From Chef White Feather

International Food Advice

Take it from me…

Don’t tell anyone this but I once ate at a Burger King in Munich, Germany. How embarrassing, right? What sane American travels overseas to a foreign country to eat American fast-food? When in Rome eat Roman food, not South Carolina barbeque. I think that’s how the saying goes.

But I had been eating European food for a few months and suddenly the idea of shoving a whopper into my mouth sounded surprisingly good. A whopper was, after all, my favorite American fast-food burger. It is far better than anything McDonalds had to offer back then. (Back then Wendy’s hadn’t even gone national yet.)

But it turned out to be a slight disappointment. Something just didn’t taste right about it. I could not figure out what it was but it just did not taste the same as it did in America. And the soggy french fries were served with warm, sweet German ketchup. How disgusting!

During that summer I was with some young distantly related friends and we were all talking about food. One of my American compatriots mentioned how hard it was to find true American food in Germany. One of the German friends disagreed, “Oh, we have American peanut butter in our grocery stores! Here, I have some…”

The fellow went into his kitchen cabinet and pulled out a jar. He showed us the label which read, “American Peanut Butter.” He spread some on some crackers and offered it to everyone.

I took a bite and nearly barfed, “This isn’t American peanut butter!” I looked again at the label and saw that it was manufactured in Hamburg. “In America peanut butter is very salty. There is no salt in this at all. It’s sweet for crying out loud! It’s an abomination.” (In Germany there is a law that says that sugar must be added to ALL food.)

It works both ways, of course. If someone from India comes to America to your home for dinner the very last thing you cook for them is Indian cuisine. They already know what Indian cuisine is supposed to taste like and you are guaranteed to screw it up. It will never taste like the food they have back home. And they didn’t travel away from home to eat pitiful attempts to recreate the food that they eat back home!

That should be the first rule taught in culinary school.

Well, when I was a kid, multiple decades ago, my family learned that some distant relatives were coming to our city to visit and they were bringing a Russian couple that they wanted us to meet.

My mother, God bless her, thought, “Russians! Oh my, I better serve borscht for dinner!” So she frantically searched all her cookbooks for a borscht recipe.

I had never eaten borscht before in my young life so I had no idea what it was supposed to taste like. With both leaves put into our dining table, I kept looking at our Russian guests as they ate the borscht. It looked like they were being tortured. Personally, I did not like it at all.

Later that night after our guests returned to their motel rooms everyone in my family came down with an especially virulent case of diarrhea. There were lines at the doors of both of the bathrooms in our house. What I remember most vividly from that night was the red liquid that came spewing from my ass like a fire hose into the toilet.

If my family was experiencing this horror then surely our Russian guests were experiencing this in the privacy of their motel room.

Our distant relatives and our Russian guests never visited us again. My mother never attempted to cook borscht again. And sadly, I have never eaten borscht ever since that fateful night.

Seriously, folks! If you are an American and you have foreigners over for dinner, don’t serve them their own cuisine! Serve them something American… like pizza.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.

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