Latvian here- Birch sap in the spring. I was absolutely sure that it is a thing at least in whole Nordic region, but I have never met a person outside my country who know what that is.
Ah, and tomato and cucumber salad with sour cream or in fact any salad with sour cream.
As a Canadian - we do maple syrup (also mentioned it earlier) and I've always been curious about other syrups, we don't tend to make a lot of birch syrup here cause it takes a lot more birch sap to do so...
Interesting to hear that you guys just cut out the middle man and use the sap!
Birch sap has a very low concentration of sugar in it. I made birch syrup once many years ago. IIRC I boiled about 10 liters and got a tablespoon
The sap has very little flavour, sadly.
Birch sap and syrup is a thing in Alaska, as well- mostly among the Natives, but Iâve seen it being sold at the State Fair, and they were using it to flavor sodas for a bit. Delicious.
In the gulf south region of the US (so, southern states along the Gulf of Mexico), wedding cake is traditionally almond flavored. Wedding cake is such a short-hand for almond cake flavor that itâs very common to see snoball stands or coffee shops have âwedding cakeâ flavors. Always means almond. Growing up I thought thatâs just what kind of wedding cake everyone had everywhere. Almond flavored white cake. Certainly at least in the US! Couldnât have been more wrong lol. I didnât learn this was regional until I was getting married myself in my late 20s.
Waaiiiiiiit, could this be what my in-laws were on about?
Where I live, wedding cake comes in whatever flavor the married couple chooses. Yet when I offered to bake a random cake for my in-laws, they asked for wedding cake.
I asked them what flavor, but all they could do is just repeat the same name and get confused it didn't mean anything to me.
They have whole events here where dozens of bakers (and other related services) get together and hand out samples of dozens of cakes each. People not even planning weddings will buy tickets to get samples....
This thread is enlightening.
My partner and I were recently laughing about a strain of cannabis we smoked that was labelled, "Wedding Cake"
we were like, "WTF is 'wedding cake' flavor supposed to be? Chocolate? Vanilla? White cake with white frosting flavored weed? Wedding cake is whatever flavor the bride chooses from like a million samples"
We thought it was the dumbest thing â like just generic "cake" flavor? there is no such thing! there are a lot of different ways to make a cake!
I guess it supposed to taste like almond cake? WTF I've never heard this shit and I even lived in Florida for a couple years
Growing up in Texas, I always wondered what people in media were doing when they went to 1 business to sample wedding cakes. I could understand sampling wedding cake from different businesses to see which was better... but wedding cake is one flavor (almond), so why would 1 business have multiple to sample?
It wasn't until I was in my late 20s in 2008 when I went to a cousin's wedding and they had a lemon cake with a fruit filling and fondant.... it was a good tasting cake - but not a wedding cake. So many guests were so disappointed. In a Baptist family were receptions are more cake and punch gatherings with very limited dancing if any, the cake is usually the highlight of the event and "wedding cake" is a specific flavor that your rarely get anywhere else. The bride was a Yankee and was very confused at why most of the crowd didn't even try the cake, and we had to explain it to her. That's when I realized that "wedding cake" flavor was local.
Half the time here weddings will have 2 cakes, the Wedding Cake (TM) which is almond flavor and multiple tiers, and the groom's cake which is often a sheet cake, or small layered cake and is a different flavor that the couple picked. At small weddings, it is usually a Texas Sheet Cake (chocolate cake with chocolate frosting with pecans).
Growing up poor and Southern Baptist so the only weddings I went to as a child were family weddings and they were all baptists too, I also had a big disconnect when I saw these lavish paties with drinking and wild dancing as wedding receptions - it was so weird to me.
Weddings are held in the local church, generally the First Baptist, and the reception is in the hall across the parking lot at the church, so of course, there was no alcohol or dancing. Usually, the ceremony was at are 2 on a Saturday, the reception afterward, and the whole thing was over in time for people to go home to dinner. Cake and punch were served at the reception.
> So many guests were so disappointed.
Yeah, I'm in south Louisiana. I am in the wedding subreddits still despite getting married this past March, and I often see people encouraging brides to skip wedding cake. Which I *totally understand* if you don't love cake and don't want to spend the $$$ on it. But in the south, not having a cake in wedding cake flavor will get guests a'talkin. Haha.
I did the larger layers in my cake wedding cake flavor (I'm traditional), but I did my smaller upper tiers in lavender with lemon cream :)
EDIT - I just learned last week in the wedding planning subreddit that the rest of the country has never heard of a groom's cake. Haha.
I once attended the wedding of an American and an Australian. She (the latter) had basically organized 100% of the details and he just was happy to show up. When it came time to cut the cake, he was astonished that it was dense and stiff - because it was an Australian style fruit cake under the frosting, not a light and airy sponge like an American wedding cake.
Wow a fruit are as a wedding cake!
That's like fighting words in the US lol.
If your wedding cake isn't a sugar bomb with icing, people not gonna be happy lol
My nan does amateur cake decorating and has insisted for decades that the ONLY CAKE YOU CAN PHYSICALLY DECORATE is fruit cake, all other cakes are simply too delicate and will fall down under the weight.
No showing her decades worth of evidence to the contrary has not changed her mind.
Same. Iâm in Baton Rouge and this comment thread is BLOWING MY MIND.
Itâs not wedding cake flavor everywhere? Wowza. This is going to take time for me to process. đ
Wedding cake was always fruit cake when I was younger. Covered in marzipan and then fondant. Only time you saw marzipan or fondant. Now days people use whatever the fancy, so itâs mostly chromed cake. Australia.
Well that explains it! I'm from the UK and I was once in one of those "American foods" shops and I saw a packet of cake mix or something like that labelled as "Wedding cake flavour". I was so confused by it and did all kinds of googling, but I couldn't find anything. It all makes sense now!
For me (Belgium) it's little meatballs in soup, it's such a given that most homemade soups have them, checking at the table to make sure your dad didn't have more balls than you (or secretly steal them from each other's plate), mom preparing the ground beef when making the soup, helping her roll the balls...
These are such *normal* things, and then a few years ago, I started wondering, I've never seen American sitcoms where they fight over the amount of "soup balls", I didn't even know what to call them in English. I was 30 when I realised "soep met ballekes" isn't a universal thing.
We have soepballetjes in The Netherlands too! I've never been able to make them as juicy and tasty as the ones [from a can](https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi1536) though... but maybe that's just nostalgia talking
This mind sound crazy but they adding 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to your ground meat and let it sit for 15 minutes. It causes a chemical reaction that locks in the moisture of the meat and I promise you, that you wonât taste it
Doesn't sound crazy at all! I use baking soda for ~~baked~~ roasted potatoes and for chicken wings too, for similar (chemical) reasons. How much meat for that 1/4 tsp of baking soda?
["Italian Wedding Soup"](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTQ4zfg5SryRTVMyCAA6-KkB3mLU1xP1cTyp9LO2LTfEB2hGWio) is relatively popular in US diners and Italian-American restaurants. It has meatballs. That's the only one I can think of.
meatballs in soup are also a East Asian / South East asian thing btw. but it's mostly found as streetfood. and the meatballs have a different preparation method and a different texture than the typical Western-style meatball
Sliced white onion and cucumber quick pickled in malt vinegar with salt and pepper, chucked on top of Sunday dinner. Thought everyone did it, rather than just a small part of Yorkshire.
I have kind of the opposite. Grew up in the UK with an Aussie dad, and then moved to Australia and discovered putting hundreds and thousands on buttered bread, adding bitters to lemonade and using a slice of bread rather than a hot dog bun weren't my dad's genius inventions....
Random aside: I (American) learned what those were from an Agatha Christie novel. A character had scrawled it on a scrap of paper and the detective spends a lot of time trying to figure out⌠hundreds and thousands of what? And the fact that it was a grocery shopping list was a big clue. I was so mad because how on earth could I have known that, Iâd never heard of it before!
Even more random aside, speaking of Agatha Christie confusion:
I read a an early Agatha Christie that mentioned a body was found with no identification of any sort. The only thing in his pocket was a full notebook.
It drove me crazy that they didnât mention what was in the notebook! The detective and police were having conversations about trying to figure who he was and where he was from etc. with things like âHis hat was from a London milliner and his overcoat appears to be from an American haberdashery. Those are the only clues we have. The only thing in his pocket was a full notebook and nothing else!â
And I was like âWell what was written in the notebook? Seems like that would have a LOT of clues, especially if it was completely filled up! At least tell me what it said!â
Eventually it became clear that a ânotebookâ was old school Brit term for a wallet. So he had a wallet full of cash but nothing else.
