When I moved to Austria, some of the very first German words I learned were foods and cooking terms. I had to cook. I had to feed us. It doesn’t really get more basic than that
Everything was so different. Grocery shopping felt like watching a favorite movie in German. I knew what the point was, (duh) but finding what I needed to put together was an adventure. There were, surprisingly, a bit more than a few foods with names that were the same or similar, like milk (milch), butter, pasta, oregano, Bolognese, pizza (shudder CORN). And a few that were figure-out-able. Basilikum (basil), Rosemarin (rosemary), Thymian (thyme), zucker (sugar), bohnen (beans), that sort of thing.
But if you are a non German speaker and I asked you to tell me what Zimt is, or Saurrahm, Schlagobers, or Schinken, Muskatnuss, Paradiser, Erdapfel (or Kartoffel in German german), Zitronen, or Käse, would you know that it is cinnamon, sour cream, heavy cream, ham, nutmeg, tomato, potato, lemon and cheese?
I can’t even fathom what it must be like for someone moving to the US and having to navigate our massive grocery stores and strange foods and food names. I can understand why people tend to cook their own foods when they move to a new country, but I think in a lot of ways you are keeping yourself separate, not fully allowing yourself to experience the life in your new country.
I have a friend who has a friend from the US, who has lived here for a few years. She gets monthly packages of American foods from her family, and she visits home often and brings back suitcases full of food. I can certainly appreciate the intent, there are many foods that I miss that are just not available here (grape jelly y’all), and if I had the means, I’m sure I would arrange to get a lot of American foods sent to me. But some things can just be made and so many people never, ever realize it.
When I moved here, seven years ago, I was thrilled to find salsa and BBQ sauce and corn chips and thought I would at least be able to snack easily.Peter warned me that it would not taste like what I expected, but I thought, this is such simple stuff, how could it possibly not taste right?
But the salsa tasted like a bad BBQ sauce (sauce!) and the BBQ sauce tasted like ketchup, and the corn chips did not taste like any corn chips I had ever even smelled, Yuck!
First big lesson learned.
Another thing I never expected, the food culture is different. More pork is eaten here than anything else, and pork is really cheap. Beef is quite expensive here, but they don’t really have masses of cows here. They have masses of pigs. And the pigs here are not raised to be lean, like ours are. The pork here is very tasty. But I had to learn how to cook it
The only pork I cooked at home was pork shoulder. It was cheap and very easy to cook and a big pan of pulled pork in BBQ sauce would feed my teenaged son for almost a whole weekend.
What is really surprising, then and now, is how expensive chicken is here. Seriously! But I think chickens have a much better and more expensive life here, so I don’t complain.
No one in my family here likes to eat chicken. I love chicken, I think more than any other meat. Between the fact that I would be cooking it only for myself and how expensive it is, I don’t really buy it unless I can talk Peter into eating it. Which is about five times a year, if I’m lucky.
My first Thanksgiving here, I made the full spread for Peter’s friends. They were incredibly sweet and polite, but it was very obvious that every item was strange to them, and not in a good way. I was kind of spoiled with Peter, he had been eating American and Canadian foods for many years, so it was within his normal. Surprisingly, only then did it really hit me that the food that was normal to me, was not normal to everyone else in the world, or even everyone else in my world.
I have slowly introduced some of my foods to my friends and family here, and some find things they like and some don’t. But honestly, my absolute greatest discovery is Austrian, Austro/Hungarian and Bavarian food.
Its been only recently that I have realized quite how much my tastes and my cooking has changed. I make a LOT more Austrian foods now, and my tastes are changing. Even Peter notices that I am eating and liking things that I hated just a few years earlier. But I will never, ever, ever, eat pizza with corn on it.