‘Can you believe they don’t know what French toast is?’ asked a guest in the next conversation over, at a party recently. Turns out this young traveler had been overseas for the first time, and wanted his favorite breakfast, French toast, while in London. Seems that his request was met with blank stares, before he got an explanation that the restaurant did not serve French food. While anyone else would probably just order kippers at this point (or, more likely, would never have gotten to this point), this fella really wanted French toast.
‘So, I told the waiter how to make it,’ he went on. ‘The waiter just repeated what I told him, but when they brought it out, I knew they got it all wrong.’ Apparently, the server and chef put their heads together, and tried to come up with an idea of what this French toast is. What they came up with was pieces of deep fried-bread.
‘Just cuz they speak English doesn’t mean they eat American food,’ said an exasperated partygoer.
True enough. So, imagine what those who don’t even share the language eat.
‘Have you ever heard of taro root ice cream? It’s good, I swear,’ says a friend of a friend. Can’t say I ever have heard of taro root ice cream, but I gotta say, chocolate chip is probably gonna be the choice before taro root flavor. It’s not like taro root ice is so easy to find in the United States anyhow. Try Chinatown, if you just have to try some.
Speaking of Chinatown, that’s also the place to find another unique item—Birds Nest Soup. It’s usually quite expensive, and is quite subtle, without real strong flavors that many associate with Asian cooking. And, yes, it’s a real birds nest in the pot. Before it makes it in there, however, the cooks pick out the twigs and, well, feathers, until only the hardened bird spittle is left.
Bird spit or chicken feet? A tough choice, but I think I’d go with the hardened spit. I know someone who loves the feet, though. I’ve seen her at work with those feet, and work is the key word. While my friend tells me how worth it all the twisting and prying is, I think I’ll stick to the spittle.
Still, when you explain exactly what French toast really is … . OK, every culture eats their share of the unexplainable. Often very tasty, but just unexplainable.
One of the most unexplainable comes from a friend who is Chinese and is always full of foods that astonish. One of the best or worst, depending on how you play the game, is lard-chip cookies. ‘During the war,’ she explains, ‘few families could afford luxury ingredients (like chocolate), so they put chunks of lard in cookies.’ You can still find them in bakeries. ‘My dad always gets them for the memories,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Yuck yuck yuck.’
The worst my dad can come up with is cream. See, when he was little, cream came in tiny bottles, shaped like milk bottles. My dad would open up bottle after bottle and drink heavy cream all day. Kinda gross, but still no lard-chip cookies.
‘There are some things like serving fish and poultry whole that I think are misunderstood,’ she goes on to explain. ‘I think it’s based on not wanting to waste anything. And Chinese people take their food very seriously. They think it’s the best food ever and they want it fresh.’
Her relatives who still live in China and Taiwan are very intrigued by the eating habits of Americans. ‘Eating different cuisines every night is fascinating to them, and eating frozen meals disgusts them. They can’t imagine it. Everyone shops for fresh food every day. A mother who serves frozen meals is thought of poorly, I think.’
She does disapprove of one aspect of her native cuisine. ‘The great fault of Chinese food, which I love by the way, is the pastry. There are things I love but overall it’s not the greatest. The diet just didn’t allow it. There’s no dairy—no cream or butter—and rice is their main grain, not wheat, so no flour or gluten. That pretty much knocks out the building blocks of pastry. Oh well, you can’t win them all.’ Not with lard-chip cookies, you can’t.