A very, very important question of global scope

[sqbr]

So I was looking up recipes for hokey-pokey icecream today and was overcome by an almost inconceivable suspicion: it's not eaten in America! Or in fact anywhere beyond the Pacific region!

Is this true? Because you guys are missing out. On the plus side afaict it's just made by mixing vanilla icecream with honeycomb (or "sponge toffee", which sounds terrible), though I plan to make it with butterscotch flavoured icecream(*).

What are the foods/recipes from a country you've lived in which you can't believe people overseas don't eat?

Personally I have trouble understanding how people can not like vegemite, but intellectually I can see how it might be something you need to have grown up with :)

(*)When I can find somewhere that sells oat/almond milk and honeycomb, Coles having neither this evening. Bah!

Comments

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

Top deck chocolate.

[alias_sqbr]

On the plus side you can just put two chocolate bars on top of each other and eat them :D (Ok, so it's probably not quite the same...)

It has been so long since I could eat milk chocolate I had to stop and remember what Top Deck was D:

[violetsquirrel.livejournal.com]

Jelly babies, not necessarily because they taste particularly good but just as a cultural thing.

I was just having this conversation the other day and now I can't remember any of the others :(

[stephiepenguin.livejournal.com]

other countries don't have jelly babies?

[theducks.livejournal.com]

Not so much foods, but we have drinks..

1) Lemon Lime and Bitters
2) Lemon Squash (ie, Solo)
3) Cordial

[alias_sqbr]

OTHER COUNTRIES DO NOT HAVE THESE THINGS???

Well, I knew about LLB, though part of me still doesn't believe it.

[bunny-m.livejournal.com]

Personally I have trouble understanding how people can not like vegemite, but intellectually I can see how it might be something you need to have grown up with :)

Not necessarily. I was born here in Perth and have lived here all my life, but I can't stand Vegemite. (Or pavlova, lamingtons, beer...)

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

I will eat Vegemite, but I prefer Marmite (the NZ version). Does that make me a bad Australian?

[flyingblogspot.livejournal.com]

Cheezels, Cherry Ripe, Tim Tams, ginger nut biscuits, roast chicken as a fast food! My Friendly Ex moved to the US some years back, and I send him shipments of all of the above except the Red Rooster. :)

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

They have wrapped single tim tams in Thailand. They're terrifyingly adorable.

[stephiepenguin.livejournal.com]

fruit tingles, iced vovos.

[alias_sqbr]

Wow, I would have thought fruit tingles were a fairly basic confectionary concept.

The again, if they don't have cordial..

(Iced vovos, on the other hand, really are very odd)

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

Oh and pods.

I may have slightly gotten an English friend addicted to them.

She may slightly hate me now.

I REGRET NOTHING.

[alias_sqbr]

Pods are too new fangled to count :)

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Well I was recently surprised to discover that lemon-lime-and-bitters is an Australian thing.

Americans also don't eat much lamb. They're missing out.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

Well, we do have it here, but usually only the high end kind. We don't have much cheaper lamb.

I do have a nice lamb dinner here and there. NOM

[seaya.livejournal.com]

Root beer! :) It's not alcoholic. It's made from a tree from here (the real kind).

Pretzels are not found in the UK that taste any good anyhow.

Actually good pizza.

Craisins (dried cranberries)

Sour patch kids

Al these things are probably found in Canada, being our neighbor. I'm sure I can think of more examples.

I'd say peanut butter, but while it is from here (George Washington Carver), I think it's found in other places maybe, though I guess not typically eaten. More for us. :)


Squash maybe? As in the plant(s). It's from the Americas.

[theducks.livejournal.com]

I have peanut butter on a regular basis. In fact, I keep up to three bottles open at once (crunch, smooth, and super-crunchy)

[grahame.livejournal.com]

Iced coffee is pretty much a WA thing, at least in the form sold by Brownes / Masters.

[loic.livejournal.com]

I miss it terribly.

[hulzie.livejournal.com]

America misses out on so many awesome things, like Tim Tams.

[loic.livejournal.com]

I really don't miss tim tams. I get them occasionally and don't love them like I used to. I do miss meat pies, sausage rolls and potato chips flavoured like meat.

[aris-tgd.livejournal.com]

Well, I do know that the UK apparently doesn't know what lemonade and milkshakes are. ;) And it's hard to find a restaurant that does deep-dish pizza really well even in the reaches of the US.

It's so weird, because the USA is big enough that you can get that "But you don't have that HERE? What?" response if you just drive for a day...

[alias_sqbr]

Heh. While even going to NZ (which for me means passing over the entire length of australia first) wasn't that different :)

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

Oh, something I was amazed to find - actual Aussie meat pies made by a guy from Sydney in the Singapore CBD.

[alias_sqbr]

Oh that's awesome. Not that I eat meat pies, but it makes me happy anyway for some reason :)

[fred-mouse.livejournal.com]

I always found that going to the eastern states was a bit of a culture shock, because of the foods that I couldn't get. I had problems with the lack of a decent yoghurt producer (no Brownes, just icky Yoplait, and Ski, and maybe some others), and none that produced individual single serves, rather than six-packs.

In Canada, my issue was always with cheese - there is no decent cheddar. And the half-decent cheddar costs as much as the premium stuff does here.

I'm finding myself vaguely amused that the first two things that I thought of are both things I can't eat!

Oh, and the other one that gets me - TicTac flavours are very different between countries. I've seen speciality ones here (acerola and mango), as well as the various mint ones (spearmint, mint, lemon-mint, passionfruit-mint and orange-mint, at last count), and orange ones. The US has wintergreen (which I occasionally organise for a new supply of) and Canada had cinnamon (although they may not be available any longer).

