17 Expat Cooking

(Warning: Culinary heresy follows)

Ernest Hemingway said that any story, pursued long enough, must inevitably end in death. Hemingway’s observation about writing fiction is irrefutable but hardly cheering. On a different occasion, he also said the end of the story is the same for all men. What matters is how we spend our time before arriving at that destination. In his day, Hemingway was as famous for his personal life as for his writing. He loved good food and lots of company at the table. Is there anything that contributes more to our quality of life than good food on a regular basis with special foods on special occasions?

My expat cooking adventures began under an unusual set of circumstances. Many years ago, I left my life as an American living in a small town in the Midwest and flew to China. I moved to the bustling city of Zhengzhou (pronounced Jung Joe) where I had been invited to be a foreign teacher. In the early days, while living in a small apartment on the campus, cooking was not a problem. Fortunately, the nearest student dining hall was located only one short block from my home. Those cafeterias meant that I wouldn’t have to spend any time preparing meals. Initially, I was not interested in doing my own cooking and had brought no cooking equipment or accessories beyond Tabasco sauce. I was relieved of that duty. But there came a day. Finally, a quest for diversity and mere curiosity led me into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. Because of the convenience of the student cafeterias, I could cook as a hobby, not a necessity. Baby steps.

The first obstacle was sources of food. Since dormitory rules prohibited students from cooking in their rooms, the on-campus food sources were almost entirely limited to packaged snacks, fresh fruit, or adding hot water to create glop-in-a-cup. Leaving the campus for fresh produce and kitchen supplies was a possibility that came with its own set of challenges. Cultural food preferences and the language barrier sometimes seemed insurmountable. As one wag put it, I felt “twelve miles from the nearest lemon.” Indeed, a couple of years later, when a large international department store, complete with an imported food section, opened in Zhengzhou, I welcomed it with vast enthusiasm and relief, even though a shopping trip for its treasures called for a half-day adventure and put a severe strain upon a foreign teacher’s food budget.

Later, to make my cooking life even more complicated, love intervened. (Ain’t it always so?) Several years after I arrived, I married a Chinese girl who subsequently moved into my campus apartment. She insisted on following the traditional pattern of daily shopping for fresh produce (off the campus), then cooking Chinese dishes at home. Healthy eating, delicious, too. She probably saved me from an eventual fast food/snack food/cafeteria food overdose. My sole complaint was my diet was now entirely Chinese. My new wife regarded the kitchen as her domain; foreign teachers and foreign foods were largely banned, although she made occasional forays into Western waters to placate my cravings, including mashed potatoes, biscuits, and a quite passable Tex-Mex chili. Obviously, if I wanted Western dishes, I would have to prepare them myself, within the limited resources of time, tiny kitchen, budget, spousal patience, and locally available foods.

The first big obstacle was the availability of the types and cuts of meats. I might pore over a lovely American cookbook from my old life while spooning up a warm cup of Black Death, but where was I to find the meats to prepare those Western recipes? In response, I evolved over a long period of time a series of mostly quick and mostly simple Western dishes that I could prepare myself using meats I could always procure locally and at reasonable cost. In the process, I found many Western recipes can be adjusted to use different types of meat. Recipes calling for beef, for example, could be successfully adapted to pork, chicken, or fish. Regardless of the species called for, most seafood dishes could be adapted to use canned tuna, shrimp, or fish fillets. Later, thanks to the development of online shopping and home delivery, the availability problem was greatly reduced. But sometimes the price was prohibitive so substitution was still required.

If you are interested in cooking as an expat, perhaps under a set of restrictions comparable to my own, you must be flexible with recipes. Adapting to the prevailing conditions is the central concept. If you have favorite herbs or spices that are not mentioned in a recipe, why not substitute them and see if you like the results? Similarly, if there is some ingredient that you don’t like or simply cannot obtain, leave it out or substitute something else… as you wish. In doing so, you may stumble upon what will become a specialty of your kitchen, maybe even a secret “house recipe” that will be only for you and your guests. (And I promise you, if you become a skilled cook, you will have guests, especially other expats.)

Finally, as Julia Child said in her famous sign-off line at the end of each episode of the ground-breaking TV series, The French Chef, “Bon Appetit!”