The World Is a Kitchen - Introduction

Preface

By Michele Anna Jordan

There is no flavor called moon
although I feel as if I can taste it
cool, soft and powdery.
Tea-cookie, translucent jellybean, host.
Swallow her down
nibble by nibble
until you too glow.
Soon, people will stop
to lick your hands
and ask for the recipe.
—Lizzie Hannon, “A Night in My Kitchen”

Whether we travel to eat or eat to travel, when something tastes good we want more: We ask for seconds and sometimes thirds, we lick each other’s fingers, we ask for the recipe. We carry the treasure home, in our hands and in our hearts, where we hope to recreate the magic.

I was lucky to have been born with an adventurous palate. My first memory of food on the road was the sweet ripe watermelon I ate on my fourth birthday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A few days later, on the California Zephyr from Chicago to Oakland, I ate what I consider my formative meal, the one that that transformed me bite by bite from a passive into an active eater, one eager to discover and savor all the enticing flavors the world offers.

I was in the dining car, asleep in my mother’s lap, when her complaints about rare prime rib awakened me. She’d ordered well done and did not know what to do.

I sat up, tasted the juicy red meat and then devoured the entire slab.

When we got home, I wanted more and I learned how to get it. I began to tell my mother how to cook—yes, I was a cheeky little thing—and I used smell and taste to find my way back to flavors I had discovered here and there, at my grandmother’s house, in a friend’s kitchen, in the neighborhood Chinese restaurant, in that silver dining car with the tuxedo-clad waiters. Soon, I could convince my mother to take me to San Francisco for Dungeness crab, to a farm stand on the outskirts of town that had the best tasting watermelon and juiciest plums, to an out-of-the-way deli for smoked salmon, smoked oysters, and good Italian salami. On my eighth birthday, I received my first cookbook.

Married at just sixteen, I defied all predictions that my husband would starve at the hands of his child bride. I cooked my way through The White House Cookbook by Rene Verdon, the Kennedys’ chef, and figured out where to buy ingredients like fresh rosemary that were then all but impossible to find in suburban America. I learned my way around unfamiliar streets and aisles, guided by hunger and curiosity, invaluable tools for any culinary traveler.

With my first venture abroad, an accidental trip to India—I was on my way to Canada when a new acquaintance was so certain that I should go to India that he bought me a round-trip ticket to Bombay—I began to discover how intimately hospitality and the pleasures of the table are entwined in other cultures. A visitor, any visitor, was received with open arms and an abundant table filled with the best foods the family could afford. There was always rice, dal, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, meat (usually goat) curry, vegetable curry, a dizzying array of condiments, including raitas, fresh and cooked chutneys, raisins, toasted nuts, coconut, and platters of huge papaya for dessert.

Soon, I was making chapattis in a rustic country kitchen with a tiny little woman named Mansari, a long silver braid stretching all the way down her back. As little birds flew in and out of the barred windows, we patted the dough into perfect rounds and cooked them on a hot grill until their aromas filled the air. Mansari sang one Beatles song after another, tunes she learned from young visitors. We spent each afternoon this way, wrapped in the rhythm of the patting and the melody of the songs as we sipped sweet chai and savored each other’s company.

I was dazzled by the colors, aromas, and flavors of India but it took some time before my hosts—other than Mansari, who knew instinctively that we were eager to learn anything she wanted to teach us—would take my curiosity seriously. Yet by expressing my interest slowly and somewhat indirectly, often the best way to get what you want in a foreign land, I was able to get the cook who worked for the family with whom I was staying to understand my sincerity. Before long, she invited me into her kitchen and let me help as she toasted spices and roots, ground them into fine pastes and powders and stirred them into rich stews. All these years later I can return to that moment in a kitchen on the outskirts of Ahmednager, revisit the aromas and textures and bring them to my own table.

The world opened to me while I was in India and it has never closed. And always, it is the foods of any land that most entice me. I had never thought of what I do as culinary travel because to travel for any other purpose, to not immediately look for the best local trattoria in Genova, say, or the most delicious food stands in Kuala Lumpur’s night market, is simply unthinkable. Within an hour of arriving in Paris for the first time, my bags were stashed in the tiny seventh floor walk-up where I was staying and I was happily ensconced in a bustling local bistro over a mound of steak tartare and a hot ramekin of brandade de morue. Before noon the next day, I had a recipe for that brandade tucked into my suitcase. I am, obviously, one of those lucky people who lives to eat.

It was inevitable, I think, that traveling for culinary adventures coalesce into the popular pursuit it is today. As Americans, we have become, in general, more adventurous when it comes to food. That there is now a chain of fast-food restaurants called Chipotle, after that delicious fiery smoked chile of Mexico, tells it all. As recently as the 1990s, it was almost impossible to find chipotles outside of Mexican communities. Just a generation ago it was difficult to find olive oil and today we travel to Italy to see the olives harvested and to search for the most flavorful oils.

Americans still have a reputation among hotel managers around the world for wanting our own food when we travel, a preference we share with Japanese tourists, but increasingly we are venturing away from bacon, eggs, and cereal for breakfast and Big Macs for lunch and dinner and discovering the joys of jook, tagines and tapas.

Cooking has become the universal language, an international tongue that allows us to communicate, to resolve every cultural challenge, be it language, custom or belief, and even overcome personal inhibitions like shyness and insecurity. We take a bite, smile, and raise our eyes to see the same response in our companions. May I have some more, please?

