Meal 59: Ethiopia
What makes Ethiopian food so delicious and rich? For sure, the classic berbere mix, that blend of chilies and roughly half your spice cabinet, lends a complexity of flavor uncommon in most cuisines. And there’s something to be said for eating with your hands, grabbing bite-sized morsels with strands of the tangy injera flatbread. But what I learned from this meal is that it’s an ingredient common to virtually every cuisine, cooked in a simple but rare way, that provides ...
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 47: Democratic Republic of the Congo
What a special night! 75 guests, most of whom had never been to a Nosh before, gathered in the beautiful ballroom at Hostelling International on the Upper West Side, for a meal of classic Congolese dishes. The idea came from Ari, the community engagement manager at the hostel, who saw our email on The Listserve and reached out to see if we might want to do a Nosh with them. With a big venue and kitchen, we decided to align ...
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 40: Congo
The larger better-known of the two countries named after the Congo River is the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Zaire and previously a Belgian colony, but that shows up in the D’s. This meal is from the north side of the river, the Republic of Congo, the former French colony, sometimes known as Congo-Brazzaville after its capital. Anyway, as you might imagine, it’s a bit tricky to find what’s distinctively from this country as opposed to its cross-river sibling, ...
Meal 34: Chad
Chad spans the three S’s of the heart of Africa: the Sahara desert in the north, the arid Sahel in the middle, and the wetter savanna to the south. Or put into culinary terms, this extent is why we see both dates and peanuts factor into this meal. However, on the heels of the generically-named Central African Republic, Chad’s another country that poses some online searching problems, at least in English. To wit, I was looking for advice on cooking ...
Meal 33: Central African Republic
I’d have been pretty clueless about what to cook were it not for a chance introduction to the daughters of the US Ambassador to the Central African Republic. You see, I begin my research for a country’s cuisine by searching online, but the Central African Republic certainly wasn’t thinking of search-engine optimization when they chose their name, and it’s super hard to find info that relates to the country and not to Central Africa generically. But thankfully, through my friend ...
Meal 32: Cape Verde
For some countries it’s tough to nail down which dishes to cook, but Cape Verde, a cluster of islands off the coast of Senegal, offers an unmistakable national dish. The cachupa is a stew based on dried corn and beans, and what goes in beyond that depends on your family history, socioeconomic status, and whether the rains came. To inventory the sorts of ingredients that typically go in a cachupa is to trace the extent of the Portuguese empire: corn, dry ...
Meal 31: Cameroon
For our first Nosh in DC, we teamed up with WFP USA to host the biggest yet, with over 25 people — just about none of whom Laura or I had ever met! — coming to experience a Cameroonean feast meal. It was quite the affair, with a buffet line, speeches before and after, a Q&A with our guests, a slideshow of prior Noshes, and a really powerful video about the amazing work WFP does that we hope to put ...
Meal 29: Cambodia
Having grown up in the Bay Area, I had more than my fair share of many southeast Asian cuisines, including Thai, Vietnamese, even Burmese. But I’d never really encountered Cambodian until this meal. The core ingredients are pretty similar to those of its neighbors, especially the triptych of galangal, kaffir lime leaf and lemongrass. Yet as the Wikipedia page observes, the country is full of wetlands and floodplains, a geography which is reflected in a culinary style where solid and ...