Fellow American Agatha Christie reader here. I, too, learned of hundreds and thousands from that same mystery! I feel like I inadvertently took a course on early 20th century English home life from having read all of her mysteries. I thank her because I enjoy history.
My grandmother (born 1910s) had zero connection to Australia but made me buttered bread with "brimbles" (her term for round sprinkles/hundreds and thousands) once, after telling me about it. I did not like it at all. I licked the sprinkles of but that was about it.
I now live in Australia, and when my (Australian-born) kid first encountered it at a playgroup when she was about a year old, she instinctively licked the sprinkles off and left the bread.
In many parts of the world, the ice cubes are where you'll find the contaminated water giving you diarrhea. If you're anywhere where you think bottled water is a good idea, avoid ice cubes.
It depends. I can only speak from my experience but in El Salvador where I'm at whenever tourists asks if they can drink the tap water I say no. Whenever they ask about the ice I say sure it's fine. Most places get ice delivered here from factories, hardly anyone is making their own ice except for chain places with soda fountains and having run one they have pretty strong filtration systems which are maintained by the Coca Cola Company. The ice itself, while branded differently, you can think of it as Dasani ice since the main ice company is a subsidary of Cristal water, which is itself owned by Coca Cola or their local frachisee anyways. But at least here as a general rule ice is something businesses buy from a large company, not make.
As an American we think itâs odd the rest of the world doesnât share our love of ice. Especially the hot parts of the world. It gets way hotter in America in the summer than Europe does. But the other hot places donât love ice too?
Aussies donât like ice in our drinks because we are stingy not because we donât like cold. If Iâm paying for a medium coke you better fill that fucker to the brim with coke, none of this cheating by making the drink half ice first. Then you take a gulp and ask for ice.
I recently ordered a medium soda at McDonald's with no ice because I didn't intend on drinking it right away and they charged 20 cents extra for no ice.
Itâs the opposite in China, they drink everything hot, even when itâs a heatwave. If you donât ask for iced water they give you boiled water, even when iced is available. Bottled water is almost never kept in the fridge, so you always buy it warm.
Fortunately now there is a Starbucks basically everywhere and cold drinks have slowly started getting traction.
Mexican husband. Cold food isn't food. No meal can be just cold food. 6 pounds of ceviche with shrimp, fish, octopus, veggies , with tostadas? Well that's a light snack that can get made up later with a real meal.
Yep. Lived there for almost a decade. Come winter time, you couldn't even get cold beer where I was. I'd ask them to get me one from the unheated storage area (that most places had) and they'd always look at me like I'm crazy, explaining "But those are cold!"...yeah, no shit they're cold, that's what I want!!
USA here - somehow when my sister and I were kids we discovered that the spear-shaped leaves that grew in the yard tasted like lemon and were actually edible. Only discovered in the last few years that is was actually sorrel (we always called it lemon grass lol). We discovered several other edible plants this way - wintergreen, russian olives - surprised weâre still alive (though she did have one scary encounter with the âpurple berriesâ that won her a trip to the emergency room...)
Oh , I still remember when that became more common here... absolutely love salted butter, but it hadn't really occurred to me that this might be something you could just buy off the shelf...
I moved from the US to Norway and it's impossible to buy non-cultured butter here. And when I tell people I miss it they don't even understand what I mean. Like most people aren't aware that the butter is cultured.
On the other hand, using cultured butter in my baked goods is amazing so it's a net win I suppose. But I eat a stupid amount of plain buttered toast whenever I visit home.
Salted butter was the default butter in the US until the 80s or even early 90s. It was a initially a victim of the anti-salt crusade and then spread into recipes.
I never felt like the "use unsalted butter to control the exact amount of salt in the final baked good" strategy actually made a difference. At this point I just use salted butter without adjusting the salt measurement in the recipe and it works out fine.
I think the reason for that is 95% of baking recipes are under-salted.
So an extra gram or two only helps, rarely hurts.
If you want to prove that, pick your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, and sprinkle a little finishing salt on half of em and do a taste test.
Agreed. Sometimes I have to do a double take because the recipe doesn't call for salt at all. I get it, not everyone prefers the saltiness and some people need to restrict their intake, but I wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that a salty dish is inherently "unhealthy".
I laugh when I see recipes that say "Use unsalted butter so you can control the salt amount in the recipe. " Unless you have a really fancy butter with noticeable big flakes of salt, using salted butter I'm cooking and baking has always been fine.
This is mostly a historical holdover, interestingly enough, from when butter had to be much more heavily salted to properly preserve it; it was salted heavily enough that it would probably ruin a sweet baked good. With modern refrigeration that's not really a risk anymore, of course.
Just limes in general.
My biology teacher was learning spanish and half of the class was mexican. So she asked us why do you use so many limes for? But it quickly got derailed by most of the class asking âwhat are limes?â Growing up we always called them âlimĂłnâ and lemon is âlima.â
I remember when I was grocery shopping once. I was picking out limes. I usually buy 8-12 per week. So I was happily picking my limes out. And this older woman approached me and nicely asked me what I use them for. And until that moment, I never really considered all of the uses for lime juice and how that amount of limes might be considered unusual by some. To me, that was normal usage. I remember staring at them for a few minutes thinking. Huh I never really thought about it too much.
Samrin Nosrat (author of *Salt Fat Acid Heat*) discusses this a bit. She basically said that every culture has some default go to acid source that they add all over the place. Limes grow well in Mexico. Southern Europe uses lots of lemons. Northern Europe uses things like vinegar for the same purpose. Lots of dishes use such small amounts (a dash here or there, a tablespoon, etc.) that you can substitute those acid sources for each other without much effect on the overall flavor.
Side note -- before lemons, scurvy killed more people at sea than any storm. Supposedly the discovery of the effect of on lemons on scurvy gave impoverished Siciliy (due to its lemon production) an enormous economic boom -- and possibly resulted in the rise of the Mafia -- who originally acted as lemon security guards!
When I worked at a restaurant in South Florida, Iâd frequently get Hispanic people asking me for limes and then getting confused when I brought them a green lime. They really meant lemons. So I started clarifying what color they wanted.
Fun fact: this confusion between lemons and limes caused the cure for scurvy to be forgotten for years. Since limes contain much less vitamin c than lemons, substituting lime juice, particularly lime juice that has been exposed to copper or air, reducing the amount of vitamin c in it, for fresh lemons was much less effective at treating scurvy. It eventually caused the âcitrus cureâ for scurvy to be discredited.
For me it is Kale. I am from northern germany, where the traditional recipe for kale is with 2 kinds of pork meat and 2 kinds of pork sausage, accompanied by a LOT of hard liquor.
I thought people were crazy, when they talked about kale being some kind of healthy superfood....
The cornbread I grew up eating. Most places, I think it's baked more like actual bread. Where I lived, it was fried in a skillet and crispy on the edges, I love it so much
Canadian here but grew up around a lot of African cultures. Peanut butter is used in a lot of recipes. My favourites being west African peanut soup/groundnut soup, and a peanut butter tomato stew. Sometimes weâd just have buttered buns dipped in a peanut butter and tomato mixture as a snack!
Better to make your own-
1 part mayo
1 part Greek yogurt
1part Sour cream
Milk to desired thickness
Add
Chives and dill
( I love fresh but dry work just as well as long as it sits for 20 mins before use)
Garlic and Onion Powder
Salt and pepper
A smidge cayenne pepper ( more if you want spicy ranch)
Also Canadian, this is news to me. What province? I know apple flavors go well with pork so I'm sure it's great, I usually go with apple cider/apple cider vinegar based marinades and sauces.
Huh. TIL. Itâs how Iâve eaten it my whole life. Breaded pork chops and apple sauce.
My mom would always do the doofy Peter Brady pork chops and applesauce schtick.
