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This weekend saw the first ever Darlington Food Festival.
We missed it yesterday by going to Gateshead to buy Carl some new corals and shrimps for his marine aquarium from the dudes at Cyberaquatics. That night I made seafood stir fry - and yes I am aware of the irony. Cyberaquatics has been branching out, and now stocks snakes, lizards and various cute furry rodents, including "Classic rabbits." Quite what was classic about them I don't know, they just looked like your average bunny to me. I think they must have had a population explosion though, because there were five little bunnies in one cage, and they were priced at £6. Not bad! They were pretty big too - I silently named one "Lunch" and seriously considered getting one for the ferrets (a bag of ferret food now costs £5.49...). Carl told me I was cruel. I don't think the ferrets would have agreed.
But as usual, I digress...
This morning we toddled down to the food festival, held in the Market Square. The website claimed there would be "around 100 stalls". There wasn't, but as the Darlington Councillor shows on his blog (with a video) it was absolutely packed on both days. Typically, the first stall we encountered was a guy from Wakefield selling exotic curry mixes, chutneys and pickles. Carl got his beloved Lime Pickle, I tried an award winning aubergine chutney (with aubergines grown in Yorkshire), and picked up some tips on marinating paneer... After that we spent quite a while "sampling" artisan cheeses from Wensleydale (caramelised onion cheese being the favourite here). Of course I had to try The Coffee Company (the only one?) - who had a proper espresso machine with a hand pump. We were accosted by a wandering band with trombones all dressed as chefs outside the Caribbean food stall, and also by a bloke dressed as the mad hatter, advertising the Mad Hatter Tea company. Having sampled that North-East staple foodstuff - chorizo, we bought plenty of exotic sausages from Broom Mill Farm near Bishop Auckland, including chilli,lime and ginger sausages which I can't wait to try.
Inside the main tent there were cookery demonstrations done by a "TV chef" who I'd never heard of, (having looked it up, it turns out she's on This Morning - never having got up in time for that, this could explain my ignorance!). There were also more stalls - fantastic Pie Men with proper thick pastry pies crammed full of Serious Meat. We tried a Cumbrian Rocket from the dried meat stall- a fiery hot pepperami type thing. There were also a few fudge stalls which my parents would have loved, more cheese, and more sausages. One stall was decorated with a load of feathers- ah ha! A purveyor of the finest ostrich meat! - steaks, mince, pies, even a joint of sorts, constructed with ostrich and chicken breasts. From Preston!
I really, really enjoyed the festival, it was great (and inspiring) to see really good quality produce available fresh, often organic, and well, just Real Food I suppose. There was one stall selling t-shirts promoting the Slow Food Movement with lots of information leaflets, which I relished until I noticed it seemed to be mainly about things happening in Italy. There were several other stalls which we didn't get a chance to see, but with the exception of our sausage man, nothing was spectacularly local. Sure, Wensleydale, Wakefield, Cumbria and Preston aren't that far away, but then chorizo, lime pickle, and ostrich steak aren't really typical dishes of Northern Britain either. There was some black pudding on offer, but I was expecting to see more "traditional British cuisine" from "local" sources. - But then, I wouldn't even know what that would entail actually.
But back to the point...between the fabulous pies and the Cumbrian Rockets, there was another miscellaneous meat stall. It had beef sausages with Newcastle Brown Ale in them, which was good, but it also had a huge tray of vacuum-packed (but still bleeding) rabbits and hares. These,even without their heads or skin, were far larger than my "Classic Rabbit" Lunch, and considerably less messy to consume. I proffered a fiver, asking "Can I have a decent sized bunny please?". I got one. I love rabbit - it has such a distinctive smell, and really rich taste. We wandered home to cook it for Sunday lunch. ("Lunch" went into a casserole, with red wine, onions, carrots, parsnips, garlic, rosemary, and my own secret ingredient, a double shot of espresso - and very nice he was too. The ferrets approved of the leftovers as well!)
On route home however, I saw something which shook me to my very soul, sent icy shivers down my spine, and produced indignant levels of bile in my stomach.
They're putting a fucking TESCO EXPRESS in the Cornmill!!!!! Aaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!
HOW COULD THEY??????
Darlington actually achieved a certain claim to fame in a wonderful book called Tescopoly by Andrew Simms - we are one of very, very, few towns in the UK that doesn't have a Tesco. In fact, we saw off Tesco when they planned to build a massive one right on the corner of the market square, 200 yards from Sainsbury's. Three planning applications to turn an old petrol station on North Road into a mini Tesco have already been rejected as well. Go us!! We shall RESIST!!! Or so I thought. But no, for some INSANE reason, someone, somewhere has agreed to let the corporate monopoly take over an empty unit in the shopping centre.
It just makes me so angry that this is being built, when there are small, independent,companies offering fantastic quality food from a few miles down the road. Instead of supporting our indoor market and shopping there, it's a safe assumption that a good proportion of the Darloite population will traipse round a generic, soulless supermarket buying completely unethical, mass produced, over processed, unseasonal food shipped in from the other side of the globe - because it's "convenient." Tesco is "easy" and non-scary. Food is 'sanitised' and made appealing by packaging; it looks safe and uncomplicated to prepare. My Lunch bunny was quite literally bones and blood and guts in a bag - turning him into something edible was quite a task. But it was completely worth it, and I far, far prefer eating like that. Hopefully events like the Darlington Food Festival will convince other people of that too!
Gah.
Sunday 5 October 2008
Tuesday 22 July 2008
Some good grease....Wasted.
My university project at the moment concentrates on the idea of food waste. Specifically, mine is coffee waste and is dwelt on a great deal on my other blog. However, in the more general literature review, I've had to quickly learn a lot of discourse about food waste, both socially and in more pragmatic terms.
Project 5 of our Waste of the World programme concentrates on UK waste management strategies; that lucky team get to delve into the maze of inconsistent, contradictory recycling guidelines, where each and every local authority has its own set of rules. The bit that caught my attention was the celebration of a relatively new scheme using an Anaerobic Digester. There was a massive one built in Ludlow, which my Dad's Wasteless Society were heavily involved in. The idea was simple: get everyone's "green" waste - kitchen scraps, grass clippings, "organic" waste, collected in the local recycling scheme and put it in this Digester. It squashes it all, decomposes, and then the resulting gases and presumably some of the compacted waste can be used as fuel.
Get rid of the governmental strategy papers and funding bids and community cohesion plans and all the other bureaucracy surrounding these schemes, and what you get is basically a giant compost heap. Theoretically, it's a sound idea. Except the whole concept relies on the cooperation of the local community. To encourage people to recycle, the local council decided to only run a rubbish collection service every fortnight, but to collect the green waste for recycling every week. This not only stopped people composting their own waste for their private gardens, it also meant that they had plenty of non-compostable rubbish building up whilst only being able to dispose of it once a fortnight. As such, they started putting plastics, wood and all their inorganic waste in the green recycling bins, and hiding it under organic waste so that they could get rid of it. And of course, this waste going into the digester meant the machinery broke, and strangely enough, this stuff didn't decompose well either..... So much for well researched, joined up government....
Where I live, private recycling is very good; we have regular collections of paper, glass, and tin, the council gave out free compost bins as well, there is a huge "household waste recycling centre" up the road, and the two of us now produce less than half a black bag of non-recyclable rubbish a week. However, the same cannot be said of business recycling. It does not exist in Darlington. When I worked at the cafe, all the kitchen scraps, food past its sell by date, coffee grounds etc - all of it, despite being mainly recyclable or compostable, got chucked in the regular bins and collected weekly destined for landfill. We used to sneak the less disgusting bits home with us, just cos... well, because it seemed such a waste.
Worse still, I worked at a very busy pub in the middle of town, the sort of place that's open from 8am to 1am seven days a week. There was no facility to recycle the glass that the pub generated. Every day we'd fill one of the big green wheelie bins with discarded glass bottles, and the whole lot would end up in landfill, as would all the waste from every other pub in town. The amount of waste from those alone is unimaginable.
We do try and do our bit for the environment though, and we even help that pub with its recycling. We run our car off used vegetable oil. My husband converted the (diesel) engine on our old Peugeot to run off chip fat - it's not an overly complex thing to do, since diesel engines were originally designed to run off peanut oil in the first place. We get our fuel from the pub kitchen. The big fryers are emptied and cleaned once a week, and there is usually 30 litres of oil awaiting our collection in big buckets on Sunday afternoons. We take it home, and put it through a very fine filter set in a water butt in our garden (to get the chips out!) and then it is ready to go straight in the car. Of course, if for any reason there is no oil to collect (and while we're on the subject of food waste, pub kitchens are infamous. One of the most common reasons why there is no oil sometimes is that the chef has refilled the fryers and forgotten to put the plug back in the bottom and flooded the entire kitchen with 30 litres of grease...) - we can always buy vegetable oil straight from supermarkets and chuck it in the tank, but nowadays even that is expensive!
Free, recycled fuel is definitely the way to go, though. True, our car does smell of chips, especially when stuck in a traffic jam, and virtually every one of my husband's t-shirts has splashes of veggie oil down it, but these are small prices to pay, given we can smugly laugh at everyone else queuing up to pay £1.30 a litre for dino-diesel. Carl even got on TV, have a lookee at his video HERE.
