Meal 57: Estonia
Vikings, Russians, Swedes, Poles, Russians, Germans, Soviets… pretty much, if you were an empire within a few hundred kilometers of Estonia, you probably had dominion over this small country at some point. But things are now going well for the Estonians, who emerged from the USSR with a bang, and now enjoy a strong economy, EU membership, strong civil liberties, and Internet access so pervasive they have online voting. (Thankfully this made finding recipes a lot easier than expected!) Estonia’s ...
Meal 55: Eritrea
This wedge-shaped country on the Red Sea has seen a tumultuous history, especially in the past decade and a half: colonization by Italy after the opening of the Suez Canal, being stapled to its larger neighbor Ethiopia in the 1930s when the Italians invaded there too; a thirty-year war for independence that finally ended in 1991; and since then a highly autocratic government that is intolerant of any dissent. (Oh, and a border war with Ethiopia for good measure in ...
Meal 54: El Salvador
After a three-week trip to India, where our senses were entranced with spices, I was afraid that Salvadorean food would prove mild and uninteresting. While it’s true that pupusas are a pretty straightforward food, I was surprised by the creative combination of ingredients, such as aged cheese in dessert, cloves in a soup, and coriander seed in a drink. While the food of this small, dense, Pacific-facing nation shares most of its base ingredients with its Latin American neighbors, a ...
Meal 43: DPR Korea
Nothing about making a North Korean meal is easy. First of all, it’s even hard to find someone from North Korea to talk to: estimates say that only 14,000 people have managed to escape the totalitarian state in the 59 years since the end of the Korean War, and there’s virtually zero Internet access within the country. Secondly, except for a particular noodle dish, most (South) Koreans aren’t really aware of which of the foods they eat originated across the DMZ. ...
Meal 23: Botswana
We were super fortunate to have a Botswanan on hand! Ssebbaale, from the north of this large but sparsely populated country in southern Africa, is a colleague of previous nosher Jessica. Not only did he share recipes before coming — which was very helpful since there’s precious little online in the way of Botswanan recipes — but he also brought spices he’d recently picked up back home. And those spices made all the difference in giving the dishes a lovely, ...
Week 10: Austria
Laura learned early in our relationship that I’d never seen The Sound of Music. (That’s around the same time I learned that she’d never seen Star Wars.) Turns out this musical classic, set in Salzburg, Austria, was the movie of her childhood household, so much so that the two VHSes had worn out. (And now I’ve seen it, while she still hasn’t watched Star Wars. Too bad Tatooine isn’t a UN country or that would be a surefire way to obligate her.) Needless to ...
Week 4: Andorra
Andorra’s cuisine is built around the sorts of things that go well in its high mountainous environment: meat and winter-hardy vegetables in stews. In other words, exactly the wrong thing for a humid New York summer. But the weather tried its best to comply: it’s been raining sheets all day. Precious little of neighboring France or Spain’s spectacular culinary traditions rubbed off on mountain-ringed Andorra over the centuries. The food is, dare I say it, pretty bland: you won’t find ...