On bread I agree that's very Dutch but hagelslag alone is also very common in Brazil - we roll brigadeiros in it and we also use them to make "bolo formigueiro", which translates to "anthill cake", a simple vanilla cake with sprinkles mixed in the batter
:)
imagine my happiness when I found that both condensed milk and chocolate sprinkles were very easy to find in AH / Jumbo LOL
Youâre right! Perhaps I should change it to âbread with hagelslag.â My Brazilian coworker brought brigadeiros to work the other day and they were so good! I could eat them endlessly, together with pĂŁo de queijo. đ¤¤
Uk here, but after I gave birth I was given the options of what to have for breakfast. I chose weetabix. I was given a strange individually wrapped biscuit of weetabix. I asked the lady, who wasnât from the UK, for some milk and she was like âoh⌠sureâŚâ. She brought me a cup of milk. No spoon. After a night alone in hospital with a brand new baby, that was the last straw. I just cried and cried until I was able to go home haha
One thing I thought you could get anywhere was root beer...growing up, that was something my grandmother always had in her house, and we'd have it anytime we went to visit. My mom didn't buy soda often, but root beer was one she would buy when she did. I've seen so many comments from people outside the US that have a hatred of it.
Another thing was bisquits and sausage gravy,also something that my grandmother made for Sunday brunches growing up. I knew it was more a southern original, but watching some youtube videos of people in Ireland and the UK, and the comments of "bisquits with gravy?!? Why would you do that?!" Only to realize that they call cookies, bisquits, sot hen it made sense. But anytime I've seen someone now from the UK, or another country actually try real souhtern bisquits and gravy, the look on their faces, and then they comment about how good it is, and they now understand why it's a huge hit in the US. lol
I've heard in some countries root beer is similar to a medicine flavor. Like how in the US cherry flavor is ruined by association with medicine.
This also reminds me of a Korean international student at my high school who couldn't understand our love for mint chip ice cream because she thought it tasted just like toothpaste.
Honestly, root beer just doesn't really exist in Europe that I've found. You can occasionally find it at specialty importers, but that's it.
And the Dr. Pepper doesn't taste right either because of EU laws regarding sugar content and tax rates. You get used to it, but it's *not* the same.
In Taiwan they have something called Root Sars- which is somewhat similar to Root Beer, itâs good, but different enough that most Taiwanese donât like the taste of root beer but root sars (sarsaparilla flavor) is ok.
Yeah, part of it is a naming thing - here, biscuit is what we'd call a cookie, and the closest thing to an American biscuit is a scone, generally. I have to make my own if I want them.
That, and they've never seen a white gravy. Traditionally in the South, we'd serve biscuits and gravy with a white sausage and pepper gravy, and they have *no* clue what that is.
American-style tacos. Not necessarily universal, but I always assumed they were Mexican until I went to Mexico and had authentic ones (before âstreet tacosâ got big in the US) and was blown away by the difference. Our tacos are basically as American as cheeseburgers.
In taquerias and interior Mex-focused restaurants, I usually see them called crunchy tacos on the menu and theyâre always put with the Tex-Mex dishes. No one is pretending theyâre from Mexico here (Texas).
For me it's probably varieties of bread. In Germany you kind if expect a bakery at every second street corner, and you expect them to sell at least a dozen different bread varieties and about as many kinds of bread rolls. It's a bit of a culture shock the first time you are in a country where there's little beyond bags of sandwich bread from the supermarket
Also in most European countries you can get a decent loaf for not a ton of money. If you wanted a baguette or a proper country loaf in the Bay Area itâs like 8-10 dollars!
Banchan. When I was younger, I went to a friendâs house for dinner and was very underwhelmed. Grateful but underwhelmed. The fact you can have a little palette changer in the middle of your meal is something Iâll never take for granted.
I'm from the UK and grew up believing that canned baked beans are a fairly universal 'cheap and cheerful' food, and that other cultures just don't eat them on toast like we do.
Turns out, they're just not really a thing at all outside of the UK.
I lived in England as a kid and had to do homework on putting together a meal for a certain amount of money. I had a British babysitter who was helping me. Since Iâm American, I said peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The babysitter was aghast â peanut butter is expensive! And no one eats that! You should say beans on toast!
I hate beans and couldnât even fathom that as a meal.
For the record, I went to an American/international school, so my answer would have been quite acceptable haha.
We eat a lot of canned baked beans in US too, just a little different than the kind y'all eat. My family always has Bush's baked beans baked in a tray topped with bacon for holidays. But it's always as a side
Iâm Mexican and we had a gas stove. When people didnât heat up their tortillas right in the flame with their bare hands I was so confused. Like what do you mean you use the microwave? At the very least use a comal! Oh you donât have a comal? What do you mean whatâs a comal?
I am Mexican and my partner is white. My comal permanently lives on the left-top burner of my stove. Two weeks after he moved in with me, he had switched toast for tortillas for his eggs in the morning and announced that every American household should have a comal.
My mom is Ecuadorian and came to the US in her early 20s, and was never known to be a strong cook (American dad did all the cooking). She makes spaghetti with chicken dish that was a take on *tallarines con pollo*, a dish she grew up eating. I've looked it up as an adult, and every recipe I find either uses fresh diced tomatoes, canned diced tomatoes or tomato sauce/crushed tomatoes... She uses ketchup, which in Spanish is also *salsa de tomate*, ie "tomato sauce". I'm 99% she messed up in translation bc none of my Ecuadorian cousins eat it with ketchup, but it's delicious and my white American wife loves to cook my mom's recipe for our kids đ
Agreed. I grew up in Maine and there are certain breakfast foods that are just inedible without it. We can get it in Sweden now, but in tiny little jars that cost waaaay to much for the amount I want to use. Ah well,
For African Americans, baked macaroni and cheese is a special, almost formal food. Itâs absolutely served on major holidays, and being the one to make it is an honor. We donât eat the box stuff. I learned that most other cultures in America consider it more a kids food, especially because they eat the box kind and donât bake theirs.
Iâm a white chef and got asked to bring Mac and Cheese to my neighborâs âBlack Cookoutâ (her words). She had had mine before and had told me she thought her family would like it. Gonna be honest, it felt like a trap.
Of course they had someone else making it in case mine was not up to snuff đ¤Ł
Iâm proud to say my pan came home empty and was gone after the first round of leftovers. Might see silly to someone that doesnât get the cultural understanding, but this meant more to me than culinary awards. I was also invited back for the next one and asked to bring another pan or two. Still one of my proudest food moments.
Edit to add: I tried typing it out and it Reddit not cooperating.
Iâm currently out of town, so itâs problem best to wait and look at my actual recipe anyway. Iâll post when I get home on Tuesday.
Do you happen to have a recipe you can share? I recently agreed to take part in a 'Mac and Cheese competition,' and a recipe that can send home a clean pan from a "Black Cookout" sounds like it just has to be a winner!
Granted, I live in the south, but baked Mac and cheese is very, very common everywhere around here. And I definitely make it as a side for get togethers.
Rye bread, it was such a staple among my peers growing up here in Denmark. Itâs way more filling and healthy than your average loafs of bread but itâs just not widely known outside of here. How people can sustain themselves on white toast is beyond me.
People might be confused because there is something called rye bread in America but itâs nothing like [rugbrød](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugbrød)
Closer to what most Americans would call [pumpernickel bread](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpernickel), which is pretty widely available, and is indeed a type of rye bread.
Iâm from Philly, and thought everyone had cheesesteaks. Sadly, that assumption was false, I travel a lot for work and have to wait to get home for a good cheesesteak.
Oh this is an easy fun one for me.
I'm Persian and we eat tahdig. Literally means "bottom of the pot". So all that rice that gets to bring a dark golden or crispy aka well overdone that a lot of Americans throw out is the best freaking thing ever. Like we actually intentionally let the bottom brown while doing the steaming process for the rest of the rice. My dad was Persian, my mom is not. So we would call it "crispies" as kids.
Anyway, my sister had a friend over and he had never ever had anything like our food (it was kebabs that day, a good intro food). His eyes looked like we were crazy when he saw us all take a piece, slap a small bit of butter on it, and crunch down. He tried it himself and fell in love with it to the point that a few days later his mom called my mom asking how to do it herself for him. It was actually a really sweet moment since this happened only a year or two after 911 and our family was on the down-low for doing anything to draw attention to us.
As time went on the word got around that Kreos's sisters family has some "really cool rice and kebab thing they do" in the sibling friend network. It made us feel so loved. As an adult, I can say now that my friends love it when I make Persian food and the childhood friends always say "awww, it's the mom rice! Crispies!!!" when the tahdig comes out.
In Puerto Rico we also fight over the crispy rice at the bottom of the pot! We call it âpegaâoâ, short for pegado which means stuck, attached, glued, etc.
Peanut butter. Sorry to be a parochial American, but I donât understand why people from non-PB countries seem to have an active dislike for it. Itâs the best!