Veggie cars are sustainable too. There is a lot of hand wringing by environmentalists over biodiesel using up precious grain crops that in turn push up world food prices, etc. Mass producing palm oil involves destroying rainforest and so on and so forth. But what no-one considers is how much oil is used, and then disposed of by cafes, restaurants, pubs up and down the country on a daily basis. This oil can easily be filtered and used as fuel, as we do. In our experience, most places are happy to give you their oil, as some have to pay to have it taken away. Or worse, they simply chuck it down the drain. I read somewhere that 300 tonnes of reusable oil is poured down the drain every day in the UK. Vegetable oil is a very misunderstood substance, I think. We found a few drums of the stuff at the Household Waste Disposal site, and asked if we could take it for the car. We were told we couldn't, because it had been classed as Hazardous Waste, and we'd have to pay for it and fill in loads of forms or something.... doh. Vegetable is not flammable unless under highly intense heat or pressure - if you drop a match in it, it will go out. If you spill it, it will biodegrade in a matter of days. How or why it could ever be hazardous I cannot fathom.
At the beginning of July we drove our veggie mobile all the way down to Buckinghamshire, to what is now the annual Biodiesel Buddies Barbecue. A guy has a field, and everyone who runs their car off chip fat (or tractor, landrover, or caravan, come to that) congregates there to discuss the merits of biofuel. As a veggie-oil-fanatic's WAG, I found myself cooking for 20 veggie geeks over a campfire. It was bloody brilliant. I made potjiekos and Trinidad Pepperpot and my infamous potato salad and rice and even very special campfire coffee. But I digress....
The 'convention' also involved others demonstrating their latest ideas for veggie burning efforts. Chug had an old Lister engine and was trying to run a generator off veggie oil. Others had Turk burners. Making biodiesel involves mixing veg oil with methanol and caustic soda, and the end result produces biodiesel and glycerin. The Turk burners allow you to burn that glycerin by-product, and one bloke was even seeing if he could use them to heat his house. Someone else had designed a system (for some reason, elegantly wrapped in a green velvet curtain) that allowed you to reclaim the methanol from the biodiesel so you could reuse it. We also had a compost toilet which was infinitely less smelly and more civilised than conventional portaloos, and even solar powered fairy lights- very pretty!
The Lister engine, a Turk burner and the methanol reclaiming drum.
For more info on all this, please have a look at the Biodiesel forums that inspired all this.
The possibilities with this fuel from food waste are endless. If Ludlow get their anaerobic digester working, you may even get cars running on reclaimed/recycled LPG from compost... or something like that. My understanding of the chemistry here is very vague, but I appreciate the concept. Food doesn't have to stop being useful after we've finished eating. Your car can eat the leftovers!
Project 5 of our Waste of the World programme concentrates on UK waste management strategies; that lucky team get to delve into the maze of inconsistent, contradictory recycling guidelines, where each and every local authority has its own set of rules. The bit that caught my attention was the celebration of a relatively new scheme using an Anaerobic Digester. There was a massive one built in Ludlow, which my Dad's Wasteless Society were heavily involved in. The idea was simple: get everyone's "green" waste - kitchen scraps, grass clippings, "organic" waste, collected in the local recycling scheme and put it in this Digester. It squashes it all, decomposes, and then the resulting gases and presumably some of the compacted waste can be used as fuel.
Get rid of the governmental strategy papers and funding bids and community cohesion plans and all the other bureaucracy surrounding these schemes, and what you get is basically a giant compost heap. Theoretically, it's a sound idea. Except the whole concept relies on the cooperation of the local community. To encourage people to recycle, the local council decided to only run a rubbish collection service every fortnight, but to collect the green waste for recycling every week. This not only stopped people composting their own waste for their private gardens, it also meant that they had plenty of non-compostable rubbish building up whilst only being able to dispose of it once a fortnight. As such, they started putting plastics, wood and all their inorganic waste in the green recycling bins, and hiding it under organic waste so that they could get rid of it. And of course, this waste going into the digester meant the machinery broke, and strangely enough, this stuff didn't decompose well either..... So much for well researched, joined up government....
Where I live, private recycling is very good; we have regular collections of paper, glass, and tin, the council gave out free compost bins as well, there is a huge "household waste recycling centre" up the road, and the two of us now produce less than half a black bag of non-recyclable rubbish a week. However, the same cannot be said of business recycling. It does not exist in Darlington. When I worked at the cafe, all the kitchen scraps, food past its sell by date, coffee grounds etc - all of it, despite being mainly recyclable or compostable, got chucked in the regular bins and collected weekly destined for landfill. We used to sneak the less disgusting bits home with us, just cos... well, because it seemed such a waste.
Worse still, I worked at a very busy pub in the middle of town, the sort of place that's open from 8am to 1am seven days a week. There was no facility to recycle the glass that the pub generated. Every day we'd fill one of the big green wheelie bins with discarded glass bottles, and the whole lot would end up in landfill, as would all the waste from every other pub in town. The amount of waste from those alone is unimaginable.
We do try and do our bit for the environment though, and we even help that pub with its recycling. We run our car off used vegetable oil. My husband converted the (diesel) engine on our old Peugeot to run off chip fat - it's not an overly complex thing to do, since diesel engines were originally designed to run off peanut oil in the first place. We get our fuel from the pub kitchen. The big fryers are emptied and cleaned once a week, and there is usually 30 litres of oil awaiting our collection in big buckets on Sunday afternoons. We take it home, and put it through a very fine filter set in a water butt in our garden (to get the chips out!) and then it is ready to go straight in the car. Of course, if for any reason there is no oil to collect (and while we're on the subject of food waste, pub kitchens are infamous. One of the most common reasons why there is no oil sometimes is that the chef has refilled the fryers and forgotten to put the plug back in the bottom and flooded the entire kitchen with 30 litres of grease...) - we can always buy vegetable oil straight from supermarkets and chuck it in the tank, but nowadays even that is expensive!
Free, recycled fuel is definitely the way to go, though. True, our car does smell of chips, especially when stuck in a traffic jam, and virtually every one of my husband's t-shirts has splashes of veggie oil down it, but these are small prices to pay, given we can smugly laugh at everyone else queuing up to pay £1.30 a litre for dino-diesel. Carl even got on TV, have a lookee at his video HERE.
Veggie cars are sustainable too. There is a lot of hand wringing by environmentalists over biodiesel using up precious grain crops that in turn push up world food prices, etc. Mass producing palm oil involves destroying rainforest and so on and so forth. But what no-one considers is how much oil is used, and then disposed of by cafes, restaurants, pubs up and down the country on a daily basis. This oil can easily be filtered and used as fuel, as we do. In our experience, most places are happy to give you their oil, as some have to pay to have it taken away. Or worse, they simply chuck it down the drain. I read somewhere that 300 tonnes of reusable oil is poured down the drain every day in the UK. Vegetable oil is a very misunderstood substance, I think. We found a few drums of the stuff at the Household Waste Disposal site, and asked if we could take it for the car. We were told we couldn't, because it had been classed as Hazardous Waste, and we'd have to pay for it and fill in loads of forms or something.... doh. Vegetable is not flammable unless under highly intense heat or pressure - if you drop a match in it, it will go out. If you spill it, it will biodegrade in a matter of days. How or why it could ever be hazardous I cannot fathom.
At the beginning of July we drove our veggie mobile all the way down to Buckinghamshire, to what is now the annual Biodiesel Buddies Barbecue. A guy has a field, and everyone who runs their car off chip fat (or tractor, landrover, or caravan, come to that) congregates there to discuss the merits of biofuel. As a veggie-oil-fanatic's WAG, I found myself cooking for 20 veggie geeks over a campfire. It was bloody brilliant. I made potjiekos and Trinidad Pepperpot and my infamous potato salad and rice and even very special campfire coffee. But I digress....
The 'convention' also involved others demonstrating their latest ideas for veggie burning efforts. Chug had an old Lister engine and was trying to run a generator off veggie oil. Others had Turk burners. Making biodiesel involves mixing veg oil with methanol and caustic soda, and the end result produces biodiesel and glycerin. The Turk burners allow you to burn that glycerin by-product, and one bloke was even seeing if he could use them to heat his house. Someone else had designed a system (for some reason, elegantly wrapped in a green velvet curtain) that allowed you to reclaim the methanol from the biodiesel so you could reuse it. We also had a compost toilet which was infinitely less smelly and more civilised than conventional portaloos, and even solar powered fairy lights- very pretty!
The Lister engine, a Turk burner and the methanol reclaiming drum.
For more info on all this, please have a look at the Biodiesel forums that inspired all this.
The possibilities with this fuel from food waste are endless. If Ludlow get their anaerobic digester working, you may even get cars running on reclaimed/recycled LPG from compost... or something like that. My understanding of the chemistry here is very vague, but I appreciate the concept. Food doesn't have to stop being useful after we've finished eating. Your car can eat the leftovers!
Saturday 21 June 2008
The Boiled, the Bland and the Bizarre
(This is a paper I wrote for uni, years ago (third year undergrad to be precise). I loved writing it, and it's kinda relevant to this blog, so I decided to repost it!)
Introduction
“Latin American food is, by our standards, bland. So bland, that during my 6-month stay in Peru I lost two and a half stone, simply because I got so bored of the food that I stopped eating it. After this plan eventually made me ill, … I suddenly learned the true value of Peruvian cooking. If anything, it is just so much easier and logical. I am now hoping that my host family’s taste of the British food I cooked them was enough to make them understand my own confusion with their food.” (Terrill,: 2001:49)
I know I am not alone in experiencing intense culture shock when it comes to alien eating habits, and it is this phenomenon that this project aims to explore. The questionnaires and interviews conducted aimed to examine travellers’ initial reactions to the food they were offered in Central America and the Andean region of South America. (For reasons of space and a lack of participants, the Caribbean and jungle regions have not been included.) Some foods were obviously more popular than others, and the interviews attempted to inquire whether these foods were popular because they were more recognisable or similar to British foods. What is it about Latin American cuisine that British travellers find so hard to adapt to? Why, when ‘British’ food is so varied and encompasses influences from so many different cultures, do we find it hard to adapt to another culture’s eating habits? Once the extent of culture shock has been established and analysed, suggestions and recommendations are made to help cope with the food in an alien culture.
