The inspiration for this blog was my three decades of living and working as an American expat outside the US, when I also had opportunities to travel throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East. My work as an international corporate attorney also brought me to city and village markets and cafes and restaurants and private homes across several continents, and it stimulated a longstanding interest in food and food preparation.
When the time came for career change and returning to my Chicago home, I realized that aside from paintings and sculpture acquired for my Ukrainian apartment over the years, the only possessions I wanted to repatriate were my cookbook collection and cooking equipment, ceramic bowls, plates and dishes acquired during those visits to many parts of the planet.
For 32 years, my long distance career had permitted an appreciated opportunity to travel throughout the world, often accompanied by my husband and daughter. While work was the primary purpose of many trips, we often had time to go off on side adventures to explore the visited community. Beyond touring the usual palaces, religious shrines, monuments, museums and archeological sites, I eventually gravitated to each city’s or village’s local market – to observe which fresh fish, fowl, meats and other ingredients were sold and who was buying, to marvel at the product variety, to inhale the spices, to taste unfamiliar fruits and vegetables and to ask questions, sometimes with hand gestures and mimicry, about local preparations. On many occasions, I arranged to take a quick cooking class from a local chef to learn more about the foodways of that particular culture.
When travelling, I was not one to purchase tourist tchotchkes to bring home but I searched for local cookbooks in nearby bookstores. If I couldn’t locate bookstores without help, I asked hotel concierges to write taxi instructions in the local language to the closest bookstores with separate instructions on how to find the cookbook section. Once there, I happily browsed local cookbooks at length, examining photographs of finished dishes studying the traditions associated with particular dishes. When English language cookbooks were unavailable, I leafed through cookbooks’ foreign language text, deciphering ingredients, quantities/measurements and preparation instructions with the help of a dictionary. I was comfortable with most European languages based on Latin or Cyrillic alphabets but I was stuck when it came to Asian and Arabic alphabets and languages. Still, I usually bought a local language cookbook as a memento of the visit and over the years, my family added to my cookbook collection from their own travels.
Beyond the undeniable role of culture in establishing essentially social definitions of what is edible and what is not and how food is to be prepared and consumed, I’ve also discovered that food preparation within a culture is surprisingly varied, reflecting regional influences and family traditions. Most home and professional cooks repeat and recycle family traditions, modifying recipes when certain ingredients are unavailable. What is often referred to as a traditional dish is traditional only to a particular family or region, and these traditional dishes vary widely in any particular culture and among cooks in that culture. Adaptation of traditional recipes to available ingredients by immigrants also resulted in different versions of classic dishes.
My interest in food preparation and related traditions began at an early age in my Ukrainian immigrant family, as I described in Legacy of Four Cooks, Recollections of Ukrainian Home Cooking (2010). When I later pursued a career in law, cooking became an avocation sandwiched between drafting cross-border contracts and conducting corporate due diligences, and it permitted a kind of creative imagination not usually helpful in legal practice. Along the way I met many interesting people who helped me learn about the gastronomical bridges between countries and within regions of the same country.
Long after my earliest years in an immigrant kitchen in East Baltimore, I ultimately expanded my culinary interests and I now reflect on what I learned from my travels and research into the history, preparation and taste of cross-cultural cuisines — and will sometimes share my Kitchen Epiphanies.
I hope you enjoy your visit, and you can contact me at slava@kitchenepiphanies.com or at www.kitchenepiphanies@gmail.com.