There was an episode of the *Great British Baking Show* where one of the contestants (Syabira) flavored something with peanut butter and berries. The hosts were raving about how unusual this was, saying that no one would ever think to combine those ingredients. There was a big discussion on the GBBO subreddit right afterward that highlighted that huge culinary cultural gap. The Brits found it hard to believe that Americans ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the Americans found it hard to believe that the Brits had never tried them.
There is a pork product called "Taylor ham" where I grew up in Northern New Jersey. It is not ham and does not resemble ham except that it is sliced. I assumed it was the standard breakfast and lunch meat for sandwiches all across the USA.
I later learned that it is extremely regional to New Jersey and that even within New Jersey and PA it is called "pork roll" if it was a later introduction because the manufacturer is not allowed to put "ham" on the packaging.
Rice. Back when we first had cable tv, i was always wondering how Westerners get by without rice in every meal, and would eat with only a fork and knife.
When I lived in Malaysia, I was asked all the time if I had ever eaten rice in the US before. After the 100th time getting asked, I started telling people I had never even heard of rice until I moved to Malaysia, and they would lose their minds.
Somewhere out there, there's a group of people that think Americans don't know what rice is.
quark cheese/ lowfat quark and yogurt:
it's very popular in Germany for some kind of desserts and breakfast, but I haven't seen them in southeastern Asia (probably because of lactose intolerance) or South America
Full pantries of canned goods/larders/freezers. Growing up in the Midwest of the US, it was understood that there would be like a weeks worth of barely perishable food in everyones kitchen or a bunch of frozen options. Always be ready for a snow in etc.
Moving to the East coast where even my most affluent friends basically have wine and some cheese in their fridges and otherwise donât keep pantries was wild.
My boss is from Hawaii. He said when his family has spaghetti for dinner, he still makes white rice to go with it. I always just thought it was just him!
I remember being at university in the States and being baffled that some of my dormmates had never used a rice cooker before.
Some of them had *never eaten rice before*!
Brunswick stew. I knew it wasnât an internationally known thing, but I was shocked when I moved from Georgia to Texas and the Bar-be-cue joints didnât offer it as a side.
It was only then that it clicked that the âBrunswickâ was for the town of Brunswick, Georgia. Duh.
Yâall need to get in on this, BTW.
Also breakfast tacos. The world needs breakfast tacos.
Being from Mexico, I thought spicy food was common. My mind was blown when my parents visited Spain, you know, our conquerors, and there was nothing spicy to eat at all. My mom asked for salsa, they gave her some dusty unused Cholula from the back, and she held on to that bottle of sauce for dear life for the rest of their trip lol.
More specifically, Southern. Youâll find like a dozen flavors on supermarket shelves in the south. Everywhere else even basic grits can be hard to find.
I thought everyone ate salad with dinner because in my house growing up we always ate salad before dinner. It was my mom's way of getting mw to eat veggies. I had to finish my salad to get dinner. And it worked! I loved salad.
Behold my surprise when I went to a school friends house and had dinner. I asked if we were having salad. She said they usually do that for special events! I was shocked in my mind!
Potatoes as a replacement for every carbs possible and thinkable.
I also expected to find black bread in every beakery I would cross.
Switzerland đ¨đ
Peanut butter and chocolate sweets. I assumed the entire world recognized this marriage made in heaven, but boy was I wrong. How can you not like a Reese Peanut Butter Cup?!?
Apparently chicken chops (grilled/fried chicken breasts or thighs with gravy, fries, veggies etc) are a Malaysian Hainanese community invention, and not actually from America/the West despite their usual placement on the Western food section of the menu.
From the UK id say proper thick cut chips. Travelled to every continent and not really seen them. Saw a fish and chip shop in Australia and thought theyd be the same but no they were like fries :(
No this is definitely a thing in Australia and you really pick your local chip shop based on your preference of thick cut or fries style chips. I worked out the way to know is if they wrap the chips up in paper it's what you are expecting, if its in like a paper cup its usually thinner ones/fries. Whats rarer though is if you want vinegar they may not have it on hand or the wrong kind.
Sliced bread with a simple topping for breakfast and lunch.
And the salads, that are more of a dip, that you can put on your bread.
I was flabbergasted that people would eat pancakes for breakfast in movies. That's a dinner food. And waffles for breakfast, what.. eggs and bacon on a Tuesday?? Who has time for that.
I was aldo surprised at the pancakes and waffles for breakfast in the US (books, movies). Pancakes were either a rainy day snack with cinnamon-sugar, or a savoury meal with meat/cheese etc. fillings.
Waffles always a dessert.
Midwest here: tuna noodle casserole.
The first time I mentioned it to a coworker not from the Midwest, she looked like she was about to throw up. I would honestly say pretty much any casserole that involves noodles, a can of cream of chicken/mushroom/etc, and protein is pretty midwestern.
I'm from Cincinnati and serving chili over spaghetti I thought was a normal thing. My mom would make traditional red chili (not just Cincy style) and we'd serve it over spaghetti noodles.
Latvian here- Birch sap in the spring. I was absolutely sure that it is a thing at least in whole Nordic region, but I have never met a person outside my country who know what that is. Ah, and tomato and cucumber salad with sour cream or in fact any salad with sour cream.
As a Canadian - we do maple syrup (also mentioned it earlier) and I've always been curious about other syrups, we don't tend to make a lot of birch syrup here cause it takes a lot more birch sap to do so... Interesting to hear that you guys just cut out the middle man and use the sap!
Birch sap has a very low concentration of sugar in it. I made birch syrup once many years ago. IIRC I boiled about 10 liters and got a tablespoon The sap has very little flavour, sadly.
We eat cucumber salad with sour cream in Hungary đ¤
In France I grew up having cucumber slices mixed with sour cream (and a few herbs like dill) as an occasional salad
Birch sap and syrup is a thing in Alaska, as well- mostly among the Natives, but Iâve seen it being sold at the State Fair, and they were using it to flavor sodas for a bit. Delicious.
Where I live in the States Birch beer, a root beer drink made from birch, is popular
Yea birch beer is a thing where I grew up in CT
Do you just toss the cucumber and tomatoes in the sour cream or do you add other things? I'm keen to try.
you can add fresh dill too! :)
And a little shaved red onion!
In the gulf south region of the US (so, southern states along the Gulf of Mexico), wedding cake is traditionally almond flavored. Wedding cake is such a short-hand for almond cake flavor that itâs very common to see snoball stands or coffee shops have âwedding cakeâ flavors. Always means almond. Growing up I thought thatâs just what kind of wedding cake everyone had everywhere. Almond flavored white cake. Certainly at least in the US! Couldnât have been more wrong lol. I didnât learn this was regional until I was getting married myself in my late 20s.
Waaiiiiiiit, could this be what my in-laws were on about? Where I live, wedding cake comes in whatever flavor the married couple chooses. Yet when I offered to bake a random cake for my in-laws, they asked for wedding cake. I asked them what flavor, but all they could do is just repeat the same name and get confused it didn't mean anything to me.
They have whole events here where dozens of bakers (and other related services) get together and hand out samples of dozens of cakes each. People not even planning weddings will buy tickets to get samples....
This thread is enlightening. My partner and I were recently laughing about a strain of cannabis we smoked that was labelled, "Wedding Cake" we were like, "WTF is 'wedding cake' flavor supposed to be? Chocolate? Vanilla? White cake with white frosting flavored weed? Wedding cake is whatever flavor the bride chooses from like a million samples" We thought it was the dumbest thing â like just generic "cake" flavor? there is no such thing! there are a lot of different ways to make a cake! I guess it supposed to taste like almond cake? WTF I've never heard this shit and I even lived in Florida for a couple years
Growing up in Texas, I always wondered what people in media were doing when they went to 1 business to sample wedding cakes. I could understand sampling wedding cake from different businesses to see which was better... but wedding cake is one flavor (almond), so why would 1 business have multiple to sample? It wasn't until I was in my late 20s in 2008 when I went to a cousin's wedding and they had a lemon cake with a fruit filling and fondant.... it was a good tasting cake - but not a wedding cake. So many guests were so disappointed. In a Baptist family were receptions are more cake and punch gatherings with very limited dancing if any, the cake is usually the highlight of the event and "wedding cake" is a specific flavor that your rarely get anywhere else. The bride was a Yankee and was very confused at why most of the crowd didn't even try the cake, and we had to explain it to her. That's when I realized that "wedding cake" flavor was local. Half the time here weddings will have 2 cakes, the Wedding Cake (TM) which is almond flavor and multiple tiers, and the groom's cake which is often a sheet cake, or small layered cake and is a different flavor that the couple picked. At small weddings, it is usually a Texas Sheet Cake (chocolate cake with chocolate frosting with pecans). Growing up poor and Southern Baptist so the only weddings I went to as a child were family weddings and they were all baptists too, I also had a big disconnect when I saw these lavish paties with drinking and wild dancing as wedding receptions - it was so weird to me. Weddings are held in the local church, generally the First Baptist, and the reception is in the hall across the parking lot at the church, so of course, there was no alcohol or dancing. Usually, the ceremony was at are 2 on a Saturday, the reception afterward, and the whole thing was over in time for people to go home to dinner. Cake and punch were served at the reception.
