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 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 28: Burkina Faso
Our plans took us to Cambridge, MA this weekend, so for the third time, we took United Noshes on the road. This week was Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African former French colony, and I was not terribly confident that we’d find the proper ingredients in the Boston area, given that it’s not very easy in New York. But lo and behold, the Tropical Foods market in Roxbury had just about everything, including sumbala seeds and fermented cornflour. Heck, they ...
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 11: Azerbaijan
“Do you have narsharab?” I asked the older gentleman, whose dusty and rambling Middle Eastern grocery shop seems to wither a bit in the shadow of the much busier, more popular, and crowded neighbor across Atlantic Avenue, Sahadi’s. “Where are you from?” he responded. “That’s not the English name for what you’re looking for. Do you speak Persian?” I’d been emailing with Marsha, our Azeri guest for tonight’s meal, who said that narsharab was a must. But somehow I didn’t ...
Week 8: Armenia
Armenia has a very long and tough history. The country as it currently stands is a small patch of just a few million people in the south Caucasus, with a diaspora of many million more around the world. As with many diaspora populations, the culinary tradition is a core part of identity, so I was glad to have our friend the nomad, Ed, helping me through it properly. The meal was quite delicious and a heck of a lot of ...
Week 3: Algeria
Another “A” country, another meal with lamb and eggplant. But Algerian food does have a distinguishing aspect: couscous. My obsession for the week was figuring out how to go about finding a couscousière, the specialized two-part pot: a voluptuous lower chamber for the stew, and a upper chamber with perforations on the bottom to allow steam through. Apparently, this is an extremely fuel-efficient method of cooking, since the same fire cooks both the stew and the starch. I ended up ...
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 ...
Week 1: Afghanistan
By virtue of the alphabet, first up in the culinary romp around the world is Afghanistan! I had it easy with the research for what to cook, since my good friend Oliver lived in Kabul for two years and is very into food. I took his advice on what to cook just about exactly, merely turning to the internet for the recipes. (Don’t think I know anyone with deep experience on Albania, so next week will require some more planning.) ...