The participants in this study are all current students or recent graduates who have had some experience of travelling, be it backpacking around several countries, or volunteering in one particular place. The majority have travelled in Central or South America. For comparison, and to give further examples of culture shock, some students who have travelled or volunteered elsewhere in the world but have sampled Latino food have been included as well.
Some information from the participants was collected in face-to-face interviews, other parts in email questionnaires, and some material is semi-autobiographical.
Towards a definition of Latin Food
A possible, if very vague definition of Latin food is that it is a combination of vastly different influences, altered to fit with the restraints of climate, ingredients and ease of preparation. That definition, however, could also easily apply to British food. Possibly the defining point of Latin cookery is simply that it is very difficult to extricate one historical influence from another, and as Luard (2002) suggests, “It would be a very brave ethnologist indeed who could … claim exclusivity [in South America] for the use of the earth oven … a method of cooking, which… is common throughout South East Asia as well as among the aboriginal shore dwellers of Australasia. (Luard, 2002:10)
Central and South America has been colonised by many European groups, the Spanish and Portugese, the French, the English, the Dutch, and even the Welsh in Patagonia.(Hutchinson, 2002). All these groups brought with them their own style of cookery, the Spanish possibly introducing rice dishes as a derivation of paella, and the Portugese settlers bringing the taste for seafood, both presumably also carrying Moorish influences, given the time period. (Luard, 2002).
The New World was, of course, discovered on a search for a new spice route to the Orient and India, with people’s tastes clamouring for the exotic. With the settlers came the slave trade, and consequently some sorts of African influences, such as the Creole and some forms of Caribbean cookery. In more recent times there has been an influx of Oriental settlers, shown by the numerous “Chifa” restaurants in the Andes, mixing traditional Andean food with Chinese and Japanese dishes. All this disregards the traditional cookery from the Aztecs, Mayans or Incas civilisations, or the plantain-based food of many of the Amazonian tribes. In short, the combination of all these peoples intermixing and sharing recipes is what makes Latin food so unique.
International influences aside, cuisine is also enhanced or sometimes restricted by the available ingredients, and cooking and storage arrangements. The Spanish settlers saw that the Argentinean and Chilean plains in Patagonia were ideal for grazing cattle, and as a result beef and red meat is a key ingredient in these areas. Barbecuing is also extremely common, as is salting and drying the meats, which evolved in the absence of refrigeration. (Luard 2002). Unusually, for a long time the cow was seen only as a meat animal, and was not often used for milk and dairy products. (Aguirre, 2003). Finally, the raw fish ceviche dishes on the Pacific coast again may have stemmed from not having a way of transporting fish successfully given the lack of ice and refrigeration in the coastal deserts.
The differing climates in the region (dry, hot coastal desert, cold, hypoxic highlands, and humid cloud- and rainforests) mean a lot of different crops came to flourish. International businesses and slave owners quickly came to recognise the potential advantages of cash crops and plantations with crops of coffee and sugar cane, and more recently the multi-million dollar cocaine industry based on coca crops. In the Amazon, more exotic flavourings such as chocolate and vanilla can be grown, along with a huge variety of nuts and unusual berries. All these crops required indigenous knowledge to process successfully. Finally, the staples of potatoes, cassava and plaintain became encompassed within the cuisine of the settlers as well.
Food from the traditional Mayan or Incan cultures is heavily entwined with their belief system and cosmology as well. The Mayan’s prized their rich, dark, bitter chocolate as food for only the elite in society and it was used during religious ceremonies.(Hutchinson, 2002) Another example is the Incan’s use of the guinea-pig, as food, as a part of Shamanic healing rituals, and in some cases, as sacrifices to the Gods. The name for guinea pig, Cuy, is not, as many suggest, from the noise they make (“Cwee-Cwee!”), but from the Quechua ‘kawe’ meaning ‘life.’(Morales, 1995). The legacy of the guinea-pig continues despite the conquest of the Inca’s as shown by its infiltration of the Catholic religion. The huge “Last Supper” painting in the central cathedral in Cusco, Peru, appears to show Christ and his disciples sitting down to a meal of cuy asado.
Given this extraordinary range of influences and ingredients, it is not hard to see why some travellers are not able to adapt easily to Latin cuisine. What is surprising is the way most backpackers’ overriding impression that Latin food is bland and unvarying.
A Gringo’s Eye View
As shown throughout the interviews and questionnaires, many travellers experience “Gastronomic culture shock”, because the food they receive is either not what they are accustomed to, or not what they expect. Gorden (1988) describes the shock in the following way:
“Often an American guest arrived in Colombia determined to follow dietary customs. He had fantasies of eating unusual foods such as squid, goat, fried grasshoppers… or food smouldering with chilli pepper. … He was usually not prepared for what he found. Instead … he found that the food is very “bland,” “starchy,” “greasy” and “monotonous.” The gastronomic jolt was not in specific strange foods but in a different balance of fairly familiar items.”(Gorden, 1988:78)
The Bland:
No one in the surveys particularly disliked any of the food they were given while staying with a Latin American family; what caused problems was the tediousness of it. By definition, staple foods are bland, and have to be made more interesting and palatable by supplementing them with meats, vegetables, spices and herbs with stronger flavours. In this country, we eat rice only in conjunction with a hot curry sauce, or a sweet and sour stir-fry. Potatoes are served in many forms, for example, mashed with butter and milk, roasted then dowsed in meat gravy, deep fried as chips then splashed with salt and vinegar, or whole potatoes are baked then topped with cheese and so on.
In Central America and in lowland South America, rice is the staple, and although rice is still ubiquitous, the potato makes more of an appearance in the Andean Highlands. In theory at least, Western travellers should not be too shocked at having to eat rice and potatoes since they do so at home quite comfortably. What has the greatest effect on the Gringos’ stomach is the blandness of it, and lack of variation, particular when the traveller is staying with a host-family. Rice is often served as an accompaniment to every single meal, since it is economical, filling, and suitable for the entire family. In Nicaragua and Honduras, it is sometimes served up three times a day, rice and frijole-beans for breakfast or desayuno, refried rice and some sort of mashed vegetable, or a fried chicken leg for almuerza and any leftovers are dressed with chilli and scooped up with an equally tasteless tortilla for supper or cena. In the questionnaire and interviews, the travellers in host families all described the food similarly:
Nutritionally speaking, this style of food provides an adequate diet. The sheer amount of starch and carbohydrates provided a slow but steady release of energy. Proteins and vitamins come from the occasional meat and vast array of vegetables and fruit on offer. (Luard, 2002) However, our diet in Britain is not the same in the sense that we get the same nutrients from different sources. We tend to eat more meat, probably because we are able to afford it. We certainly eat more processed foods, high in salts and preservatives. Finally, a lot of our energy comes from sugar and sweetened foods. (Gorden, 1988) In contrast, there are very few sweet dishes in Latin America. In Peru, although chocolate and sugar cane grew readily in the countryside, virtually all of it was exported and so very little was available to the general public. In Central America, the only chocolate available is thick, rich and very, very dark, almost bitter. Although it contains the same amount of caffeine as a milk chocolate bar, (Luard, 2002) it does not have the sweet taste some backpackers craved.
Fresh fruit and vegetables were in abundance though, and it is these food groups that the travellers seemed to be most enthusiastic about. The range of fruit was truly astounding in some parts, with some fruits that were unrecognisable and unheard of it Western supermarkets. Ensalada de Fruta for breakfast was a favourite among all the travellers in this survey, as well as the delicious “frescos” or “jugos” which were liquidized fruit with either milk or water and cooled with shaved ice.
“As we all sat around drinking our jugo de piñas I started thinking about the bizarre fruits in the market that we would never see again when we returned to Britain. Elise’s favourite is Atuna - fruits from, of all things, cacti. Surprisingly juicy and neon pink, like a miniaturised watermelon. I prefer Granadia - some relation to the pomegranate, which is a round, yellow thing with a very hard shell, and what looks like frog-spawn in the middle. You tap it on the table to crack the skin, then pour the jelly into your mouth.” (Terrill, 2001:61)
The Exotic
Another part of gastronomic culture shock did come from the exoticness of some of the food, Peru providing some very odd concoctions from a Gringo’s point of view. These included ceviche, which can be found along all parts of the pacific coast. Essentially it is raw fish marinated in lime juice, the acidity of which ‘cooks’ the fish. It is also customary to serve “leche de tigre” as an accompaniment. This is the juices from the cerviche mixed with vodka and knocked back as a shot, unsurprisingly, not a favourite among the few backpackers who dared to try it. Sometimes it is not just the ingredients that shock, but also their preparation:
Remember the joke: ‘What’s red and green and goes round and round and round?’ In the market they sell frogs and toads alive. When you buy one, they slit it down the back, still alive, and take the skeleton out. Then they put whatever’s left in the blender, add salt and give it to you in a glass to drink. I nearly puked. (Terrill:2001:62)
Many travellers enjoyed the vast array of soups available all over Latin America, especially since these too involved some exotic ingredients and unknown recipes. Since soup is designed as a starter only, part of the culture shock in many cases was from happily slurping an enormous bowl of sopa (broth or water-based soup) or chupe (milk or cream soups), feeling full, and then being expected to consume a large plateful of rice as well. Another danger was never knowing what you would find actually in the soup. In some cases this really was a shock:
The plata tipica on the Pacific coastline near Leon, Nicaragua, is sopa de res con punche, or beef and crab soup (Schechter:2001). This is served as illustrated, with a very large chuck of beef in the middle, swimming in its own broth, with roughly chopped potatoes, corn cobs, marrow and other unidentifiable vegetables wallowing beneath the surface. A few crabs’ legs appear to be crawling out of the side of the bowl, which you are encouraged to crack open and suck the juices out of. The whole thing was served with a dried avocado skin to act as a spoon. This dish alone demonstrates how so many Gringo travellers get culture shock from the food they experience in Latin America.