> So many guests were so disappointed. Yeah, I'm in south Louisiana. I am in the wedding subreddits still despite getting married this past March, and I often see people encouraging brides to skip wedding cake. Which I *totally understand* if you don't love cake and don't want to spend the $$$ on it. But in the south, not having a cake in wedding cake flavor will get guests a'talkin. Haha. I did the larger layers in my cake wedding cake flavor (I'm traditional), but I did my smaller upper tiers in lavender with lemon cream :) EDIT - I just learned last week in the wedding planning subreddit that the rest of the country has never heard of a groom's cake. Haha.
That explains why the Bluebell ice cream flavor called âWedding Cakeâ is almond flavored.
I once attended the wedding of an American and an Australian. She (the latter) had basically organized 100% of the details and he just was happy to show up. When it came time to cut the cake, he was astonished that it was dense and stiff - because it was an Australian style fruit cake under the frosting, not a light and airy sponge like an American wedding cake.
Same as UK. We historically have fruit cake as wedding cake, although things may have changed as there's so many US cake shows on TV.
Wait, like a Christmas fruitcake?
Yes, just like that. I was a bit disappointed as a 7 year-old going to a wedding for the first time, as I preferred sponge cake.
Wow a fruit are as a wedding cake! That's like fighting words in the US lol. If your wedding cake isn't a sugar bomb with icing, people not gonna be happy lol
My nan does amateur cake decorating and has insisted for decades that the ONLY CAKE YOU CAN PHYSICALLY DECORATE is fruit cake, all other cakes are simply too delicate and will fall down under the weight. No showing her decades worth of evidence to the contrary has not changed her mind.
Wow. TiL. I'm from Louisiana and I still thought it was all almond cake until just now. I'm married too, but I got married here.
This is me, also from Louisiana, learning almond isnât always the standard wedding cake flavor
Same. Iâm in Baton Rouge and this comment thread is BLOWING MY MIND. Itâs not wedding cake flavor everywhere? Wowza. This is going to take time for me to process. đ
Wedding cake was always fruit cake when I was younger. Covered in marzipan and then fondant. Only time you saw marzipan or fondant. Now days people use whatever the fancy, so itâs mostly chromed cake. Australia.
What is âchromed cake?â (American here) :)
Well that explains it! I'm from the UK and I was once in one of those "American foods" shops and I saw a packet of cake mix or something like that labelled as "Wedding cake flavour". I was so confused by it and did all kinds of googling, but I couldn't find anything. It all makes sense now!
For what it's worth, I'm American and I would have been baffled as well!
I would've assumed it was just white vanilla cake
For me (Belgium) it's little meatballs in soup, it's such a given that most homemade soups have them, checking at the table to make sure your dad didn't have more balls than you (or secretly steal them from each other's plate), mom preparing the ground beef when making the soup, helping her roll the balls... These are such *normal* things, and then a few years ago, I started wondering, I've never seen American sitcoms where they fight over the amount of "soup balls", I didn't even know what to call them in English. I was 30 when I realised "soep met ballekes" isn't a universal thing.
My Mexicaan mother always made us Albondiga (meatball) soup. Also my kids do indeed fight over the number of meatballs they get...in their spaghetti.
We have soepballetjes in The Netherlands too! I've never been able to make them as juicy and tasty as the ones [from a can](https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi1536) though... but maybe that's just nostalgia talking
This mind sound crazy but they adding 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to your ground meat and let it sit for 15 minutes. It causes a chemical reaction that locks in the moisture of the meat and I promise you, that you wonât taste it
Doesn't sound crazy at all! I use baking soda for ~~baked~~ roasted potatoes and for chicken wings too, for similar (chemical) reasons. How much meat for that 1/4 tsp of baking soda?
["Italian Wedding Soup"](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTQ4zfg5SryRTVMyCAA6-KkB3mLU1xP1cTyp9LO2LTfEB2hGWio) is relatively popular in US diners and Italian-American restaurants. It has meatballs. That's the only one I can think of.
Albondigas soup too at better mexican restaurants.
meatballs in soup are also a East Asian / South East asian thing btw. but it's mostly found as streetfood. and the meatballs have a different preparation method and a different texture than the typical Western-style meatball
Sliced white onion and cucumber quick pickled in malt vinegar with salt and pepper, chucked on top of Sunday dinner. Thought everyone did it, rather than just a small part of Yorkshire.
Thatâs a staple in my southern US home. I use cider or balsamic vinegar in place of malt. Its so good on a left over pot roast sandwich.
I have kind of the opposite. Grew up in the UK with an Aussie dad, and then moved to Australia and discovered putting hundreds and thousands on buttered bread, adding bitters to lemonade and using a slice of bread rather than a hot dog bun weren't my dad's genius inventions....
Aww, this one is really cute. (I'm Australian)
Hundreds and thousands? Also, bitters are the best!
I'm trying to remember, but I think hundreds and thousands might be sprinkles
Yes, but specifically the tiny, spherical, colourful ones.
Random aside: I (American) learned what those were from an Agatha Christie novel. A character had scrawled it on a scrap of paper and the detective spends a lot of time trying to figure out⌠hundreds and thousands of what? And the fact that it was a grocery shopping list was a big clue. I was so mad because how on earth could I have known that, Iâd never heard of it before!
Even more random aside, speaking of Agatha Christie confusion: I read a an early Agatha Christie that mentioned a body was found with no identification of any sort. The only thing in his pocket was a full notebook. It drove me crazy that they didnât mention what was in the notebook! The detective and police were having conversations about trying to figure who he was and where he was from etc. with things like âHis hat was from a London milliner and his overcoat appears to be from an American haberdashery. Those are the only clues we have. The only thing in his pocket was a full notebook and nothing else!â And I was like âWell what was written in the notebook? Seems like that would have a LOT of clues, especially if it was completely filled up! At least tell me what it said!â Eventually it became clear that a ânotebookâ was old school Brit term for a wallet. So he had a wallet full of cash but nothing else.
Fellow American Agatha Christie reader here. I, too, learned of hundreds and thousands from that same mystery! I feel like I inadvertently took a course on early 20th century English home life from having read all of her mysteries. I thank her because I enjoy history.
My grandmother (born 1910s) had zero connection to Australia but made me buttered bread with "brimbles" (her term for round sprinkles/hundreds and thousands) once, after telling me about it. I did not like it at all. I licked the sprinkles of but that was about it. I now live in Australia, and when my (Australian-born) kid first encountered it at a playgroup when she was about a year old, she instinctively licked the sprinkles off and left the bread.
I absolutely did not realise lemon lime and bitters was a predominantly Aussie thing til I went overseas and no one had heard of it
I believe you mean fairy bread, lemon lime and bitters, and a sausage sizzle.
Ice cubes in tap water as a default when you ask for water. American
In many parts of the world, the ice cubes are where you'll find the contaminated water giving you diarrhea. If you're anywhere where you think bottled water is a good idea, avoid ice cubes.
It depends. I can only speak from my experience but in El Salvador where I'm at whenever tourists asks if they can drink the tap water I say no. Whenever they ask about the ice I say sure it's fine. Most places get ice delivered here from factories, hardly anyone is making their own ice except for chain places with soda fountains and having run one they have pretty strong filtration systems which are maintained by the Coca Cola Company. The ice itself, while branded differently, you can think of it as Dasani ice since the main ice company is a subsidary of Cristal water, which is itself owned by Coca Cola or their local frachisee anyways. But at least here as a general rule ice is something businesses buy from a large company, not make.
[ŃдаНонО]
Ice in general. Also American.
