Is there a food item that has been around for a long time that you never tried until later in life.
For example, I ate some Eggo brand toaster waffles for the first time ever the other day. They’ve been around “forever”. I’d just never had one.
What’s your food that’s been around “forever” that you ate for the first time long after people might expect?
I’ve had to rediscover some foods in my adult life bc when I was a kid, the people preparing food for me were lousy cooks.
Spinach for example. Spinach salad? Yes. Spinach sautéed in butter and garlic? Hell yes. But boiled spinach? Uh… fuck no.
My mom always put an egg in the boiled, canned spinach. It makes it a lot better. In fact, I wondered a long time why I didn’t like it as much when other people made it, until she showed me her secret. Her mom taught it to her.
As for the OP: I know it’s happened, but I’m drawing a blank at the moment. Instead I’ll ask what @DorkVader thought of Eggos.
I had sour cream for the first time about 10 years ago (I’m over half a century old). Still can’t bring myself to eat cottage cheese.
Fascinating. What is the technique? (hard-boiled and diced, scrambled in the pan, or what?)
I got nothing for the OP, sorry.
Oh, sorry. It’s just a raw egg, which then cooks in the water as the spinach is heated. I actually remember the first time I tried egg drop soup and noticed the similarity.
It’s stirred in, so I didn’t really notice it as a kid. It tempers the bitterness and changes the texture.
Also, the ratio is one egg for two cans.
Sauerkraut. I hate cabbage and pretty much anything pickled so I avoided it for 50 years before it was served to me on a brat in a pretzel roll at a beer garden near my house. I’ve ordered it a dozen times since. I think their recipe includes onions and apples though, so I’m still not sure if I would like legit kraut.
Steamed shrimp; as a kid, it smelled like something died on the plate. My schnozz must have matured in the ensuing years because now I’ll walk over anyone to get to the “vacuum cleaners of the sea.”
As a containment and delivery vehicle for “maple” flavoured syrup and butter, utterly inoffensive and perfectly suitable.
As a waffle, perfectly inoffensive, slightly sweet, pretty much flavorless.
I judge them to not be made using pancake mix as a starting point for the batter, which I consider to be a grievous, unforgivable sin.
Goose. I don’t remember ever having it until 2001 or thereabouts, when I decided to roast one for Christmas. Since then, I’ve done it twice, 7 or 8 years ago. It’s so much work to do right, and there’s always so much left over, that I doubt I’ll do it again in the time I have left.
(The same is true of turkey now—I just got sick of having to consume the bird for weeks after a holiday.)
I don’t think I’d ever had roast duck either until a few years ago… I remember having Peking Duck in London in December 1994, but that was the only other time.
Monkfish. I’d heard of it but never tried it until just a few years ago. It’s delicious!
It’s similar to lobster, right? I’ve heard it referred to as “poor man’s lobster”.
Until the time I was 21, I had a very pedestrian palate. Then I dated a girl who had a much more experienced palate than mine, especially for Asian cuisines. She introduced my to sushi, which I never would have tried on my own (raw fish? Gross!). It turned out to be one of my favorite things ever.
She also introduced me to authentic Dim Sum at the former Wong’s Eatery in Windsor, Canada. By then she had turned me into an adventurous eater, and I was all set to try the duck feet, but they were all out. Haven’t had an opportunity to try duck feet since.
About the only adventurous cuisine I’ve tried and couldn’t do was Menudo. One hungover Sunday I went with a friend to a restaurant in Detroit’s Mexican Village area for lunch. Menudo was on the menu and I had heard it was good for hangovers. I’m not sure whether I knew it was made from tripe or not when I ordered it.
When the waitress placed the big steaming bowl in front of me, it had cut up rectangular pieces of honeycomb-textured stomach lining floating in it and smelled like a sewer. I about hurled. I told the waitress I’d pay for it but please take it away posthaste, and ordered something more normal. I’m sure they were laughing at me in the kitchen 
Chef Boyardee. Growing up there was a famous story in the family about my older sister, firstborn, who begged my parents for it for months and months on end, and finally my mother bought her a can. Heated it up for her, gave it to her, she took one bite, and immediately threw up all over the kitchen.
