Posted on by rjonakait

Cooking with Home Schoolers

I try to experience local foods when traveling. Calvin Trillin wrote that, when in a new town, he would not ask for the best restaurant but instead ask a long-time resident what that person would want to eat upon returning to home after being away for a year or two. In other words, what was the local comfort food. And thus, as a result, you might have an ice cream potato in Coeur d’Alene, a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich in Kokomo, or chicken riggies in Utica.

I don’t know how to do this in a country where I don’t speak the language. Instead, I have found myself in markets pointing at possible palatable foodstuffs and indicating with gestures how much I want. This is always an adventure and sometimes a successful one.

Only recently have I done what I should have done decades ago—book a food tour at the beginning of the trip. That is what the spouse, the NBP, and I had done in Merida, Yucatan’s capital city, in pre-Covid days. In addition, there had been three others on the tour—a pair of medical doctors from the Netherlands finishing their training and–in the small world department–another Dutch doctor who had just finished up her training. She had not met the other two until that day. Apparently, Holland, while not that large, is not so small that everyone knows each other—not even the doctors. However, we all learned that there is a special connection between Yucatan and Holland. The Yucatecans love Edam cheese and use hollowed out balls of it for one of their signature dishes. According to Jose, the food tour guide, Yucatan recently sent representatives to the Netherlands to discuss Edam cheese.

Our food tour took us through the narrow, crowded passageways of the major food market of Merida where fruits and vegetables, honey and vanilla, spices and chiles are sold. (Another nearby market sold meat.) Food stalls were abundant, and Meridians crowded around them for lunch and snacks. Jose would stop and procure the specialties of an establishment generally not more than a few feet wide. We tried things we otherwise would not have and learned the difference between panuchos and salbutes, that turkey and venison are staples, what sopa de lima is, and that mole is not used. Instead, a black bean paste, sold in huge blocks in the market, is the base of many dishes. We went outside the market and had a terrific ceviche in a tiny restaurant followed by creatively flavored and delicious ice cream. This tour, coming at the beginning of the Yucatan sojourn, stood us in good stead for the rest of our stay as it encouraged us to eat items that we otherwise would not have understood on menus. As a result of the tour, we continued to eat panuchos at many places (they are similar to but different from salbutes—both are fried platforms for other foods, but panuchos have a black bean paste injected into them while hot).

From my standpoint that food tour had been satisfying, so going to a different part of the Yucatan peninsula, I looked for a similar but different local experience. I booked a rather expensive combination market excursion and cooking class in the home of a Yucatecan host.

First, we had to find that home, which was a forty-minute drive from where we were staying. One of the three of us was confident, incredibly confident, that she knew how to get to the location. We got lost. We eventually pulled up to a hotel to ask for directions but thought that it wiser to hire a cab to lead us to our destination. We were fifteen minutes late but found our host and a family across the street waiting in what until recently had been an industrial area in Playa del Carmen. After we apologized profusely, we walked a block. The host pulled aside a solid gate fronting the sidewalk, and we entered a courtyard surrounded by three or four buildings, each the home of one or more families. Through an open door in one of the buildings, and we were in the host’s kitchen and dining room, where we chatted for a few moments.

Alma, the host, talked a bit about the history and growth of the fast-growing city. After she explained what we would be preparing, we went to a market a few blocks away. I was disappointed. I was looking for a central, city market like ones I have visited in Florence, Barcelona, Istanbul, Budapest, and Merida where there are dozens and dozens of vendors selling all sorts of things I do not recognize. I wanted to see pyramids of unknown fruits and stretches of exotic vegetables with food stalls hawking unfamiliar prepared food. This, however, was only a neighborhood market equivalent to the ones where I buy fruits and vegetables several times a week in Brooklyn. We did learn a little about some new-to-me foods, but not much. After Alma bought a few things, others jaunted but I trudged (it was getting hot) back to her kitchen.

We then began to assist Alma and her aunt (or perhaps it was her sister) in the preparation of what would be our lunch. Guacamole was first. Alma had two rigid rules for this dish. First, use a mortar and pestle, never a blender. She maintained that blending altered the taste of the guac ingredients. (She did use a blender to make a marinade for chicken.) Second, no lime. This was to the chagrin of the two girls, ten and eight, who with their parents were our cooking companions. The girls loved limes and sucked any they could get their hands on. Perhaps those two were disappointed, but the guacamole was delicious.

We made our own tortillas. Alma’s twist: she colored part of the masa with beet juice producing a red tortilla or mixed with the non-colored dough for a binary effect. I, however, could discern no taste difference in the beet infused tortillas with the nonbinary ones. (In any event, I prefer wheat tortillas to corn ones.) Two presses were used to form the tortillas, a metal devicemuch like ones I have seen elsewhere and a larger, wood one, which I guess harkened back to older days. The product from each seemed to be identical.

