Foods that have improved with time

MrMusician18

We all know of various food products that have suffered at the hands of the accountants over the years, through lower quality ingredients and cheaper recipes. Can anyone think of a product that's improved with time, or at least stayed the exact same? Beyond simple staples, I'm struggling to think of any but Coke. The old reliable.

I suspect this list will be fairly short, but any other things out there that one could say, yeah that tastes better now?

El Tarangu

Tunnocks tea cakes - consistency in a world gone mad

Markcheese

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142500#Comment_118142500

Nope ... They were always great ...(still are)

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142668#Comment_118142668

The OP asked for stuff that had least stayed the same.

Nearly everything processed has had its sugar levels reduced so there's not going to be a lot of options here.

The quality of beef available in Irish supermarkets (specifically) has improved hugely, used to be junk.

maestroamado

port....

mrslancaster

Yoghurt and the huge choice now - it was vile sugary stuff years ago IIRC.

Bread - the choice was very limited, white or brown sliced pans, batch loaf or McCambridges brown were common unless you were able to make your own homemade soda bread. Now we have all sorts of yummy breads, it's great.

buried

I think with the advent of the internet any sort of foreign based dish you want to cook up yourself has greatly improved with all the actual ingredients based recipes that you can reach at the touch of a button anytime.

Back in the late 80's/early 1990's any foreign based dish you wanted to make yourself, basically had to have either 'dolmio' or 'uncle bens' as the main ingredient, or McDonalds.

Freddie Mcinerney

Chillies.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142699#Comment_118142699

I remember the junk! My mother used to be driven mad trying to get decent quality beef in the 60s, & 70s when it was both prohibitively expensive and tough as old boots. When she would ask the butchers about it there was either a rude answer or a more honest one that the best quality beef was mainly reserved for hotels, which were main eating places back in the day.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142778#Comment_118142778

Well the 70s is before I was born, but in the 90s the whole "craft butcher" thing took off and you could get quite high quality meat there, at a price. Supermarkets, even with in house butcher counters, still sold lower quality product.

Now you can get high quality albeit limited selection product in supermarkets - even those that just sell trays butchered off site.

Markcheese

Fair enough ...

Potato Waffles.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142858#Comment_118142858

Are they more waffly versatile?

Much better selection of cheese these days. Not just cheddar and that processed stuff in a box that jackeens used to eat.

Vegan/plant based meat substitutes are really improving. Almost impossible to tell the difference these days.

igCorcaigh

My boring blurb* aside, all I can say is that quality food (artisan, if you like) and food from different parts of the world are more accessible (in terms of availability and price) to more people now. Quality is a relative scale though.

*Food used to be a big fraction of people's spend back a few decades ago, or even longer. Now there is much more choice, depending on how much you are willing to spend. Most of people's money these days goes on housing. Which, combined with global supply markets, opens up a whole world of food choice to those who are interest and have a spare few pennies.

igCorcaigh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142734#Comment_118142734

Bread? We used to get great locally baked quality bread, back in the late 1970's. Delivered to your door, still warm. And this is in a working class area. They weren't paying artisan prices for an artisan product, it was the norm.

It was the 1980's supermarkets that mainstreamed the crap bread.

igCorcaigh

Coffee.

igCorcaigh

Beer.

buried

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142901#Comment_118142901

Yeah the taste is near about the same, but most of that stuff is really heavily processed foodstuffs, like a chemical lab of processed ingredients mangled together. Can't be good for you. You have all sorts of processed fats and sugars mixed with soy ingredients in a petri dish in order to make your tastebuds think that you are eating meat. Your body and brain knows that you aren't. Your just eating experimental processed trash and paying well over the odds for it too.

igCorcaigh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142932#Comment_118142932

True enough, but these things are fast food fixes, of which there are many meat-based products too. Vegans need to stuff unhealthy crap into their mouths too, at a certain point in time, like us all.

EmmetSpiceland

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142901#Comment_118142901

The Linda McCartney mozzarella quarter pounders are dynamite.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142987#Comment_118142987

Got left with a pack of those after catering for some vegetarians at a BBQ. Grilled between buttery toast they were really very nice. Easier for hungover next morning food than doing full burger setup

The vegan pudding (clonakility or vpuds) is also great if you're a bit put off by blood. As it's just grains, fat and flavouring it's indistinguishable

spacetweek

Parmesan cheese. I remember when the only parmesan you could get in Ireland came in a plastic sprinkler container and it had the consistency and flavour of sawdust. Now it's actual Parmesan probably from Italy and is delicately flavoured and delicious.

It's worth noting that the food quality has also massively improved in places like the UK and Germany in the last 30 years too. Also America despite the fast food/processed crap, they have top quality restaurants these days.

MrMusician18

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118143029#Comment_118143029

I'd have to agree there. The quality of restaurants has improved significantly over the last decades.

Freddie Mcinerney

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142987#Comment_118142987

I prefer the bean burgers instead of the quorn type.

Patsy167

Brussel Sprouts - "Dutch scientists identified exactly what made these veggies bitter in the 1990s, seed companies in the Netherlands began searching through their extensive collections of older varieties of Brussels sprouts for ones that have a lower concentration of glucosinolates. Once the most promising varieties were identified, plant breeders crossed them with newer varieties that had other desirable characteristics such as higher yields and excellent disease-resistance. The resulting varieties have proven popular with both farmers and chefs, and ultimately anyone who eats them"

https://www.bhg.com/news/brussels-sprouts-less-bitter/

Sunny_Arms

salad. lots of people are so innovative with salads. various ingredients and additions. it's a staple but so many people are finding and creating new recipes and mixes on salads.

Strumms

Salads and pasta dishes..

A cafe I frequent has the nicest Caprese Salad with added prosciutto as an optional extra which I always get, it’s huge, flavorsome and filling... in the 80’s here, order a salad and it was vegetarian, egg or ham... shitloads of leaves, onion, beetroot, corn and whatever else piled high... tasteless blandishness.... the salad bar in local deli is unreal too if a rip off.

pasta dishes... so many variants of traditional dishes, bolognese, carbonara, all’aribata, and so on now, an Italian here in the ‘80’s was all pizza dishes, bout 10 of them like that’s all Italians ate, and a spaghetti bolognese... with about 3 big slices of rock hard garlic bread, phone number for a dentist and a jug of water

whisky_galore

Cheese, no longer the only choices are rubbery Easy Singles and rubbery Calvita.

Wishbone Ash

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142734#Comment_118142734

I disagree with that. Bread was much nicer up to the late 70's/early 80's. Then the removed the preservatives and it went downhill from then on not helped by the supermarkets putting most of the local bakeries out of business. Most of the variety of bread available now is just pretentious shíte.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149339#Comment_118149339

Agree. Theres loads of bakeries and regional varieties say in Germany, here just a handful of mostly bland bread and awful frozen shyte laughably called Cuisine de France.

If beige was a bread it would be C de F.

notAMember

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118150787#Comment_118150787

As a corkonion, I thought you would be all over the decent bread around. Even my local petrol station is supplied by Pana bread now. It's savage stuff. ABC, Cameron, Pana, there are loads of great bread bakeries.

BurgerFace

One that springs to mind is cod. Now the quality of the fish isn't any better per se but now you can enjoy a nice piece of fried cod without choking on bones. The filleting process seems pretty good.

Freddie Mcinerney

Soup.

spacetweek

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118150787#Comment_118150787

Good point about CdeF. In the 90s, or whenever they started, that was what passed for artisan in Ireland. Now they seem laughably sh!te and bland.

"Artisan" has leveled up over the years. Me I get my bread from a farmer's market and it's yummy.