And you know what comes next: How did you make it?

We lick each other’s fingers and ask for the recipe.


Introduction

By Susan Brady

The World Is a Kitchen was five years in the making, but the concept was formulated, quite unknowingly, fourteen years ago before culinary tourism had become the popular pursuit it is today. I was hired by a nascent travel publishing company to help produce its first book, but not having traveled much in my life, I seemed an odd choice for the job. My skills, however, complemented those of my two bosses, and working on Travelers’ Tales Thailand helped bring alive an unfamiliar country for me. But something was missing. Having never been to Asia was an obstacle, until I found the article. Written by Kemp Minifie in Gourmet, it was about a cooking school in Bangkok. She wrote that “one of the most vivid pleasures of travel to Thailand is the cuisine” and proceeded to seduce with preparation of dish after dish, eloquently describing smells, sights, sounds, tastes. I had found my connection. I went out and bought my first Thai cookbook, The Taste of Thailand by Vatcharin Bhumichitr, which has some wonderful stories as well as recipes. I read about unusual produce and regional foods, and started testing dishes. I felt like an alchemist in the kitchen with all these new ingredients and spices, the mixing, the preparation. The end product was bright, vivid, and full of flavor that tantalized my taste buds. I was hooked.

To celebrate the publication of that first book, I cooked a huge Thai meal. And subsequent books received the same treatment. India, Spain, Nepal, France, Mexico, Italy…the list goes on. I was able to better understand and to connect to a country and its culture through the indigenous food. And, there was, of course, the side benefit of getting to eat really wonderful things, not just in celebration, but this type of cooking entered my everyday life. My children grew up eating curries and moles and cassoulets, with only the occasional meatloaf thrown in.

In the last five years I have begun to travel, and no matter whether it is to Erie, Pennsylvania, or Taipei, Taiwan, my focus on every trip is the food. Sometimes I am fortunate enough to go to a cooking school, like I did at the Oriental Cooking School in Bangkok, the Boathouse Cooking School in Phuket, and the New Orleans Cooking Experience in Louisiana. Oftentimes I focused on country specialties, like chocolate in Belgium and the Chinese- and Japanese-influenced regional cuisines throughout Taiwan. When a destination did not have a remarkable cuisine, I sought out unusual restaurants or stores, like La Buona Tavola in Seattle, which specializes in truffle-based foodstuffs and small vineyard Italian wines. Everywhere I went, I found common ground when food was the focus of conversation. Street food vendors gladly showed me how things were cooked, waiters went into lengthy descriptions of ingredients of a particular dish, spice sellers were happy to enlighten me as to how to use the mahlab fourteen different ways. Food brings out the best in people, and while people in many cultures may be shy or unused to sharing themselves, they have no qualms rambling on about the regional specialties, their mother’s famous dish, or even inviting you home for a meal. And some of the best teachers are in the home, as this book illustrates.

I now consider myself a culinary traveler, seeing the world through its food. I have found out that I was not alone in this endeavor. According to recent articles in Business Week, The Seattle Times, and MSNBC, the trend toward culinary travel is increasing. Cooking Light has expounded the virtues of culinary vacations and Margo True, the Executive Editor of Saveur, traveled and learned firsthand what “no TV cook or book could tell her,” while making strudel in Vienna and rolling yufka in Turkey. And I can attest to hands-on learning. It is something that alerts all the senses: seeing and touching the exotic ingredients, hearing them sizzle and pop in a pan, smelling the fragrant aromas, tasting the unique flavors. When you use all five senses, your memory recall is better and duplicating recipes at home is easier than checking out a cookbook from the library and having a go blindly. Stepping into another kitchen can be intimidating, but oh so worthwhile.

Taking the next step can be difficult. But more and more people are traveling these days and finding that the world is a friendly place. Given the proliferation of cooking shows and rise in popularity of food and cooking magazines, there’s little doubt that curiosity toward foreign cuisine is at an all-time high. Culinary travel gives us the opportunity to create bridges between people and cultures, and allows us glimpses into worlds previously unseen. And what marvelous worlds they are.

In the five sections of this book you will find connections and a direction for your next adventure. Will it be in Cyprus? Thailand? Ghana? France? New Orleans? Will you, like Eileen Hodges Sonnad, learn that it is a privilege to serve food to those you love, if it is done with love, in “First, the Mustard Seeds”? When planning that next trip, our Resource Section can help guide you to find the right tour, class, or school to fit your needs. Or maybe you will enter someone’s home through serendipity, like Celeste Brash does in “Mama Roses’ Coconut Bread” and find that where a language barrier exists, that words become irrelevant as time is passed, working towards the same goal, and a bong can be created that is like none other. Like Augusto Andres, you will come to realize that the how is not as important as the why while “In the Kitchen with Yuyo.” It could be that you will test a recipe, such as the mafe in the story “A Scandal in Senegal,” and will decide that Africa is the place to go. No matter where it is that this book leads you, we agree with Helen Gallagher, who in “Flavor by the Spoonful,” finds that food is the soul of good travel.

We have tried to combine first-person experiences of cooking in a foreign land, delicious recipes for you to recreate, and a resource section covering books, magazines, cooking schools, and culinary tours. The stories included in this collection serve to show just a small portion of culinary experiences abroad to help steer you in a direction that will make you, and your stomach, happy. Along with these great real-life experiences the Resource section will help you take the next step and venture out into the world of culinary travel.



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