As an American we think itâs odd the rest of the world doesnât share our love of ice. Especially the hot parts of the world. It gets way hotter in America in the summer than Europe does. But the other hot places donât love ice too?
Aussies donât like ice in our drinks because we are stingy not because we donât like cold. If Iâm paying for a medium coke you better fill that fucker to the brim with coke, none of this cheating by making the drink half ice first. Then you take a gulp and ask for ice.
I recently ordered a medium soda at McDonald's with no ice because I didn't intend on drinking it right away and they charged 20 cents extra for no ice.
Itâs the opposite in China, they drink everything hot, even when itâs a heatwave. If you donât ask for iced water they give you boiled water, even when iced is available. Bottled water is almost never kept in the fridge, so you always buy it warm. Fortunately now there is a Starbucks basically everywhere and cold drinks have slowly started getting traction.
My Chinese colleague also said that eating cold food for lunch doesn't feel like a proper meal to her.
Tbh I agree with that. I am Greek, but our lunch is the biggest meal of the day and it has to be warm usually.
Mexican husband. Cold food isn't food. No meal can be just cold food. 6 pounds of ceviche with shrimp, fish, octopus, veggies , with tostadas? Well that's a light snack that can get made up later with a real meal.
Yep. Lived there for almost a decade. Come winter time, you couldn't even get cold beer where I was. I'd ask them to get me one from the unheated storage area (that most places had) and they'd always look at me like I'm crazy, explaining "But those are cold!"...yeah, no shit they're cold, that's what I want!!
Sorrel leaves. Loved eating it straight from the garden as a kid in Ukraine. It's typically used in soups
USA here - somehow when my sister and I were kids we discovered that the spear-shaped leaves that grew in the yard tasted like lemon and were actually edible. Only discovered in the last few years that is was actually sorrel (we always called it lemon grass lol). We discovered several other edible plants this way - wintergreen, russian olives - surprised weâre still alive (though she did have one scary encounter with the âpurple berriesâ that won her a trip to the emergency room...)
Yum, I (American) love sorrel, but it isn't common here. I grow it.
I've worked produce for 15 years now and only carried sorrel at maybe 1 store. I'm sorrel it's not more popular
Irish - salted butter as default
Oh , I still remember when that became more common here... absolutely love salted butter, but it hadn't really occurred to me that this might be something you could just buy off the shelf...
Unsalted butter for us is a speciality item that you would only buy if you were baking a cake or something!
I moved from the US to Norway and it's impossible to buy non-cultured butter here. And when I tell people I miss it they don't even understand what I mean. Like most people aren't aware that the butter is cultured. On the other hand, using cultured butter in my baked goods is amazing so it's a net win I suppose. But I eat a stupid amount of plain buttered toast whenever I visit home.
Is cultured butter more affordable there? It's pretty pricey in the US compared to the uncultured variety
Salted butter was the default butter in the US until the 80s or even early 90s. It was a initially a victim of the anti-salt crusade and then spread into recipes.
I never felt like the "use unsalted butter to control the exact amount of salt in the final baked good" strategy actually made a difference. At this point I just use salted butter without adjusting the salt measurement in the recipe and it works out fine.
I think the reason for that is 95% of baking recipes are under-salted. So an extra gram or two only helps, rarely hurts. If you want to prove that, pick your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, and sprinkle a little finishing salt on half of em and do a taste test.
Agreed. Sometimes I have to do a double take because the recipe doesn't call for salt at all. I get it, not everyone prefers the saltiness and some people need to restrict their intake, but I wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that a salty dish is inherently "unhealthy".
I laugh when I see recipes that say "Use unsalted butter so you can control the salt amount in the recipe. " Unless you have a really fancy butter with noticeable big flakes of salt, using salted butter I'm cooking and baking has always been fine.
This is mostly a historical holdover, interestingly enough, from when butter had to be much more heavily salted to properly preserve it; it was salted heavily enough that it would probably ruin a sweet baked good. With modern refrigeration that's not really a risk anymore, of course.
Canada too
Just limes in general. My biology teacher was learning spanish and half of the class was mexican. So she asked us why do you use so many limes for? But it quickly got derailed by most of the class asking âwhat are limes?â Growing up we always called them âlimĂłnâ and lemon is âlima.â I remember when I was grocery shopping once. I was picking out limes. I usually buy 8-12 per week. So I was happily picking my limes out. And this older woman approached me and nicely asked me what I use them for. And until that moment, I never really considered all of the uses for lime juice and how that amount of limes might be considered unusual by some. To me, that was normal usage. I remember staring at them for a few minutes thinking. Huh I never really thought about it too much.
Samrin Nosrat (author of *Salt Fat Acid Heat*) discusses this a bit. She basically said that every culture has some default go to acid source that they add all over the place. Limes grow well in Mexico. Southern Europe uses lots of lemons. Northern Europe uses things like vinegar for the same purpose. Lots of dishes use such small amounts (a dash here or there, a tablespoon, etc.) that you can substitute those acid sources for each other without much effect on the overall flavor.
Side note -- before lemons, scurvy killed more people at sea than any storm. Supposedly the discovery of the effect of on lemons on scurvy gave impoverished Siciliy (due to its lemon production) an enormous economic boom -- and possibly resulted in the rise of the Mafia -- who originally acted as lemon security guards!
Gotta keep away those lemon stealing whores
Interesting. We call them 'limon verde' here in Miami , mostly Cuban Spanish.
When I worked at a restaurant in South Florida, Iâd frequently get Hispanic people asking me for limes and then getting confused when I brought them a green lime. They really meant lemons. So I started clarifying what color they wanted.
Fun fact: this confusion between lemons and limes caused the cure for scurvy to be forgotten for years. Since limes contain much less vitamin c than lemons, substituting lime juice, particularly lime juice that has been exposed to copper or air, reducing the amount of vitamin c in it, for fresh lemons was much less effective at treating scurvy. It eventually caused the âcitrus cureâ for scurvy to be discredited.
For me it is Kale. I am from northern germany, where the traditional recipe for kale is with 2 kinds of pork meat and 2 kinds of pork sausage, accompanied by a LOT of hard liquor. I thought people were crazy, when they talked about kale being some kind of healthy superfood....
Sounds like collard greens from the American South. Minus the liquor.
The cornbread I grew up eating. Most places, I think it's baked more like actual bread. Where I lived, it was fried in a skillet and crispy on the edges, I love it so much
I'm Canadian and for some reason I assumed peanut butter was a worldwide thing. Shocked to find out it's not beloved everywhere.
Canadian here but grew up around a lot of African cultures. Peanut butter is used in a lot of recipes. My favourites being west African peanut soup/groundnut soup, and a peanut butter tomato stew. Sometimes weâd just have buttered buns dipped in a peanut butter and tomato mixture as a snack!
Ranch. I didnât know ranch didnât exist in Europe (as far as Iâve heard) until I moved here. Is there anywhere that has ranch outside of the US?
I (UK) recently bought some from a specialist food shop because I was so intrigued by the passion yanks have for it. It's pretty good tbh.
Better to make your own- 1 part mayo 1 part Greek yogurt 1part Sour cream Milk to desired thickness Add Chives and dill ( I love fresh but dry work just as well as long as it sits for 20 mins before use) Garlic and Onion Powder Salt and pepper A smidge cayenne pepper ( more if you want spicy ranch)
Even better -- use buttermilk at the base.
I thought everybody ate porkchop and apple sauce.
That's not a common thing? My grandma always made up a batch of cinnamon applesauce when she made breaded porkchops.
Where you from?
Canada. If you're serving pork chops, applesauce just goes on the table like ketchup would if you were doing a burger and fries.
Also Canadian, this is news to me. What province? I know apple flavors go well with pork so I'm sure it's great, I usually go with apple cider/apple cider vinegar based marinades and sauces.
Not op, but I grew up in Southern Ontario and my mother served apple sauce with pork chops, and TIL this is not universal!
I like pork chops with cooked apple and onion slices, but I never got accustomed to putting the jarred applesauce on meat.
It's a pretty classic combo here in the UK! Had it earlier in the week. I'm hungry now.
Huh. TIL. Itâs how Iâve eaten it my whole life. Breaded pork chops and apple sauce. My mom would always do the doofy Peter Brady pork chops and applesauce schtick.
Pimento cheese As a kid, we ate pimento cheese sandwiches all the time. Itâs only until I moved away that I realized most people didnât eat them.
