On cooking in a foreign land

Ask someone living in a foreign country what he or she misses about home, and the most common answer you're likely to get is, "the food." A certain computer-animated rat excepted, we humans are (as far as I know) unique in our relationship to food. It doesn't just nourish us; it is an integral component of cultural, and personal, identity.

If you move to a foreign country, then, food is not going to be the least of the things you must adjust to.



First, the shock of the move, of the time change, and of being in a completely new place can change your appetite. I remember very clearly that, for the first several days here, neither T nor I wanted to eat. At all.

When we finally got hungry, the food tasted strange – yogurt, cheese, bread, fruit preserves, beans, vegetables, everything.

On top of all of that – and probably more significant – is that, when you move to a foreign country, you have to rebuild your kitchen from (almost) nothing. This is always a difficult task, but it's particularly challenging in a place where 1) you don't even know what items are available, or where to get them, and 2) you aren't familiar with the brands or the language(s). (For example, if you are in Morocco and need baking soda, you first need to know the name in French, and then you need to know that the only place to get it is at a pharmacy.)

I have talked to my friend Sarah about this (who, incidentally, is also a vegetarian who enjoys cooking). She moved here a year later than I did and, thus, is a year behind me in terms of cultural adjustment. And I see her going through the same stages with food that I went through.

Stage one goes something like this: find a small set of ingredients that are familiar, and cook all of your meals with them. Our normal daily menu for our first few months here was bread and cheese for lunch, and some kind of chickpea and tomato salad for dinner.

Eventually, though, one becomes comfortable with the tools available in one's kitchen, with shopping at the marché and the souk and Marjane, and with the brands and ingredients available. I think one reason this happens so slowly is that the brain can only process a little new information at a time. You literally don't see everything that is available. So stage two might be thought of as the "wow" stage, as in, "Wow, they have coconut milk!"

Related to stage two is the common practice among my vegetarian and flexitarian friends and me of sending excited text messages to each other about food-related discoveries we make (e.g. "soymilk at Marjane!" or "curry paste at Superette!").

Red lentil, cabbage, and cauliflower curry with basmati rice, mango chutney, and yogurt. The lentils and chutney arrived here in suitcases from Germany and Liberia, respectively.

Bell peppers stuffed with quinoa (from Germany), vegan sausages (from Spain) and parmesan cheese (which--it took me a while to discover--can be found in Morocco).

I still have stage two moments, but I think I'm comfortably in stage three now. I can keep my refrigerator and pantry well-stocked with a variety of ingredients that allow me to cook more familiar foods. I have figured out where I can find cheddar cheese and soy, oat, and rice milk. I cook tofu (I brought several kilos of it from Germany in January), Indian and Thai curries, spring rolls, biscuits and gravy, and burritos. I'm even making my own bread now, which is something I hadn't tried much when I lived in the U.S.

Homemade "soaked grain" whole wheat tortillas

Grilled sandwich on homemade whole wheat sandwich bread with marinated zucchini and onions, roasted red peppers (homemade), and spicy gouda cheese

Learning how to cook in a foreign land has definitely been a lesson in patience and, often, creativity. I think I'm also learning not to take so many things for granted. And while it was hard at first, now I'm really enjoying the process of discovering foods I didn't know I could find here and experimenting with cooking new things.

In fact, I've become so used to shopping and cooking here that I suspect I will go through a degree of culture shock regarding food when I return to the U.S. this summer. Until then, I will do my best to shop and cook with an attitude of appreciation and thankfulness.