Perhaps the worst shock from food that travellers experience is the Latin American tendency to eat animals that we in Britain would consider to be pets. The coastal regions of Central America mean that supplies of turtle meat is readily available in the dry season, and a few British volunteers working on conservation projects in Costa Rica were horribly disheartened to find the turtles they had spent all day rescuing, ended up on the menu in their local restaurant.
Perhaps the most infamous example is the Andean cuisine of roasted guinea pig.
My shoestring travelling mantra is always “never refuse free food”, and so when Mitzy’s parents offered us a meal, I responded very positively. But oh dear..Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,.. Picante de Cuy! In other words, Roast Guinea-pig in spicy sauce! Fortunately they’d chopped the poor thing up so it no longer resembled my childhood pets...usually they served Cuy whole, complete with head so you know you are not eating rat, which is delightfully reassuring. I eventually squashed my taunting conscience and tried the thing, and I have to admit I quite liked it. (Terrill, 2001:68)
As explained in the previous chapter, the guinea pig, or cuy is very important in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and so on, both as a good food source, and as an animal with religious and spiritual significance. Try as we might, very few travellers staying in the Andean highlands managed to convince their host families that they couldn’t eat Cuy, because they had kept guinea-pigs as pets when they were younger. The equivalent would be a Peruvian telling us they couldn’t eat lamb or mutton because they’d had a pet sheep in the past. To us, this sounds equally odd, and we would be unlikely to take this complaint seriously, just as the Peruvian’s disregarded ours. (Morales, 1995)
The Unclean
Another problem faced by the inter-cultural traveller is how much to trust the alien culture’s level of hygiene. In most rural areas in Latin America, it is not advisable to drink the water. (Schechter, 2001) In Peru, you cannot drink water straight from the tap; the cleanest water available is straight from the mountain streams. (Rachoweiki, 2000). In Central America, the water is drinkable in the major towns and cities but again, it is less hygienic in rural areas. (Hutchinson, 2002)
Many travellers are wary of particular food as well, based on (often exaggerated) stories of horrendous illnesses from other travellers, or from their own experiences:
In a way, this fear of certain foods, in particular, meats, cannot help culture shock. In order to fully acculturate, travellers must not be afraid to get involved with local customs, try typical foods and attempt to live as local people do. Travellers can never truly feel at home until they do this. Some gringos who worry about getting ill from eating foreign food tend to start searching for restaurants that do “familiar” western food, such as burger bars and pizza places. Again, by surrounding yourself with familiar foods, this aspect of the alien culture will always be unfamiliar.
Wariness of unhygienic food can also lead to problems for those travellers living with a local family. It is pointless and also quite rude to ask if food is safe if all the other members of the family are happily eating it, and can be seen as a slight on the family’s cooking. (Gorden, 1988)
One of the most unnerving and disorientating times for volunteers abroad appears to be major festivals, such as Christmas or Easter. This confusion is enhanced particularly as the seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere, and the climate is very hot all year round in Central America. Each of the participants in this project appears to have a fixed idea of what should happen at the celebration, a mental image of the ideal Christmas based on what they are used to from their own experiences at ‘home’ with their families. All unconsciously expect festivals abroad to be similar, but as most found, they are not; the differences depending on the climate, customs and religion of the area visited. It is not too much of a generalisation to say that Britain as a nation has a much more secular approach to Christmas and Easter than the strictly Catholic countries of Latin America. As a result, each backpacker who experienced a major festival whilst abroad felt somewhat bewildered, as shown from their comments in interviews.
In the Catholic calendar, Easter is the most important festival, marking the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ in the New Testament. In Britain, although Easter is marked and has religious significance to many people, the festival has nothing like the intricacy or preparation and the scale of the celebration is not comparable with those in Latin America. In the UK, typical Easter foods would include Simnal cake (a spiced fruit cake usually covered in Marzipan), and ‘hot cross buns’ with the cross presumably representing the crucifix. Chocolate eggs are a relatively new tradition. The religious connection is unclear; some assume a hollow egg is a symbol of the empty tomb after Christ’s resurrection, while another theory claims an egg is a symbol of new life, which is again linked with the resurrection. Easter also marks the end of Lent, where people traditionally give up certain foods for forty days, representing Christ wandering in the wilderness. Lent starts with Shrove Tuesday, when all the milk and eggs and other dairy products are used up (usually in the form of pancakes), and these foods are not consumed for the following forty days.
In contrast, in the Andean region, Easter is celebrated with large feasts, in which all the extended family are invited. In Argentina, this takes the form of a huge beef-based barbecue, where whole cows are roasted out doors over a wood fire.
Similarly, in Peru a feast is prepared, but the symbolism of the food is a peculiar meld of Catholicism and the older Andean religions. The Semana Santa (Holy week) cuisine is “Pachamanca”, or “Earth food” in the Quechua language. This is a meal of mutton cooked on the bone, broad beans still in their jackets, potatoes and a type of cornmeal-based dumplings steamed in maize leaves, called Tamales.
The whole concoction is cooked in an earth oven, consisting of hot rocks in a hole in the ground, with the food piled on top and the heat sealed in by piling the earth back in on top of a tarpaulin. This ritual is apparently in honour of “Pachamama” or Mother Earth, but the confusing thing is that the earth mound is decorated by placing a Christian crucifix on the top, so the oven looks rather like a grave. Pachamanca celebrations also include the consumption of Calientitos, (lit. ‘little hot ones’) – a cocktail served up hot in shots, based on Peruvian Pisco brandy. Older members of the family also chew coca leaves. Traditionally, some coca is also buried in the ground, and some alcohol deliberately spilt on top in honour of Pachamama.
This whole elaborate ceremony is almost incomprehensible to most travellers, as the meal is so symbolic, both for the Catholic religion as also the older Andean earth rituals. There are virtually no similarities between Semana Santa rituals in South America, and Easter festivals in Britain, and at this time of year, a gringo could feel a very very long way from home.
The differing degrees of gastronomic culture shock experienced by the travellers relates to their individual circumstances. Their own preferences concerning food should be taken in to account, for example, whether or not they are vegetarian, have any allergies, or in some cases, whether their religion prevents them eating particular foods. Within this survey, a traveller whose religion forbids her to eat pork, and who was served in on a regular basis in Peru, experienced extreme culture shock. The author has a distinct hatred of fish, much to the disappointment of her host-family
The most obvious differentiation that should be made is between travellers staying with local families and travellers passing through as tourists. These interviews showed that it was the travellers living with host-families who remained convinced that Latino food was bland and unvarying. This relates to the socio-economic status of the family involved, and in many cases the food did not vary because of financial restraints. Travellers planning on staying with host-families should be made aware of this because, as shown, relations with the host-family can become strained if the gringo obviously dislikes the food that the family take for granted. If the monotony of the food becomes too much, one suggestion would be to supplement the diet by visiting local restaurants and cafes, possibly inviting the family as well, and to sample some of the more exotic dishes on offer.
In the opposite case, travellers who ate solely in cafés and restaurants were the ones who expressed disgust at the more exotic dishes they encountered. This can be remedied in some way by suggesting the traveller asks for “el Menu” or “Comida Corrida” in restaurants, which is usually very similar to what local people would eat at home, and typically rice and bean based, neither ingredient of which is particularly unknown.(Schechter, 2001) Also, as stated in one of the interviews, it is not recommended that the traveller ask for anything on a menu that he cannot translate, to avoid unwelcome surprises.
One thing that all travellers should avoid is trying to surround themselves with foods that remind them of home, such as always going to Pizza places, burger bars or restaurants that offer other Western foods. As with any form of culture shock, the disorientation is only relieved by submerging yourself in the alien culture until it becomes familiar. Eating Western foods alone not only has the effect of making you more homesick, it also singles you out as permanently different to the local people, which, if the traveller is aware of it, exaggerates any feelings of not fitting in locally.
Similarly, being paranoid about becoming ill from local food has the same effect in the community. The quicker the traveller samples and becomes accustomed to the food, the quicker he will build up a tolerance to any unhygienic aspects of it.
No-one can ever be truly prepared when visiting a foreign culture, but culture shock is vary rarely a permanent phenomenon, and most symptoms can be relieved as soon as the traveller acculturates to the new surroundings.
Bibliography: Aguirre, P., 2003 The Culture of Milk in Argentina in Anthropology of Food Journal, No. 2, September 2003.