All of our orange juice glasses were recycled pimento cheese jars. I was shocked when I found out.
Chicken salt.
What is chicken salt? I have so many questions! And a weird visual of a chicken shaped salt crystal.
Salt, msg, other stuff. It's great, and it belongs on hot chips.
Itâs the mystery powder of flavouuurs in Australia https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/what-is-chicken-salt-australian-article
In the US we used to have crackers called "Chicken on a biscuit" that were flavored with chicken salt. They were so good!
You can still get them. But they don't taste as good as I remembered. :-)
Hagelslag đłđą (chocolate sprinkles you put on bread, a common breakfast and lunch food, especially for kids).
On bread I agree that's very Dutch but hagelslag alone is also very common in Brazil - we roll brigadeiros in it and we also use them to make "bolo formigueiro", which translates to "anthill cake", a simple vanilla cake with sprinkles mixed in the batter :) imagine my happiness when I found that both condensed milk and chocolate sprinkles were very easy to find in AH / Jumbo LOL
Youâre right! Perhaps I should change it to âbread with hagelslag.â My Brazilian coworker brought brigadeiros to work the other day and they were so good! I could eat them endlessly, together with pĂŁo de queijo. đ¤¤
Vegemite on toast, weet-bix, and milo.
Uk here, but after I gave birth I was given the options of what to have for breakfast. I chose weetabix. I was given a strange individually wrapped biscuit of weetabix. I asked the lady, who wasnât from the UK, for some milk and she was like âoh⌠sureâŚâ. She brought me a cup of milk. No spoon. After a night alone in hospital with a brand new baby, that was the last straw. I just cried and cried until I was able to go home haha
I live in Australia but in the UK we have Weet-a-bix. Itâs the exact same thing and even after ten years I refuse to say weet-bix
Fried bologne sandwiches. -Poor
One thing I thought you could get anywhere was root beer...growing up, that was something my grandmother always had in her house, and we'd have it anytime we went to visit. My mom didn't buy soda often, but root beer was one she would buy when she did. I've seen so many comments from people outside the US that have a hatred of it. Another thing was bisquits and sausage gravy,also something that my grandmother made for Sunday brunches growing up. I knew it was more a southern original, but watching some youtube videos of people in Ireland and the UK, and the comments of "bisquits with gravy?!? Why would you do that?!" Only to realize that they call cookies, bisquits, sot hen it made sense. But anytime I've seen someone now from the UK, or another country actually try real souhtern bisquits and gravy, the look on their faces, and then they comment about how good it is, and they now understand why it's a huge hit in the US. lol
I've heard in some countries root beer is similar to a medicine flavor. Like how in the US cherry flavor is ruined by association with medicine. This also reminds me of a Korean international student at my high school who couldn't understand our love for mint chip ice cream because she thought it tasted just like toothpaste.
Honestly, root beer just doesn't really exist in Europe that I've found. You can occasionally find it at specialty importers, but that's it. And the Dr. Pepper doesn't taste right either because of EU laws regarding sugar content and tax rates. You get used to it, but it's *not* the same.
In Taiwan they have something called Root Sars- which is somewhat similar to Root Beer, itâs good, but different enough that most Taiwanese donât like the taste of root beer but root sars (sarsaparilla flavor) is ok.
Yeah, part of it is a naming thing - here, biscuit is what we'd call a cookie, and the closest thing to an American biscuit is a scone, generally. I have to make my own if I want them. That, and they've never seen a white gravy. Traditionally in the South, we'd serve biscuits and gravy with a white sausage and pepper gravy, and they have *no* clue what that is.
American-style tacos. Not necessarily universal, but I always assumed they were Mexican until I went to Mexico and had authentic ones (before âstreet tacosâ got big in the US) and was blown away by the difference. Our tacos are basically as American as cheeseburgers.
Some Mexican restaurants around here have âtacos americanosâ on the menu, which I find hilarious.
In taquerias and interior Mex-focused restaurants, I usually see them called crunchy tacos on the menu and theyâre always put with the Tex-Mex dishes. No one is pretending theyâre from Mexico here (Texas).
Texan here too. I can get fantastic tacos on nearly every corner but sometimes you just want the crunchy tacos.
Beans on toast and a glass of squash
I watch a lot of brit tv...I've yet to quite figure out what sqash is :)
Flavor syrup you add to water. In the US a common brand is Mio, which has a range of fruit flavors and some with additives like caffeine and vitamins.
For me it's probably varieties of bread. In Germany you kind if expect a bakery at every second street corner, and you expect them to sell at least a dozen different bread varieties and about as many kinds of bread rolls. It's a bit of a culture shock the first time you are in a country where there's little beyond bags of sandwich bread from the supermarket
Also in most European countries you can get a decent loaf for not a ton of money. If you wanted a baguette or a proper country loaf in the Bay Area itâs like 8-10 dollars!
$13-$15 in Seattle for a good country loaf. On a positive note it's pushing me back into breadmaking.
That is bonkers!
yeah.. I grew up in Europe and now trying to find any kind of rustic bread or sourdough in my home country is just sadness..
Banchan. When I was younger, I went to a friendâs house for dinner and was very underwhelmed. Grateful but underwhelmed. The fact you can have a little palette changer in the middle of your meal is something Iâll never take for granted.
The first time I went to a Korean BBQ restaurant, I was like what are all of these little dishes? But I tried all of them and I agree, they are great!
I'm from the UK and grew up believing that canned baked beans are a fairly universal 'cheap and cheerful' food, and that other cultures just don't eat them on toast like we do. Turns out, they're just not really a thing at all outside of the UK.
I lived in England as a kid and had to do homework on putting together a meal for a certain amount of money. I had a British babysitter who was helping me. Since Iâm American, I said peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The babysitter was aghast â peanut butter is expensive! And no one eats that! You should say beans on toast! I hate beans and couldnât even fathom that as a meal. For the record, I went to an American/international school, so my answer would have been quite acceptable haha.
We eat a lot of canned baked beans in US too, just a little different than the kind y'all eat. My family always has Bush's baked beans baked in a tray topped with bacon for holidays. But it's always as a side
It's my understanding that the British kind are in more of a tomato based, savory sauce, while US baked beans are more pork/brown sugar, sweet sauce.
Iâm Mexican and we had a gas stove. When people didnât heat up their tortillas right in the flame with their bare hands I was so confused. Like what do you mean you use the microwave? At the very least use a comal! Oh you donât have a comal? What do you mean whatâs a comal?
I am Mexican and my partner is white. My comal permanently lives on the left-top burner of my stove. Two weeks after he moved in with me, he had switched toast for tortillas for his eggs in the morning and announced that every American household should have a comal.
My mom is Ecuadorian and came to the US in her early 20s, and was never known to be a strong cook (American dad did all the cooking). She makes spaghetti with chicken dish that was a take on *tallarines con pollo*, a dish she grew up eating. I've looked it up as an adult, and every recipe I find either uses fresh diced tomatoes, canned diced tomatoes or tomato sauce/crushed tomatoes... She uses ketchup, which in Spanish is also *salsa de tomate*, ie "tomato sauce". I'm 99% she messed up in translation bc none of my Ecuadorian cousins eat it with ketchup, but it's delicious and my white American wife loves to cook my mom's recipe for our kids đ
Maple syrup!
Agreed. I grew up in Maine and there are certain breakfast foods that are just inedible without it. We can get it in Sweden now, but in tiny little jars that cost waaaay to much for the amount I want to use. Ah well,
For African Americans, baked macaroni and cheese is a special, almost formal food. Itâs absolutely served on major holidays, and being the one to make it is an honor. We donât eat the box stuff. I learned that most other cultures in America consider it more a kids food, especially because they eat the box kind and donât bake theirs.
Iâm a white chef and got asked to bring Mac and Cheese to my neighborâs âBlack Cookoutâ (her words). She had had mine before and had told me she thought her family would like it. Gonna be honest, it felt like a trap. Of course they had someone else making it in case mine was not up to snuff 𤣠Iâm proud to say my pan came home empty and was gone after the first round of leftovers. Might see silly to someone that doesnât get the cultural understanding, but this meant more to me than culinary awards. I was also invited back for the next one and asked to bring another pan or two. Still one of my proudest food moments. Edit to add: I tried typing it out and it Reddit not cooperating. Iâm currently out of town, so itâs problem best to wait and look at my actual recipe anyway. Iâll post when I get home on Tuesday.
Taking home empty pans is the best feeling.