We soon sat down to lunch eating guacamole and tortillas stuffed with the meat flavored with the marinade Alma had made. It was pleasant but also disappointing. I had not had the culinary discoveries I had been hoping for. The market was not what I had envisioned. I own a mortar and pestle, and although I seldom do, I know how to use it. I had not made a tortilla before, but I already knew the basics. The food was tasty, but nothing made me say, Oh, wow. Alma emailed us the recipes we had cooked as well as other ones. Even though I am a regular recipe-reader, I have not even looked at what she sent.

(concluded May 4)

Posted on by rjonakait

Road Trip–Fallingwater Edition

          Compared to those of some of my friends, my travels have been limited. I have not been to Tanzania, South Africa, or Ethiopia. I have not gone to Kazakhstan or Mongolia. I have been to neither Argentina, Brazil, nor Chile. I have not been to Japan, China, or Singapore, or New Zealand or Australia, or even Scotland or Ireland, much less the Faroe or Shetland Islands. But, in pre-Covid times when the spouse and I talked about trips to some of these places, we also realized that we had not traveled to many potentially interesting parts of the United States, some not far from us. We started planning driving trips to places we had not been before with stops along the way to see some local attractions.

          And so, recently we drove from our northeast Pennsylvania house with the goal of visiting Fallingwater, the house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright over a small waterfall. The trip had been planned months before with hopes of seeing some fall foliage along the way. While occasionally we had stretches of a mile or two with yellows and reds, the deciduous trees remained largely green, perhaps, we speculated, because the autumn had been warm. We realized, though, that we did not know why leaves turned colors—was it colder weather or shortening days or both? Although we have many, many years of education between us, we had to concede ignorance of these matters.

          The first leg of our trip was a two-hour drive from our Pocono Mountains home to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a town of about 30,000, perhaps best known today as the home of the Little League World Series and a museum for the same. That held little interest for me, but it did not matter because the museum was not open, presumably because of Covid.

          We arrived for lunch at the Sawhorse Café, a tiny, crowded restaurant on the edge of a college campus with good food that came after an inordinately long wait. I was struck yet again by the fact that this country has a vast number of colleges and universities many of which, even though I was an academic for decades, I have never heard of or know little about, including Lycoming College which was a few blocks from the café. To my surprise I found that Lycoming, a private coeducational institution of about 1,200 undergraduates and affiliated with the United Methodist Church, was one of the oldest colleges in the country with roots going back to the early nineteenth century. I had at least heard of Lycoming before going to Williamsport, but I had no previous knowledge of the public Pennsylvania College of Technology, with 5,400 undergrads, which is also located in Williamsport.

          After lunch we went to the Thomas T. Taber Museum of the Lycoming County Historical Society. (Mr. Taber is a local historian and philanthropist.) The spouse and I have now learned to seek out small-town museums. Many of them are surprisingly good, exposing us to history and artists we do not know. The Taber Museum is an outstanding example with geology, Native American, lumbering, weaving, and blacksmithing exhibits. The spouse was most impressed with a demonstration of a complicated, ingenious, nineteenth-century rickrack weaving machine. (She had to educate me about rickrack.) We were both amazed that someone had invented such a thing that was simultaneously useful and beautiful.

          I was drawn to the extensive displays about the development of Williamsport’s lumbering industry, the source of the region’s late nineteenth century wealth. It was clear that the work was hard and dangerous, not just the felling of the timber but also the floating of a huge number of logs down a branch of the Susquehanna River where Williamsport is located. The industry was essential in the development of the town, but, of course, a ready supply of lumber fueled the development of many parts of America.

          In the blacksmith section, I learned that oxen have small hooves split into two sections. Each foot requires two small shoes, but oxen cannot support their massive weight on only three legs. The smithy could not shoe an ox the way I had seen horses shoed many times in old western movies where the leather-aproned blacksmith picks up a leg and nails on a horseshoe. Instead, a sling was invented to bear part the ox’s weight so that a leg could be raised and the two ox shoes could be hammered onto each foot.

          Other exhibits documented Williamsport’s famous Repasz Brass Band, which was founded in 1831 and claims to be the country’s longest continuously operated band. However, the Taber Museum is especially known for its model trains, a collection of one person, Larue Shempp. It contains over 2,000 pieces and 347 complete train sets, some of which run in large, interactive displays. Awesome.

          The visit-worthy Taber Museum is housed in a modern building, but it is situated on Millionaires’ Row, a national historic district. The street is lined with fantastic, extravagant homes built in the Victorian era. The town proclaims, “Once the Lumber Capital of the World, Williamsport had more millionaires per person than any other city in the USA.” I remembered a similar boast when we were in Merida, Yucatan, which proclaims that, at the turn of the 20th century, Merida had more millionaires than any other city in the world. I wonder how many other towns or cities make similar claims.

Most of the homes on Williamsport’s Millionaires’ Row have now been broken up into apartments and offices, but the Rowley House, finished in 1888, is open to the public—unfortunately not on the day we were there. The helpful, friendly staff member at the Taber Museum made a call to a gregarious, eighty-nine-year-old volunteer at the Rowley House. He agreed to meet us there and show us around, but then he remembered that an alarm was set. He had not written down the code and could not recall it, and, thus, we could not visit the nineteenth century house.