“Latin American food is, by our standards, bland. So bland, that during my 6-month stay in Peru I lost two and a half stone, simply because I got so bored of the food that I stopped eating it. After this plan eventually made me ill, … I suddenly learned the true value of Peruvian cooking. If anything, it is just so much easier and logical. I am now hoping that my host family’s taste of the British food I cooked them was enough to make them understand my own confusion with their food.” (Terrill,: 2001:49)
I know I am not alone in experiencing intense culture shock when it comes to alien eating habits, and it is this phenomenon that this project aims to explore. The questionnaires and interviews conducted aimed to examine travellers’ initial reactions to the food they were offered in Central America and the Andean region of South America. (For reasons of space and a lack of participants, the Caribbean and jungle regions have not been included.) Some foods were obviously more popular than others, and the interviews attempted to inquire whether these foods were popular because they were more recognisable or similar to British foods. What is it about Latin American cuisine that British travellers find so hard to adapt to? Why, when ‘British’ food is so varied and encompasses influences from so many different cultures, do we find it hard to adapt to another culture’s eating habits? Once the extent of culture shock has been established and analysed, suggestions and recommendations are made to help cope with the food in an alien culture.
The participants in this study are all current students or recent graduates who have had some experience of travelling, be it backpacking around several countries, or volunteering in one particular place. The majority have travelled in Central or South America. For comparison, and to give further examples of culture shock, some students who have travelled or volunteered elsewhere in the world but have sampled Latino food have been included as well.
Some information from the participants was collected in face-to-face interviews, other parts in email questionnaires, and some material is semi-autobiographical.
Towards a definition of Latin Food
A possible, if very vague definition of Latin food is that it is a combination of vastly different influences, altered to fit with the restraints of climate, ingredients and ease of preparation. That definition, however, could also easily apply to British food. Possibly the defining point of Latin cookery is simply that it is very difficult to extricate one historical influence from another, and as Luard (2002) suggests, “It would be a very brave ethnologist indeed who could … claim exclusivity [in South America] for the use of the earth oven … a method of cooking, which… is common throughout South East Asia as well as among the aboriginal shore dwellers of Australasia. (Luard, 2002:10)
Central and South America has been colonised by many European groups, the Spanish and Portugese, the French, the English, the Dutch, and even the Welsh in Patagonia.(Hutchinson, 2002). All these groups brought with them their own style of cookery, the Spanish possibly introducing rice dishes as a derivation of paella, and the Portugese settlers bringing the taste for seafood, both presumably also carrying Moorish influences, given the time period. (Luard, 2002).
The New World was, of course, discovered on a search for a new spice route to the Orient and India, with people’s tastes clamouring for the exotic. With the settlers came the slave trade, and consequently some sorts of African influences, such as the Creole and some forms of Caribbean cookery. In more recent times there has been an influx of Oriental settlers, shown by the numerous “Chifa” restaurants in the Andes, mixing traditional Andean food with Chinese and Japanese dishes. All this disregards the traditional cookery from the Aztecs, Mayans or Incas civilisations, or the plantain-based food of many of the Amazonian tribes. In short, the combination of all these peoples intermixing and sharing recipes is what makes Latin food so unique.
International influences aside, cuisine is also enhanced or sometimes restricted by the available ingredients, and cooking and storage arrangements. The Spanish settlers saw that the Argentinean and Chilean plains in Patagonia were ideal for grazing cattle, and as a result beef and red meat is a key ingredient in these areas. Barbecuing is also extremely common, as is salting and drying the meats, which evolved in the absence of refrigeration. (Luard 2002). Unusually, for a long time the cow was seen only as a meat animal, and was not often used for milk and dairy products. (Aguirre, 2003). Finally, the raw fish ceviche dishes on the Pacific coast again may have stemmed from not having a way of transporting fish successfully given the lack of ice and refrigeration in the coastal deserts.
The differing climates in the region (dry, hot coastal desert, cold, hypoxic highlands, and humid cloud- and rainforests) mean a lot of different crops came to flourish. International businesses and slave owners quickly came to recognise the potential advantages of cash crops and plantations with crops of coffee and sugar cane, and more recently the multi-million dollar cocaine industry based on coca crops. In the Amazon, more exotic flavourings such as chocolate and vanilla can be grown, along with a huge variety of nuts and unusual berries. All these crops required indigenous knowledge to process successfully. Finally, the staples of potatoes, cassava and plaintain became encompassed within the cuisine of the settlers as well.
Food from the traditional Mayan or Incan cultures is heavily entwined with their belief system and cosmology as well. The Mayan’s prized their rich, dark, bitter chocolate as food for only the elite in society and it was used during religious ceremonies.(Hutchinson, 2002) Another example is the Incan’s use of the guinea-pig, as food, as a part of Shamanic healing rituals, and in some cases, as sacrifices to the Gods. The name for guinea pig, Cuy, is not, as many suggest, from the noise they make (“Cwee-Cwee!”), but from the Quechua ‘kawe’ meaning ‘life.’(Morales, 1995). The legacy of the guinea-pig continues despite the conquest of the Inca’s as shown by its infiltration of the Catholic religion. The huge “Last Supper” painting in the central cathedral in Cusco, Peru, appears to show Christ and his disciples sitting down to a meal of cuy asado.
Given this extraordinary range of influences and ingredients, it is not hard to see why some travellers are not able to adapt easily to Latin cuisine. What is surprising is the way most backpackers’ overriding impression that Latin food is bland and unvarying.
As shown throughout the interviews and questionnaires, many travellers experience “Gastronomic culture shock”, because the food they receive is either not what they are accustomed to, or not what they expect. Gorden (1988) describes the shock in the following way:
“Often an American guest arrived in Colombia determined to follow dietary customs. He had fantasies of eating unusual foods such as squid, goat, fried grasshoppers… or food smouldering with chilli pepper. … He was usually not prepared for what he found. Instead … he found that the food is very “bland,” “starchy,” “greasy” and “monotonous.” The gastronomic jolt was not in specific strange foods but in a different balance of fairly familiar items.”(Gorden, 1988:78)
The Bland:
No one in the surveys particularly disliked any of the food they were given while staying with a Latin American family; what caused problems was the tediousness of it. By definition, staple foods are bland, and have to be made more interesting and palatable by supplementing them with meats, vegetables, spices and herbs with stronger flavours. In this country, we eat rice only in conjunction with a hot curry sauce, or a sweet and sour stir-fry. Potatoes are served in many forms, for example, mashed with butter and milk, roasted then dowsed in meat gravy, deep fried as chips then splashed with salt and vinegar, or whole potatoes are baked then topped with cheese and so on.
In Central America and in lowland South America, rice is the staple, and although rice is still ubiquitous, the potato makes more of an appearance in the Andean Highlands. In theory at least, Western travellers should not be too shocked at having to eat rice and potatoes since they do so at home quite comfortably. What has the greatest effect on the Gringos’ stomach is the blandness of it, and lack of variation, particular when the traveller is staying with a host-family. Rice is often served as an accompaniment to every single meal, since it is economical, filling, and suitable for the entire family. In Nicaragua and Honduras, it is sometimes served up three times a day, rice and frijole-beans for breakfast or desayuno, refried rice and some sort of mashed vegetable, or a fried chicken leg for almuerza and any leftovers are dressed with chilli and scooped up with an equally tasteless tortilla for supper or cena. In the questionnaire and interviews, the travellers in host families all described the food similarly:
Fairly bland. Not exactly haute cuisine, but it was cheap, and it did fill you up
Mind-bogglingly, taste-bud-dullingly monotonous
Peruvians eat A LOT of rice and chicken. Make that rice with every bloody
meal, without sauce, just plain dry rice. BORING.
I actually found it very good. Having said that, I tend to like bland and boring food which might explain why I enjoyed it so much. It wasn't very inventive and they do not appear to use a lot of spices.
Nutritionally speaking, this style of food provides an adequate diet. The sheer amount of starch and carbohydrates provided a slow but steady release of energy. Proteins and vitamins come from the occasional meat and vast array of vegetables and fruit on offer. (Luard, 2002) However, our diet in Britain is not the same in the sense that we get the same nutrients from different sources. We tend to eat more meat, probably because we are able to afford it. We certainly eat more processed foods, high in salts and preservatives. Finally, a lot of our energy comes from sugar and sweetened foods. (Gorden, 1988) In contrast, there are very few sweet dishes in Latin America. In Peru, although chocolate and sugar cane grew readily in the countryside, virtually all of it was exported and so very little was available to the general public. In Central America, the only chocolate available is thick, rich and very, very dark, almost bitter. Although it contains the same amount of caffeine as a milk chocolate bar, (Luard, 2002) it does not have the sweet taste some backpackers craved.
We then arrived in Antigua, Guatemala, and were in such shock at the … extortionate number of Tourists and Fairy lights that we spent most of our time in the (swanky) cafes drinking hot chocolate, comparing its quality and taste to the last one we had had … in a quiet Mayan village …so desolate that all you could do was...drink hot chocolate!!
Fresh fruit and vegetables were in abundance though, and it is these food groups that the travellers seemed to be most enthusiastic about. The range of fruit was truly astounding in some parts, with some fruits that were unrecognisable and unheard of it Western supermarkets. Ensalada de Fruta for breakfast was a favourite among all the travellers in this survey, as well as the delicious “frescos” or “jugos” which were liquidized fruit with either milk or water and cooled with shaved ice.