A misses A&W root beer enough that every time we go to visit his family, we end up going to an A&W (think Hungry Jacks, with a different set of corny names for the burgers).

And yes, vegemite. The first time I was overseas I missed it so much that I spent a day tracking it down. I haven't been so bad since, but that time it was bad.

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, eastern states dairy seemed pretty lackluster. I was already mostly off dairy at that stage so it didn't bug me so much :)

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Hokey-pokey icecream is funny because it reminds me of a Danish ice cream flavour (called 'nougat' I think, but that word seems to cover almost any kind of candy) which is supposed to be terribly danish.

When I lived in the US, the things I missed the most were lemon, lime and bitters (I tried teaching the concept to a bar tender at one point...) and cherry ripes (because US chocolate bars are monotonous on the caramel and maybe nuts theme).

Oh, and there was the weird gendering of food (which may have been specific to deepest darkest Pennsylvania) where Men Ate Beef (with cheese, fries, other fats, and things that might have been vegetables in some past life like ketchup and pickles) and Women Ate Chicken (with vegetables, low-fat everything). I remember breaking the brain of my server when I asked for (what I thought of as a perfectly normal) Thai Beef Salad - "like the Thai Chicken Salad there on your menu, only beef instead of chicken".

I was also shocked to discover my peanut-butter loving friends had never been introduced to the concept of satay sticks. Once that had been cleared up, I was requested to bring them to every "bring a plate" party I was invited to :-).

The US foods I was sorry to leave behind were almond M&M's (I think they've finally arrived in Australia), Hot Tamales candy (cinnamon flavoured jellybean textured bullet things, which I think you can now get here) and Penn State Creamery's Black Cherry Frozen Yogurt. (Yes, I was on a campus that taught tertiary courses in ice cream manufacture and sold the products, including new flavour experiments, cheaply.)

[wintal.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on american chocolate bars. I found it very hard to find something palatable.

[wintal.livejournal.com]

Drip-filter coffee.

It's amazing how bad (ok, maybe I should say 'different') coffee is in lots of places.

American in general has an addiction to drip-filter coffee which I find bizarre... then they have starbucks which has practically nothing on the menu that represents coffee.

Singapore was also pretty damn hard to find an acceptable cup.

The 'flat white' seems to be an entirely aussie thing too.

[alias_sqbr]

I read a book recently where one character kept referring to another's "Double latte frappachino"s as milkshakes, and that's totally what they are :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Christmas pudding.

Well no foreign country can make what I would consider a decent pudding of any sort. And finding drinkable coffee abroad can be very hard. Of course they all reckon that we are the ones who can't make decent puddings or coffee, which just goes to show how wrong headed people can be.

Regarding the Marmite discussion up above, it is now marketed in the UK as 'you either love it or hate it', since like Wagner it seems to be one of those great dividers.

Oh and I have seen honeycomb-toffee ice cream in this country, but we don't call it hokey-pokey. As far as I know, hokey-pokey is a Scottish word for all ice cream, not a particular flavour.

[alias_sqbr]

* is amused to find people from two different countries complaining that "nobody else" does coffee right* :)

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

Top deck chocolate.

[alias_sqbr]

On the plus side you can just put two chocolate bars on top of each other and eat them :D (Ok, so it's probably not quite the same...)

It has been so long since I could eat milk chocolate I had to stop and remember what Top Deck was D:

[violetsquirrel.livejournal.com]

Jelly babies, not necessarily because they taste particularly good but just as a cultural thing.

I was just having this conversation the other day and now I can't remember any of the others :(

[stephiepenguin.livejournal.com]

other countries don't have jelly babies?

[theducks.livejournal.com]

Not so much foods, but we have drinks..

1) Lemon Lime and Bitters
2) Lemon Squash (ie, Solo)
3) Cordial

[alias_sqbr]

OTHER COUNTRIES DO NOT HAVE THESE THINGS???

Well, I knew about LLB, though part of me still doesn't believe it.

[bunny-m.livejournal.com]

Personally I have trouble understanding how people can not like vegemite, but intellectually I can see how it might be something you need to have grown up with :)

Not necessarily. I was born here in Perth and have lived here all my life, but I can't stand Vegemite. (Or pavlova, lamingtons, beer...)

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

I will eat Vegemite, but I prefer Marmite (the NZ version). Does that make me a bad Australian?

[flyingblogspot.livejournal.com]

Cheezels, Cherry Ripe, Tim Tams, ginger nut biscuits, roast chicken as a fast food! My Friendly Ex moved to the US some years back, and I send him shipments of all of the above except the Red Rooster. :)

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

They have wrapped single tim tams in Thailand. They're terrifyingly adorable.

[stephiepenguin.livejournal.com]

fruit tingles, iced vovos.

[alias_sqbr]

Wow, I would have thought fruit tingles were a fairly basic confectionary concept.

The again, if they don't have cordial..

(Iced vovos, on the other hand, really are very odd)

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

Oh and pods.

I may have slightly gotten an English friend addicted to them.

She may slightly hate me now.

I REGRET NOTHING.

[alias_sqbr]

Pods are too new fangled to count :)

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Well I was recently surprised to discover that lemon-lime-and-bitters is an Australian thing.

Americans also don't eat much lamb. They're missing out.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

Well, we do have it here, but usually only the high end kind. We don't have much cheaper lamb.

I do have a nice lamb dinner here and there. NOM