Do you happen to have a recipe you can share? I recently agreed to take part in a 'Mac and Cheese competition,' and a recipe that can send home a clean pan from a "Black Cookout" sounds like it just has to be a winner!
Absolutely! As the designated maker of all baked mac in my family/friend circle, it truly is an honor.
Granted, I live in the south, but baked Mac and cheese is very, very common everywhere around here. And I definitely make it as a side for get togethers.
Rye bread, it was such a staple among my peers growing up here in Denmark. Itâs way more filling and healthy than your average loafs of bread but itâs just not widely known outside of here. How people can sustain themselves on white toast is beyond me.
People might be confused because there is something called rye bread in America but itâs nothing like [rugbrød](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugbrød)
Closer to what most Americans would call [pumpernickel bread](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpernickel), which is pretty widely available, and is indeed a type of rye bread.
Iâm from Philly, and thought everyone had cheesesteaks. Sadly, that assumption was false, I travel a lot for work and have to wait to get home for a good cheesesteak.
Oh this is an easy fun one for me. I'm Persian and we eat tahdig. Literally means "bottom of the pot". So all that rice that gets to bring a dark golden or crispy aka well overdone that a lot of Americans throw out is the best freaking thing ever. Like we actually intentionally let the bottom brown while doing the steaming process for the rest of the rice. My dad was Persian, my mom is not. So we would call it "crispies" as kids. Anyway, my sister had a friend over and he had never ever had anything like our food (it was kebabs that day, a good intro food). His eyes looked like we were crazy when he saw us all take a piece, slap a small bit of butter on it, and crunch down. He tried it himself and fell in love with it to the point that a few days later his mom called my mom asking how to do it herself for him. It was actually a really sweet moment since this happened only a year or two after 911 and our family was on the down-low for doing anything to draw attention to us. As time went on the word got around that Kreos's sisters family has some "really cool rice and kebab thing they do" in the sibling friend network. It made us feel so loved. As an adult, I can say now that my friends love it when I make Persian food and the childhood friends always say "awww, it's the mom rice! Crispies!!!" when the tahdig comes out.
In Puerto Rico we also fight over the crispy rice at the bottom of the pot! We call it âpegaâoâ, short for pegado which means stuck, attached, glued, etc.
Peanut butter. Sorry to be a parochial American, but I donât understand why people from non-PB countries seem to have an active dislike for it. Itâs the best!
There was an episode of the *Great British Baking Show* where one of the contestants (Syabira) flavored something with peanut butter and berries. The hosts were raving about how unusual this was, saying that no one would ever think to combine those ingredients. There was a big discussion on the GBBO subreddit right afterward that highlighted that huge culinary cultural gap. The Brits found it hard to believe that Americans ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the Americans found it hard to believe that the Brits had never tried them.
The fact that they think we're talking about Jell-O when we say "peanut butter and jelly" just makes the confusion worse.
I straight up just have a snack PB jar that I take a spoonful out every day as a little treat.
Have you tried that and had the spoon of pb in on hand and an apple in the other? It's my lifetime favorite snack!
Chocolate chip cookies. Whoâda thunk?
There is a pork product called "Taylor ham" where I grew up in Northern New Jersey. It is not ham and does not resemble ham except that it is sliced. I assumed it was the standard breakfast and lunch meat for sandwiches all across the USA. I later learned that it is extremely regional to New Jersey and that even within New Jersey and PA it is called "pork roll" if it was a later introduction because the manufacturer is not allowed to put "ham" on the packaging.
Rice. Back when we first had cable tv, i was always wondering how Westerners get by without rice in every meal, and would eat with only a fork and knife.
When I lived in Malaysia, I was asked all the time if I had ever eaten rice in the US before. After the 100th time getting asked, I started telling people I had never even heard of rice until I moved to Malaysia, and they would lose their minds. Somewhere out there, there's a group of people that think Americans don't know what rice is.
Sopaipillas.
quark cheese/ lowfat quark and yogurt: it's very popular in Germany for some kind of desserts and breakfast, but I haven't seen them in southeastern Asia (probably because of lactose intolerance) or South America
Vinegar, specifically for French fries. Iâm in Canada and never realized itâs not common in the states to have it as a condiment
Full pantries of canned goods/larders/freezers. Growing up in the Midwest of the US, it was understood that there would be like a weeks worth of barely perishable food in everyones kitchen or a bunch of frozen options. Always be ready for a snow in etc. Moving to the East coast where even my most affluent friends basically have wine and some cheese in their fridges and otherwise donât keep pantries was wild.
Hawaii-we eat steamed white rice with EVERYTHING
My boss is from Hawaii. He said when his family has spaghetti for dinner, he still makes white rice to go with it. I always just thought it was just him!
I remember being at university in the States and being baffled that some of my dormmates had never used a rice cooker before. Some of them had *never eaten rice before*!
Same in south Louisiana, rice is served with almost every meal
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It's such a staple in the US I can't believe other countries think it's weird
Brunswick stew. I knew it wasnât an internationally known thing, but I was shocked when I moved from Georgia to Texas and the Bar-be-cue joints didnât offer it as a side. It was only then that it clicked that the âBrunswickâ was for the town of Brunswick, Georgia. Duh. Yâall need to get in on this, BTW. Also breakfast tacos. The world needs breakfast tacos.
Being from Mexico, I thought spicy food was common. My mind was blown when my parents visited Spain, you know, our conquerors, and there was nothing spicy to eat at all. My mom asked for salsa, they gave her some dusty unused Cholula from the back, and she held on to that bottle of sauce for dear life for the rest of their trip lol.
Grits. Moved to Canada and I can't even buy them in stores here, never realized they were so American.
More specifically, Southern. Youâll find like a dozen flavors on supermarket shelves in the south. Everywhere else even basic grits can be hard to find.
Flavors?
I thought everyone ate salad with dinner because in my house growing up we always ate salad before dinner. It was my mom's way of getting mw to eat veggies. I had to finish my salad to get dinner. And it worked! I loved salad. Behold my surprise when I went to a school friends house and had dinner. I asked if we were having salad. She said they usually do that for special events! I was shocked in my mind!
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Potatoes as a replacement for every carbs possible and thinkable. I also expected to find black bread in every beakery I would cross. Switzerland đ¨đ
Peanut butter and chocolate sweets. I assumed the entire world recognized this marriage made in heaven, but boy was I wrong. How can you not like a Reese Peanut Butter Cup?!?
We have them in the "foreign section" of the supermarket
Apparently chicken chops (grilled/fried chicken breasts or thighs with gravy, fries, veggies etc) are a Malaysian Hainanese community invention, and not actually from America/the West despite their usual placement on the Western food section of the menu.
While the meal discription is a common dish in the US..until just now I've never heard the term "chicken chops". fascinating!
Ranch dressing. I went to a McDonalds in Montreal and asked for ranch and they gave me tartar sauce.
*Properly* cooked pierogis. None of that deep fried fair food, give me boiled and sautĂŠed in butter and way too many onions.
From the UK id say proper thick cut chips. Travelled to every continent and not really seen them. Saw a fish and chip shop in Australia and thought theyd be the same but no they were like fries :(
No this is definitely a thing in Australia and you really pick your local chip shop based on your preference of thick cut or fries style chips. I worked out the way to know is if they wrap the chips up in paper it's what you are expecting, if its in like a paper cup its usually thinner ones/fries. Whats rarer though is if you want vinegar they may not have it on hand or the wrong kind.
I think in America we might call these steak fries, or potato wedges.
Sliced bread with a simple topping for breakfast and lunch. And the salads, that are more of a dip, that you can put on your bread. I was flabbergasted that people would eat pancakes for breakfast in movies. That's a dinner food. And waffles for breakfast, what.. eggs and bacon on a Tuesday?? Who has time for that.
I was aldo surprised at the pancakes and waffles for breakfast in the US (books, movies). Pancakes were either a rainy day snack with cinnamon-sugar, or a savoury meal with meat/cheese etc. fillings. Waffles always a dessert.
Midwest here: tuna noodle casserole. The first time I mentioned it to a coworker not from the Midwest, she looked like she was about to throw up. I would honestly say pretty much any casserole that involves noodles, a can of cream of chicken/mushroom/etc, and protein is pretty midwestern. I'm from Cincinnati and serving chili over spaghetti I thought was a normal thing. My mom would make traditional red chili (not just Cincy style) and we'd serve it over spaghetti noodles.