“As we all sat around drinking our jugo de piñas I started thinking about the bizarre fruits in the market that we would never see again when we returned to Britain. Elise’s favourite is Atuna - fruits from, of all things, cacti. Surprisingly juicy and neon pink, like a miniaturised watermelon. I prefer Granadia - some relation to the pomegranate, which is a round, yellow thing with a very hard shell, and what looks like frog-spawn in the middle. You tap it on the table to crack the skin, then pour the jelly into your mouth.” (Terrill, 2001:61)
The Exotic
Another part of gastronomic culture shock did come from the exoticness of some of the food, Peru providing some very odd concoctions from a Gringo’s point of view. These included ceviche, which can be found along all parts of the pacific coast. Essentially it is raw fish marinated in lime juice, the acidity of which ‘cooks’ the fish. It is also customary to serve “leche de tigre” as an accompaniment. This is the juices from the cerviche mixed with vodka and knocked back as a shot, unsurprisingly, not a favourite among the few backpackers who dared to try it. Sometimes it is not just the ingredients that shock, but also their preparation:
Remember the joke: ‘What’s red and green and goes round and round and round?’ In the market they sell frogs and toads alive. When you buy one, they slit it down the back, still alive, and take the skeleton out. Then they put whatever’s left in the blender, add salt and give it to you in a glass to drink. I nearly puked. (Terrill:2001:62)
Many travellers enjoyed the vast array of soups available all over Latin America, especially since these too involved some exotic ingredients and unknown recipes. Since soup is designed as a starter only, part of the culture shock in many cases was from happily slurping an enormous bowl of sopa (broth or water-based soup) or chupe (milk or cream soups), feeling full, and then being expected to consume a large plateful of rice as well. Another danger was never knowing what you would find actually in the soup. In some cases this really was a shock:
I absolutely loved the pumpkin soup. Why? I tend to love soup and this soup was exquisite.
… Also the bizarre soup I got served in Peru: noodles, vegetables, topped by a slice of toast with a fried egg on top!!!
Oh God!! They put chicken feet in the soup! All the kids were sucking on them! Yuk!
The plata tipica on the Pacific coastline near Leon, Nicaragua, is sopa de res con punche, or beef and crab soup (Schechter:2001). This is served as illustrated, with a very large chuck of beef in the middle, swimming in its own broth, with roughly chopped potatoes, corn cobs, marrow and other unidentifiable vegetables wallowing beneath the surface. A few crabs’ legs appear to be crawling out of the side of the bowl, which you are encouraged to crack open and suck the juices out of. The whole thing was served with a dried avocado skin to act as a spoon. This dish alone demonstrates how so many Gringo travellers get culture shock from the food they experience in Latin America.
Perhaps the worst shock from food that travellers experience is the Latin American tendency to eat animals that we in Britain would consider to be pets. The coastal regions of Central America mean that supplies of turtle meat is readily available in the dry season, and a few British volunteers working on conservation projects in Costa Rica were horribly disheartened to find the turtles they had spent all day rescuing, ended up on the menu in their local restaurant.
I have a little tip for Gringos everywhere: never ever order anything off a menu that you can’t translate. Do you remember that soup in Maderas? [on the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border]. I ordered something I couldn’t read, and got a soup which had something like a golf ball floating in it. If you hadn’t told me huevos tortugesa meant Turtle Eggs, I would have eaten it, and that would have broken my heart.
Perhaps the most infamous example is the Andean cuisine of roasted guinea pig.
My shoestring travelling mantra is always “never refuse free food”, and so when Mitzy’s parents offered us a meal, I responded very positively. But oh dear..Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,.. Picante de Cuy! In other words, Roast Guinea-pig in spicy sauce! Fortunately they’d chopped the poor thing up so it no longer resembled my childhood pets...usually they served Cuy whole, complete with head so you know you are not eating rat, which is delightfully reassuring. I eventually squashed my taunting conscience and tried the thing, and I have to admit I quite liked it. (Terrill, 2001:68)
As explained in the previous chapter, the guinea pig, or cuy is very important in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and so on, both as a good food source, and as an animal with religious and spiritual significance. Try as we might, very few travellers staying in the Andean highlands managed to convince their host families that they couldn’t eat Cuy, because they had kept guinea-pigs as pets when they were younger. The equivalent would be a Peruvian telling us they couldn’t eat lamb or mutton because they’d had a pet sheep in the past. To us, this sounds equally odd, and we would be unlikely to take this complaint seriously, just as the Peruvian’s disregarded ours. (Morales, 1995)
The Unclean
Another problem faced by the inter-cultural traveller is how much to trust the alien culture’s level of hygiene. In most rural areas in Latin America, it is not advisable to drink the water. (Schechter, 2001) In Peru, you cannot drink water straight from the tap; the cleanest water available is straight from the mountain streams. (Rachoweiki, 2000). In Central America, the water is drinkable in the major towns and cities but again, it is less hygienic in rural areas. (Hutchinson, 2002)
Many travellers are wary of particular food as well, based on (often exaggerated) stories of horrendous illnesses from other travellers, or from their own experiences:
Come on Bel! You saw the state of the river! No-one drank the water, not even the locals. I didn’t fancy drinking unpasturized milk either.
I was warned against eating ceviche (raw fish). Normally, I'll try anything,
but I know you can get badly sick from eating dodgy fish in particular (i.e.
non salted, non refrigerated)
Someone tried to tell me the frijoles were poisonous if you didn’t cook them properly..? I wouldn’t eat the “meat” in Vigarones having found a bit with the hairs of the pig still attached once.
I’d never try cerviche – not after hearing about David ending up in hospital on a drip after eating it. No way.
In a way, this fear of certain foods, in particular, meats, cannot help culture shock. In order to fully acculturate, travellers must not be afraid to get involved with local customs, try typical foods and attempt to live as local people do. Travellers can never truly feel at home until they do this. Some gringos who worry about getting ill from eating foreign food tend to start searching for restaurants that do “familiar” western food, such as burger bars and pizza places. Again, by surrounding yourself with familiar foods, this aspect of the alien culture will always be unfamiliar.
Wariness of unhygienic food can also lead to problems for those travellers living with a local family. It is pointless and also quite rude to ask if food is safe if all the other members of the family are happily eating it, and can be seen as a slight on the family’s cooking. (Gorden, 1988)
Festival Foods
One of the most unnerving and disorientating times for volunteers abroad appears to be major festivals, such as Christmas or Easter. This confusion is enhanced particularly as the seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere, and the climate is very hot all year round in Central America. Each of the participants in this project appears to have a fixed idea of what should happen at the celebration, a mental image of the ideal Christmas based on what they are used to from their own experiences at ‘home’ with their families. All unconsciously expect festivals abroad to be similar, but as most found, they are not; the differences depending on the climate, customs and religion of the area visited. It is not too much of a generalisation to say that Britain as a nation has a much more secular approach to Christmas and Easter than the strictly Catholic countries of Latin America. As a result, each backpacker who experienced a major festival whilst abroad felt somewhat bewildered, as shown from their comments in interviews.
Christmas in Argentina was really weird, kinda flat, They [host family] all went to midnight mass and put a crib scene up in the window, but that was about it. I was expecting something a bit bigger. Really felt homesick then.
I was in Guatemala for Christmas. All the streets were filled with Mayan Indians in their brightly coloured clothes, so they had to be my colourful Christmas tree this year. And the nights were cold enough to imagine Christmas! Somehow it being sunny and warm didn’t feel right.
Easter Sunday, and we had rice for lunch again (first fried then boiled, its all the rage in Nicaragua!). There was a new drink for Easter … it involves boiling up pineapple skins, adding raspberry colouring so it goes pink, and blending it with boiled rice. I braved a glass with my rice and beans … and again at supper. I was hoping that it was ok to decline the third time running, I just couldn’t do it.
Its Easter week and I don’t have any chocolate eggs! ¡Que horror!
In the Catholic calendar, Easter is the most important festival, marking the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ in the New Testament. In Britain, although Easter is marked and has religious significance to many people, the festival has nothing like the intricacy or preparation and the scale of the celebration is not comparable with those in Latin America. In the UK, typical Easter foods would include Simnal cake (a spiced fruit cake usually covered in Marzipan), and ‘hot cross buns’ with the cross presumably representing the crucifix. Chocolate eggs are a relatively new tradition. The religious connection is unclear; some assume a hollow egg is a symbol of the empty tomb after Christ’s resurrection, while another theory claims an egg is a symbol of new life, which is again linked with the resurrection. Easter also marks the end of Lent, where people traditionally give up certain foods for forty days, representing Christ wandering in the wilderness. Lent starts with Shrove Tuesday, when all the milk and eggs and other dairy products are used up (usually in the form of pancakes), and these foods are not consumed for the following forty days.
In contrast, in the Andean region, Easter is celebrated with large feasts, in which all the extended family are invited. In Argentina, this takes the form of a huge beef-based barbecue, where whole cows are roasted out doors over a wood fire.
“Barbecue on Sunday! More food than you can shake a stick at! And ALL of it meat!”
Similarly, in Peru a feast is prepared, but the symbolism of the food is a peculiar meld of Catholicism and the older Andean religions. The Semana Santa (Holy week) cuisine is “Pachamanca”, or “Earth food” in the Quechua language. This is a meal of mutton cooked on the bone, broad beans still in their jackets, potatoes and a type of cornmeal-based dumplings steamed in maize leaves, called Tamales.
…I remember when my host sister came to visit from the states for the first time after ten years and the family made Pacha Manca which is very time consuming and invited the whole family over to welcome her home. Tamales are part of Pacha Manca, as in they are part of the food which is cooked underground. They basically consist of crushed corn mixed with either salt or sugar and wrapped in leaves from corn cobs. I remember asking what they were, and was told “Es Tamal” and thought I wasn’t being told their name, but that they were bad, as in non-tasty, or “Esta Mal” as I soon found out, they were as disgusting as their name suggests.
