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

[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.

[aris-tgd.livejournal.com]

http://www.dagobachocolate.com/products.asp?dept=17 <-- Hey, we have some decent stuff that's not imported. You just have to know where to look. :)

(I am addicted to their Chai bars.)

[alias_sqbr]

Those are just nicely flavoured chocolate, we want something with more texture and complexity (eg a Cherry Ripe)

[alias_sqbr]

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.

Heh, it's funny how many things that seem quintessentially Xish/universal are the reverse :)

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Yes, that thing exactly :-).

There's this salad that my family now call "blame someone else salad"*. You see, growing up in Denmark, we knew it as "Italian salad" (I'm sure no Italian would remotely recognise it, other than as one of those Danish things.) But then we went to a Turkish restaurant (in Australia) once and they served us more or less the exact same thing, but it was called "Russian salad"! (Danish also has a "Russian salad" but it's based on beetroot.) Furthermore, it turns out that it was a particular kind of Russian salad, namely American salad!

*Blame Someone Else Salad involves cooked peas, and cooked carrots cut into cubes of matching size, and a mayonnaise-based dressing. The "Italian" version may also include tinned asparagus and/or pasta.

[alias_sqbr]

Ha, that's awesome :)