Meal 60: France
No single country has contributed more to the world of cuisine than France. For sure, folks around the world have figured out how to cook food and serve it, but it’s the French who codified the process and lent us words like chef, sauté, and restaurant. France enjoys a unique physical situation, with both the olive-oil-pressing Mediterranean and the butter-churning north, coastlines teeming with sea life as well as rich interior lands for grazing livestock, and a variety of soils and climates and ...
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 48: Denmark
Danish cuisine doesn’t exactly have a high reputation, among gastronomes nor dietitians, so I had pretty low expectations for the meal. While Denmark famously produces a whole lot of dairy and pork, it has a historical reputation for sending the best stuff abroad and keeping the remainder to feed the populace. Well, I am happy to report that so long as bold, rich flavors are welcome, Danish food is actually pretty good! For this meal I tried to evoke the ...
Meal 42: Croatia
Thanks to its unique location, Croatia straddles several opposing forces of history and geography, and of course this is reflected in the food. It features a unique shape, a comically long and thin Mediterranean coastline with a big bulb at the north stretching inland toward the heart of the Balkans. Parts or all of it have been subject in turn to Venetian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, which have lent such influences as pasta, lamb, and strudel. And of course it’s ...
Meal 26: Bulgaria
Since we took a break last weekend, I thought I’d be smart and get a head start on Bulgarian shopping and get some exercise in the meanwhile. So I hopped on my bike and rode nearly nine miles to Brighton Beach, only to discover that while it’s the place to go for Russian, Ukrainian, and even Georgian food, they just don’t have Bulgarian there. When I asked for lukanka, a type of dry-cured sausage, the kind lady at a deli said, ...
Meal 22: Bosnia and Herzegovina
Upon stepping into the EuroMarket at 31st Street and 30th Road in Astoria — and residents of Queens wonder why we make fun of their street naming! — I was assaulted by the smell of smoke and meat, from bins labeled suho meso, which a quick search on my phone confirmed is Bosnian smoked, dried beef. I agonized for several minutes over whether to cram a kilo sack of Bosnian flour into my bag, and decided to go for it, since ...
Week 16: Belarus
(Above: Google Translate into Belarussian of, “Cheers, bitches!”) Belarus is in the heart of Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine, a forested, landlocked country with long, cold winters. It should be no surprise then that potatoes, sour cream, rye bread, pork, and vodka form the core of the cuisine. This was our first United Noshes on the road, back in my former apartment in San Francisco. The big common space and excellently appointed kitchen (save for the ...
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 ...
Week 2: Albania
A nation’s food is quite often a reflection of its geographic and historical circumstances. In Albania’s case, it’s across the Adriatic from Italy, not far from Greece, and was a part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Hence: yogurt, peppers, lamb, and a hell of a lot of olive oil. (See the shopping list, which doesn’t include the gallon of olive oil I bought later.) But of course, each country adds its own twist. In the case of Albania, it’s ...