Hm. I thought that artichokes were easily available worldwide. But come to think of it, I can’t remember ever seeing any in an Asian restaurant.
I was born and raised in Southern California. I can’t think of any fruits or vegetables that weren’t easily available. I do know that such things as Vegemite, which Australians can buy quite easily, were only available (and from what I’ve seen, is still only available) in specialty stores. (Thank the gods for the Internet!) And I met people in the 1980s who had never seen an avocado until they came to California, and someone suspected I was a native just because I asked for avocado on my burger. (‘Only Californians do that!’ she said.)
So are there any foods – especially fruits and vegetables – that you take as granted, and then find out they’re unavailable when you travel? Or do you live somewhere where the same are not generally available, but are in other places?
There doesn’t seem to be anything I ever ate in Canada that I can’t get here in Florida (although it costs more). But I’ve never seen or tasted an avocado.
Now, if you want to broaden the category a bit, I can’t get poutine here, or a real souvlaki, or Hungarian goulash. Considering that it’d cost me about a grand to go back to somewhere that isn’t home anymore to find them, I can wait some more.
Interesting about the avocados (romansperson,fishbicycle). I was taken aback when I heard people were unfamiliar with them in the '80s. (Once in the O-Club, an Eastern woman looked at the huge bowl of freshly-made guacamole and didn’t know what it was.) When I was a kid we just picked them off of my grandmother’s tree. Later, we just bought them at the supermarket. I thought that by now, there wouldn’t be anyplace that didn’t have them.
I used to live in Lancaster (Mojave Desert) and there was a Greek restaurant called Mr. K’s that made really good souvlaki. (I believe they’re long gone now.) And I got some nice Hungarian goulash in Hollywood.
I take many foods for granted, but as for missing foods, I’m probably most peeved that I can’t find cheese curds only a relatively short drive from the Wisconsin border. Sigh… (Why yes, I am an expatriate Cheesehead, why do you ask?)
I was born and raised here in California, and took for granted that you can find a taqueria in just about every block of every city of any size. Imagine my withdrawal symptoms when we went to France and Mexican food of any kind was virtually unheard of. I wasn’t surprised by this, but I was surprised by the speed with which we went to a dive taqueria the instant we returned to California! If I ever moved over there, I’d have to buy all the ingredients for Mexican cooking online if I wanted to continue to eat Mexican food.
Kinda related to this one, while my then-roommate and I were visiting my mom’s house in SW Indiana, I asked her if she wanted to stop by a restaurant for some fiddlers. They’re deep-fried catfish. She had never heard of them. Apparently not many other people have, either.
Until recently, not a whole lot of people outside of the NY metro area knew what a bagel was. You still can’t get fresh ones, let alone authentic ones, in many places.
OTOH, there are lots of New Yorkers and other folks outside of the southeastern U.S. who have not a clue what a “grit” is, unless you’re talking about sandpaper or that stuff in a parakeet’s cage.
My vegetarian wife was once serenaded by the musical sounds of 15 jaws simultaneously hitting the floor: CLUNK! The catalyst? The following exchange, which took place at a restaurant in Huntsville, Alabama about 15 years ago:
Wife: Do you have anything without meat?
Waitress: We have hush puppies.
Wife: What’s a hush puppy?
CLUNK! Went the jaws of the waitress, my wife’s lunch companions, and about 10 other people in the joint. No one there could believe that there was a person in the world who had never heard of a hush puppy.
For the record, hush puppies are essentially lumps of cornbread batter that are deep fried.
Well, I’m probably older than you are. I know that my parents, who grew up in the general area of Philadelphia, had never heard of a bagel when I was a child. My mom said that when SHE was growing up, Eye-talian food was a weird foreign thing. And by Eye-talian, we’re talking tomato sauce, ground beef and elbow macaroni casserole. Heck, macaroni was a foreign food for those folks.
Of course, I bet few others out there know what a Shoo-fly pie is, or scrapple, or a REAL sticky bun.
I get my bagels at Mr. Tod’s Pie Factory. It’s a small bakery near where I live. The fellow who owns it (Mr. Tod, of course) makes bagels as well as the best dam pies I’ve ever had that didn’t come out of my (or my mother’s) kitchen.
Where I’m from in New Brunswick, Canada, you can walk into almost any grocery store and buy fresh cheese curds. Need 'em for poutine, b’y.
I took for granted… hmm…
Haddock for fish n’ chips. Nothing even comes close. If you served cod in batter as part of a fish n’ chips meal where I come from, it gets sent back, with complaints. Restaurants have tanked because of this.
Ganong’s Chicken Bones. Has to be Ganong’s. All imitations I have tried (though even those are hard to find) cannot match the greatness that is the Ganong’s Chicken Bone. My parents ship me bags of them at Christmastime now. It’s not Christmas without Chicken Bones!
Cadbury chocolate. You can find only a few Cadbury items around here, which is good, but I miss the Great Bunny, and the truffle eggs, and the Crunchie bars, etc. The list goes on and on and on…
Any number of Cajun-style dishes.
Marshmallow Bananas.
Nanaimo Bars.
Poutine.
Butter pecan tarts.
Dill pickle, ketchup, and all dressed chips.
Bangers and mash, treacle bread.
Tim Horton’s coffee… and that maple pecan danish they just came out with before I moved, ohhhh! To die for.
And while I’m at it, I agree with the real maple syrup thing. The imitations are just sad. Well… they make me sad, and long for the real stuff. Maple sugar candy… not just the hard stuff, but those little lumps of sugar shaped like maple leaves, MMMMMM! How I miss those…
TastyKakes. It used to be almost impossible to get them outside of the Baltimore/Philadelphia area (we used to mail them to friends out West and abroad). But I bet you can get them anywhere now. I loved TastyKakes.
I grew up in Florida and got really used to good fruit. Even Georgia was OK since most of the fruit was form Florida. And then I moved to Texas. Wow, does the fruit suck. The stores either proudly sell “Texas grown” tangerines (like little rocks, I tell you) or that California stuff. The peaches are worse.
It’s getting better though. Over the past five years, I’ve started seeing more southern fruit in the stores and I can even get fresh honey tangerines from Florida in season…
Just how recently? I was born in the midwest before moving to New England, and I’ve been eating bagels all my life.