Hearing this story is one of my earliest memories. I was never fed Chef Boyardee growing up. It never occurred to me to buy it on my own once I was feeding myself, nor did I ever have any interest in trying it. Eventually I tried a bite of my then-girlfriend’s Chef Boyardee Mini-Ravioli sometime during the just-after-college years. I didn’t vomit everywhere like my sister, but let’s just say I did not enjoy the experience.
That’s okay, I don’t judge. You grew up with what you grew up with. My own comfort foods from childhood include things like canned fried dace with black beans, or fried eggs with oyster sauce over rice, neither of which I’ve ever successfully convinced a non-Asian person to try.
I’ve always loved Chef Boyardee, but nowadays it’s much too sweet. I suspect they’ve doubled the sugar content in recent decades.
I remember having a can of ravioli back in 2006 (my first trip to Canada) that tasted like I remembered from childhood. The cans I’ve bought in the last ten years or so have definitely differed.
I’m also a bit suspicious of the meat that’s going in the ravioli and meatballs these days. It just doesn’t taste right anymore.
Ah! See, now Chef Boyardee ravioli was a staple in early childhood, but had long disappeared from the kitchen by the time I was a teen. I’ve had their ravioli since here and there and not enjoyed it. I never did like the spaghettios.
To this day I’ve never had Nutella.
In a similar vein, I went into a Walmart today. I think this was my first time ever.
mmm
This is like the mirror-image opposite my experience. Chef B was on my mom’s rotation when she was short of ideas or time, like we all are sometimes. I wasn’t crazy about spaghettio’s, but I loved the ravioli.
Not long after I started college, before I learned to cook for myself, I remember like yesterday opening a can of Chef B ravioli and eating it directly out of the can at room temperature. Far from the worst meal I ever had.
Real sushi. By which I mean top-notch sushi prepared by a real sushi chef in a good sushi restaurant. Until maybe ten years ago I’d mostly had grocery store sushi, which I usually slathered with wasabi and then drowned in soy sauce. The first time I had real authentic sushi, and learned how to eat it properly, it was a revelatory experience. Proper sushi will have just the right amount of wasabi already in it, if the chef feels that it needs it, and then either brushed with soy sauce or the customer can gently dip the fish side into sauce. But many sushi items are served with various exotic sauces and herbs and don’t need soy sauce.
I don’t recall ever having Chef Boyardee as a child. That was another late-life discovery, I think probably because the cans were good for camping and canoeing trips, so it has pleasant memories of camping with ravioli being cooked on an open fire or on a camp stove. To this day I find the regular canned Chef Boyardee ravioli an oddly satisfying junk food on occasion. Which is kind of odd because I’m normally very, very picky about pasta sauce when I’m making a pasta dish myself. The sauce in Chef Boyardee canned pasta has got to be the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality, yet it somehow strangely works. Kind of like fast-food burgers.
One of my mother’s old classics is this breakfast concoction made of sausage, egg and cheese that I have studiously avoided since as far back as I can remember. And it seems like every time I plan a trip back to my hometown, she asks me if it’s something that I would like for her to make for me while I’m there, even though I’ve never even given her the tiniest impression that I would be interested. But when she asked before my most recent trip home, I decided to take her up on it. It occurred to me that, as much as I imagined I wouldn’t like it, I genuinely had no idea, and it wouldn’t kill me to at least give it a shot. So I did, and it turns out … I don’t like it. My instincts were correct from the start. Go me! I would like to think that this will put an end to her asking me if I’d like her to make it for me in the future, but it’s not. There’s no way. Hell, she’ll probably remember the fact that I finally agreed to try it and somehow come to the conclusion that it’s now my favorite dish.
Nitpick: Spaghettios came (come) from Franco-American, not Chef Boyardee.
I remember the jingle “Franco-American (Oh-oh!) Spaghettios.”