The whole concoction is cooked in an earth oven, consisting of hot rocks in a hole in the ground, with the food piled on top and the heat sealed in by piling the earth back in on top of a tarpaulin. This ritual is apparently in honour of “Pachamama” or Mother Earth, but the confusing thing is that the earth mound is decorated by placing a Christian crucifix on the top, so the oven looks rather like a grave. Pachamanca celebrations also include the consumption of Calientitos, (lit. ‘little hot ones’) – a cocktail served up hot in shots, based on Peruvian Pisco brandy. Older members of the family also chew coca leaves. Traditionally, some coca is also buried in the ground, and some alcohol deliberately spilt on top in honour of Pachamama.
This whole elaborate ceremony is almost incomprehensible to most travellers, as the meal is so symbolic, both for the Catholic religion as also the older Andean earth rituals. There are virtually no similarities between Semana Santa rituals in South America, and Easter festivals in Britain, and at this time of year, a gringo could feel a very very long way from home.
Conclusions
The differing degrees of gastronomic culture shock experienced by the travellers relates to their individual circumstances. Their own preferences concerning food should be taken in to account, for example, whether or not they are vegetarian, have any allergies, or in some cases, whether their religion prevents them eating particular foods. Within this survey, a traveller whose religion forbids her to eat pork, and who was served in on a regular basis in Peru, experienced extreme culture shock. The author has a distinct hatred of fish, much to the disappointment of her host-family
The most obvious differentiation that should be made is between travellers staying with local families and travellers passing through as tourists. These interviews showed that it was the travellers living with host-families who remained convinced that Latino food was bland and unvarying. This relates to the socio-economic status of the family involved, and in many cases the food did not vary because of financial restraints. Travellers planning on staying with host-families should be made aware of this because, as shown, relations with the host-family can become strained if the gringo obviously dislikes the food that the family take for granted. If the monotony of the food becomes too much, one suggestion would be to supplement the diet by visiting local restaurants and cafes, possibly inviting the family as well, and to sample some of the more exotic dishes on offer.
In the opposite case, travellers who ate solely in cafés and restaurants were the ones who expressed disgust at the more exotic dishes they encountered. This can be remedied in some way by suggesting the traveller asks for “el Menu” or “Comida Corrida” in restaurants, which is usually very similar to what local people would eat at home, and typically rice and bean based, neither ingredient of which is particularly unknown.(Schechter, 2001) Also, as stated in one of the interviews, it is not recommended that the traveller ask for anything on a menu that he cannot translate, to avoid unwelcome surprises.
One thing that all travellers should avoid is trying to surround themselves with foods that remind them of home, such as always going to Pizza places, burger bars or restaurants that offer other Western foods. As with any form of culture shock, the disorientation is only relieved by submerging yourself in the alien culture until it becomes familiar. Eating Western foods alone not only has the effect of making you more homesick, it also singles you out as permanently different to the local people, which, if the traveller is aware of it, exaggerates any feelings of not fitting in locally.
Similarly, being paranoid about becoming ill from local food has the same effect in the community. The quicker the traveller samples and becomes accustomed to the food, the quicker he will build up a tolerance to any unhygienic aspects of it.
No-one can ever be truly prepared when visiting a foreign culture, but culture shock is vary rarely a permanent phenomenon, and most symptoms can be relieved as soon as the traveller acculturates to the new surroundings.
Gorden, R.L., 1988 Living in Latin America, A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Communication, National Textbook Company: Chicago
Hutchinson, P., 2002 Central America and Mexico Handbook, Footprint Handbooks: Bath
Luard, E., 2002, The Latin American Kitchen, Kyle Cathy Limited: London
Morales, E., 1995 The Guinea Pig, Healing, Food and Rituals in the Andes University of Arizona Press: Arizona.
Rachoweiki, R.2000 Peru, Lonely Planet Publications: Melbourne
Schechter, D., 2001 Nicaragua, in Zingarelli, D., Davis, J., Gorry, C., Hellander, P., Miller, C., and Schechter, D., 2001 Central America on a Shoestring. Lonely Planet Publications: Melbourne.
Terrill, A., 2001 Gringa! (As yet unpublished)
Wednesday 28 May 2008
How to deal with a Dudhi, and other Obscene Vegetables.
This is Jo:
Last week, for reasons best known to herself, Jo proudly presented me with An Obscene Vegetable. This vegetable (if, indeed, it was actually a vegetable) was about a foot long, rounded and about 2 inches thick, and a lovely pale green colour all over, rather like a slim, pale marrow. At least, the marrow is the safest description we could come up with....
This Thing turned out to be a Dudhi, although knowing this did not really shed light on what to do with it. According to the shopkeeper, Dudhis go well in curries. This remains to be seen, since when I finally got round to cooking it, (as opposed to staring at it in the fridge nervously, waiting for inspiration to hit) I wasn't brave enough to add it to pilau or fry it up in spices or marinate it.
Instead, I created Dudhi Pie. This was a recipe invented on the spot, and as such, whatever I did to the Dudhi, I could always pretend it was supposed to be like that and get away with it. At an educated guess, I assumed the Dudhi was some sort of squash, so I put it with courgette, potato and plenty of cheese. I also made a herby eggy mixture with nutmeg and tarragon, and poured it over the top so the whole thing resembled quiche. I topped it with toasted breadcrumbs and slabs of brie. I had no idea if any of those ingredients and flavours suited a Dudhi, but it looked vaguely appetizing.
I did not even know if I was supposed to peel this thing. I brutally chopped its end off, and found it to be exactly the same colour inside as it was outside - the pale, pastel green. I peeled half of it experimentally, anyway. and found that I was just scraping off strips of green. It was indeed very squash like, but not actually squashy, the flesh is firm. Also, there were no seeds inside like a marrow or pumpkin. It smelled very fresh, like cut grass almost. If anything can smell "green" then this is it.
I cooked my Dudhi pie for around half an hour until the egg had solidified and the top browned. As pies go, it was a little on the heavy side - I think it would work as a cheesey quiche, and doesn't need the potato. But the Dudhi did make it a little different from average baked squash dishes. It has a delicate, almost nutty flavour, a little bitter and very 'summery', and it worked very well with nutmeg and the brie. It is nicely savoury and to my mind, (and my husband's) the whole thing tasted like it ought to be good for you. Overall, a success, methinks.
Unfortunately, Jo was not around that night to try the Dudhi. However, I have half of it left; a vegetable as obscenely sized as that could not be consumed by the two of us in one sitting. So, assuming it doesn't go off in the fridge (though quite how you'd tell is beyond me), I shall endevour to curry this strange object. Results to follow! I hope Jo continues to surprise me with Odd Vegetable matter. They are useful excuses to experiment in cooking, and hopefully my eccentric friends will be able to sample these experiments next time!
Last week, for reasons best known to herself, Jo proudly presented me with An Obscene Vegetable. This vegetable (if, indeed, it was actually a vegetable) was about a foot long, rounded and about 2 inches thick, and a lovely pale green colour all over, rather like a slim, pale marrow. At least, the marrow is the safest description we could come up with....
This Thing turned out to be a Dudhi, although knowing this did not really shed light on what to do with it. According to the shopkeeper, Dudhis go well in curries. This remains to be seen, since when I finally got round to cooking it, (as opposed to staring at it in the fridge nervously, waiting for inspiration to hit) I wasn't brave enough to add it to pilau or fry it up in spices or marinate it.
Instead, I created Dudhi Pie. This was a recipe invented on the spot, and as such, whatever I did to the Dudhi, I could always pretend it was supposed to be like that and get away with it. At an educated guess, I assumed the Dudhi was some sort of squash, so I put it with courgette, potato and plenty of cheese. I also made a herby eggy mixture with nutmeg and tarragon, and poured it over the top so the whole thing resembled quiche. I topped it with toasted breadcrumbs and slabs of brie. I had no idea if any of those ingredients and flavours suited a Dudhi, but it looked vaguely appetizing.
I did not even know if I was supposed to peel this thing. I brutally chopped its end off, and found it to be exactly the same colour inside as it was outside - the pale, pastel green. I peeled half of it experimentally, anyway. and found that I was just scraping off strips of green. It was indeed very squash like, but not actually squashy, the flesh is firm. Also, there were no seeds inside like a marrow or pumpkin. It smelled very fresh, like cut grass almost. If anything can smell "green" then this is it.
Unfortunately, Jo was not around that night to try the Dudhi. However, I have half of it left; a vegetable as obscenely sized as that could not be consumed by the two of us in one sitting. So, assuming it doesn't go off in the fridge (though quite how you'd tell is beyond me), I shall endevour to curry this strange object. Results to follow! I hope Jo continues to surprise me with Odd Vegetable matter. They are useful excuses to experiment in cooking, and hopefully my eccentric friends will be able to sample these experiments next time!
Tuesday 20 May 2008
An evening of international feasting and other debauchery
I like having friends for dinner. The other evening we welcomed Anna to the table. (and very tasty she was too.)
Vague cannibal references aside, this particular dinner was marked by it's total randomness, or, if I am to be less flippant, by my inspired 'fusion cooking.'
Anna is accustomed to big, warming, and filling dinners. She makes a fabulous 'bigos', or Hunter's stew, national dish of her native Poland. Bigos usually contains a variety of meats of which the only compulsory one is kielbasa, or Polish smoked sausage. As she puts it, Poles are big on dead pig. I have attempted bigos-making before as well, it appeals to my preferred style of cuisine: bung everything in a big pot, slow cook it an see what happens. Along with Miscellaneous Dead Pig, bigos also contains huge quantities of fresh cabbage and sauerkraut. It is one of the few dishes I am willing to describe as 'hearty', which is not a word I like to use often. It also gives you serious wind!
