Christmas pickle ornament on the tree brings you good luck or somesuch. Anyhow, I had a German girlfriend back in the mid-90s, and I asked her about the tradition, and she had absolutely no fucking clue what I was talking about. Maybe it was extremely regional, I thought. Well, since then the internet has vastly expanded, and it appears to be completely unknown anywhere in Germany, purely some sort of American invention.