What do you feed a Pole? I asked myself. I wasn't willing to cook her bigos in case my version wasn't up to scratch. Instead, I did chose to do Trinidad Pepperpot - Caribbean as the name implies, but with some odd similarities to the Polish counterpart. The idea of a pepperpot is to slow cook the different meats (again, mainly pork) together with plenty of spices, so that the meat practically crumbles and melts in the mouth. The longer you leave it, the better it gets. Whereas the rest of a Bigos is made up of cabbage, a pepperpot is obviously full of colourful bell and chilli peppers. Another similarity though is the presence of vinegar, cider vinegar in pepperpot counterbalanced by rum and brown sugar, and residue from the sauerkraut in bigos, topped up with red wine.
The combination of roasted spices in the pepperpot gives it its distinctive Caribbean flavour, but those are my secret recipe and will remain undisclosed for now. That evening, I simmered it for nearly four hours, and it was indeed a thing of beauty. However, in a break from authenticity, I used my Potjiekos pot. The Potjie is my giant, cast iron cauldron that I lovingly lugged back from South Africa. As previously discussed, the Afrikaans are also fans of slow, meat-filled one-pot cookery. Pepperpot was originally a slave dish in the Caribbean, designed for ease of cooking - one pot suspended over a fire, and enough spices to disguise low quality meat and offal that would have gone in it. My recipe requires pork - shoulder or chop, belly if you have no alternative. However, the original recipe requires trotters, snout and other squidgy bits I'd rather not contemplate.
It does interest me a great deal that this style of cooking - big meaty slow-cooked stews pop up all over the world. The English equivalent I guess would be a good casserole or maybe even a pot-roast. Some Himalayan curries are done in this fashion using up tough goat meat; Norwegians do thick fish stew with heavy dumplings, but all are variations on the theme. It seems to equate to a cooler or possibly mountainous climate however - I cannot think of a Meditteranean or Oriental equivalent!
To celebrate the universality of this food, I cooked Caribbean pepperpot, using Danish pork, in a South African pot, in my kitchen in north east England, for a Polish gourmet. It was accompanied by Mexican guacamole using avocados from Israel, and for dessert I made Brazilian 'Santa Catalinas' (a mousse made from cream, rum, Italian-style espresso and in this case, Ecuadorian chocolate) and washed it all down with luxurious Nicaraguan coffees. Once digested, we drank Chilean wine and then boiled ourselves in an authentically Finnish sauna. It was a great night, and we are all encouraged to celebrate diversity, right? But not so much the Food Miles. Doh.
Vague cannibal references aside, this particular dinner was marked by it's total randomness, or, if I am to be less flippant, by my inspired 'fusion cooking.'
Anna is accustomed to big, warming, and filling dinners. She makes a fabulous 'bigos', or Hunter's stew, national dish of her native Poland. Bigos usually contains a variety of meats of which the only compulsory one is kielbasa, or Polish smoked sausage. As she puts it, Poles are big on dead pig. I have attempted bigos-making before as well, it appeals to my preferred style of cuisine: bung everything in a big pot, slow cook it an see what happens. Along with Miscellaneous Dead Pig, bigos also contains huge quantities of fresh cabbage and sauerkraut. It is one of the few dishes I am willing to describe as 'hearty', which is not a word I like to use often. It also gives you serious wind!
What do you feed a Pole? I asked myself. I wasn't willing to cook her bigos in case my version wasn't up to scratch. Instead, I did chose to do Trinidad Pepperpot - Caribbean as the name implies, but with some odd similarities to the Polish counterpart. The idea of a pepperpot is to slow cook the different meats (again, mainly pork) together with plenty of spices, so that the meat practically crumbles and melts in the mouth. The longer you leave it, the better it gets. Whereas the rest of a Bigos is made up of cabbage, a pepperpot is obviously full of colourful bell and chilli peppers. Another similarity though is the presence of vinegar, cider vinegar in pepperpot counterbalanced by rum and brown sugar, and residue from the sauerkraut in bigos, topped up with red wine.
The combination of roasted spices in the pepperpot gives it its distinctive Caribbean flavour, but those are my secret recipe and will remain undisclosed for now. That evening, I simmered it for nearly four hours, and it was indeed a thing of beauty. However, in a break from authenticity, I used my Potjiekos pot. The Potjie is my giant, cast iron cauldron that I lovingly lugged back from South Africa. As previously discussed, the Afrikaans are also fans of slow, meat-filled one-pot cookery. Pepperpot was originally a slave dish in the Caribbean, designed for ease of cooking - one pot suspended over a fire, and enough spices to disguise low quality meat and offal that would have gone in it. My recipe requires pork - shoulder or chop, belly if you have no alternative. However, the original recipe requires trotters, snout and other squidgy bits I'd rather not contemplate.
It does interest me a great deal that this style of cooking - big meaty slow-cooked stews pop up all over the world. The English equivalent I guess would be a good casserole or maybe even a pot-roast. Some Himalayan curries are done in this fashion using up tough goat meat; Norwegians do thick fish stew with heavy dumplings, but all are variations on the theme. It seems to equate to a cooler or possibly mountainous climate however - I cannot think of a Meditteranean or Oriental equivalent!
To celebrate the universality of this food, I cooked Caribbean pepperpot, using Danish pork, in a South African pot, in my kitchen in north east England, for a Polish gourmet. It was accompanied by Mexican guacamole using avocados from Israel, and for dessert I made Brazilian 'Santa Catalinas' (a mousse made from cream, rum, Italian-style espresso and in this case, Ecuadorian chocolate) and washed it all down with luxurious Nicaraguan coffees. Once digested, we drank Chilean wine and then boiled ourselves in an authentically Finnish sauna. It was a great night, and we are all encouraged to celebrate diversity, right? But not so much the Food Miles. Doh.
Sunday 30 March 2008
Testing my new ScribeFire...
So, does this work? Can I type away on here without having to log on to the interweb? If I have to log on, what is the point of this program? Maybe it is for office-workery types who can't go on livejournal or blogspot from work, but can type away on here and upload it whilst keeping up the pretence of doing something useful? If so, it is yet another form of procrastination for me at university. I would not get into trouble for using a blog at uni, but I would feel embarrassed if I got caught... that could be because I am arrogant enough to believe someone cares if I am working or not...
You could also copy-type - use the split screen thing to see one website and blog about it on another? How sad is that?
Could I use it for my 100words? Doubtful, that would be a bit too complicated.
Ok, so it feeds directly to The Social Life of Food. So I best mention something about food. Two ideas did spring to mind earlier. I made Mexican Mole Poblano on Easter Monday. It was truly amazing. Easter is an excuse for chocolate after all, but not always poaching chicken in a chili-chocolate sauce. Making mole is a fine example of Slow Food; I followed a traditional Mexican recipe which included making up "proper" chicken stock (instead of "cheating" and using "convenient" stock cubes - all words I am not suppposed to use nowadays). It also involved lots of fun things like grinding cloves and peanuts in a pestle and mortar (feel the raaaaage!!! So theraputic!!) and also my personal favourite as recommended by my heroes, The Hairy Bikers, setting fire to a tortilla, and crumbling the black ashes into the pot. This apparently gives it a warming, rich, roasted flavour. The mole when finished, is indeed rich and warming, but that could come from any of the ingredients. Personally, I just like setting fire to things. The finished dish took nearly four hours to construct. I was mightily, mightily impressed with it. Somehow things always taste better when you've put so much effort in to it. Pictures will follow when I work out how!
The other idea was about slow cooking in brick ovens - tandooris, or pizza, or even some Mexican dishes. A friend of a friend has been constructing said brick oven in his back yard in Sheffield. Hopefully much fun shall be had at Cooking Parties this summer...
And now, trial of ScribeFire ends.
Night night.
You could also copy-type - use the split screen thing to see one website and blog about it on another? How sad is that?
Could I use it for my 100words? Doubtful, that would be a bit too complicated.
Ok, so it feeds directly to The Social Life of Food. So I best mention something about food. Two ideas did spring to mind earlier. I made Mexican Mole Poblano on Easter Monday. It was truly amazing. Easter is an excuse for chocolate after all, but not always poaching chicken in a chili-chocolate sauce. Making mole is a fine example of Slow Food; I followed a traditional Mexican recipe which included making up "proper" chicken stock (instead of "cheating" and using "convenient" stock cubes - all words I am not suppposed to use nowadays). It also involved lots of fun things like grinding cloves and peanuts in a pestle and mortar (feel the raaaaage!!! So theraputic!!) and also my personal favourite as recommended by my heroes, The Hairy Bikers, setting fire to a tortilla, and crumbling the black ashes into the pot. This apparently gives it a warming, rich, roasted flavour. The mole when finished, is indeed rich and warming, but that could come from any of the ingredients. Personally, I just like setting fire to things. The finished dish took nearly four hours to construct. I was mightily, mightily impressed with it. Somehow things always taste better when you've put so much effort in to it. Pictures will follow when I work out how!
The other idea was about slow cooking in brick ovens - tandooris, or pizza, or even some Mexican dishes. A friend of a friend has been constructing said brick oven in his back yard in Sheffield. Hopefully much fun shall be had at Cooking Parties this summer...
And now, trial of ScribeFire ends.
Night night.
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