Cooking like an American

I love to cook, but somehow I always seem to invite complication into my kitchen.

As a preteen I developed an intense pride in making food 'from scratch'.  It made me feel a bit like Laura Ingles Wilder.  I remember my baby brother waddling over to me waving a box of brownie mix in his hand, asking me to bake brownies for him.  I put on a big-sister smile and raised my voice an octave as I said, I'm sorry sweetie, but I can't. Pouring something into a pan out of a box doesn't count as baking.  Then I dedicated the next two hours to making brownies from scratch even though I doubt his tiny taste buds appreciated my efforts.

In my mid-twenties I became obsessed with using the healthiest ingredients possible, though that didn't necessarily add complication to cooking so much as it added expense to my grocery store excursions.  Shortly thereafter, however, I declared myself a raw-foodist for a brief period, and my culinary creativity was stretched thin.

The karmic cycle repeated when I moved to Europe and married a vegan, thus forcing me to come up with a whole new bag of tricks in the kitchen.  I'd had no idea the extent to which I'd previously relied on eggs, cheese, and milk.  At first I simply didn't cook for him - I let him cook for me.  Romantic, right?  And educational.  But it didn't take long before I got tired of eating the same three meals, so I sought out vegan blogs and recipe sites, figuring out how to make something yummy that didn't inconvenience any animals.

I soon realized that the majority of vegan recipes are written by people who have access to places like Whole Foods Market.  Specialty food stores are not as ubiquitous in Europe as they are in California.  When I do come across an organic shop here, it tends to be very small and quite expensive.  Sweden is better than Italy was as far as availability of obscure products is concerned, though it's still hit or miss regarding whether or not I'll be able to find xanthiam gum or kombu.  The combined challenges of finding the names of odd ingredients in the local language, locating them, and being able to afford them keeps my excursions to health-food shops to a minimum.  (May I just rant for just a moment?  At the ecological market I frequented in Pisa I couldn't even find simple rolled oats, and when I asked the clerk if she could order kombucha from her supplier she had to look it up online to know what it was.  The answer was no: kombucha was not even available as a special order.  Argh!  I had my choice of three different brands and eight different flavors of kombucha at the normal grocery store in California!)

So I've learned to seek out recipes that focus on standard ingredients.  Absolutely nothing fancy.  Even some rather standard ingredients that we take for granted as Americans are unheard of in Europe.  I've given up hope of finding shortening here.  And once in a while I ask Dad to include a container of baking powder when he sends a care package ... not because baking powder doesn't exist here - it does - but the baking powder I find in Europe is single-acting rather than double-acting; it behaves and tastes entirely different than what I buy at home.

And I find that regardless of the ingredients, it's still a challenge to whip up American recipes here in Europe. You see, in America we measure everything differently.  I'm not just talking about imperial measurements instead of metric - gallons rather than liters.  We also differ from Europeans because we tend to measure by volume - by how much of an ingredient can fit into a given space.  This actually works just fine, even though it's not the most scientific method.  It doesn't present any problem for liquid ingredients, but the volume taken up by a dry ingredient will vary according to the way an ingredient is handled.  Therefore our recipes refer to packed brown sugar, and heaping teaspoons.  Ours is a culture of approximation.  And that's the beauty of America, isn't it?  Exactly how hard should you pack the brown sugar?  As hard as you damn well please.  We're a country of rugged individualists, and though we recognize the utility of using a recipe as a guideline, we take pride in creating a finished product that is the result of our individual interpretations.

Not so in Europe.  The first time I saw my husband cook, I thought he was joking.  He was an undergrad in physics at the time, and he cooked as though the kitchen was his laboratory.  He pulled out a small scale and weighed each ingredient to the gram.  I can see now that this is advantageous for making something like souffle, but he was just making spaghetti.  C'mon, don't you just grab a big hand full of spaghetti and toss it in a pot?  If you make too much, there'll be leftovers for tomorrow's lunch.  But I've since learned that Italians aren't nearly as excited about leftovers as we are in America, and that precision cooking is a practice that goes beyond my favorite physicist's kitchen.

I've now come to appreciate cooking according to a European recipe's measuring system.  There's less to clean up when you eliminate the middle man from the measuring practice.  The bowl rests on the scale and you hit reset after adding each ingredient.  Each ingredient is poured, slowly, into the bowl until the correct weight is reached.  But this really only works with European recipes.  Converting an American recipe from volume-based cups to weighted measurements involves more than a few calculations from imperial units to metric; you also have to keep in mind that each ingredient will be converted differently because it's weight to volume ratio is different.  A cup of flour, depending on the type of flour, will weigh anywhere from 110 to 135 grams.  A cup of rolled oats weighs 85 grams and a cup of chocolate chips weighs 152 grams.  A cup of shortening weighs 205 grams, and lest you think that I should quit griping about Europe's shortening deficiency and use butter instead, let me set the record straight that a cup of butter weighs 227 grams.  Translating an American recipe into something useful in European culture requires a fair amount of research and above average math skills.

I received a gift in the mail recently from my best friend in California.  A simple thing, really, but it's made such a difference in my life.  It's a set of measuring cups and spoons.  Even though I figured out long ago that one American cup equals 236 milliliters, and I marked one of my glasses with a permanent marker at the 236 ml line, recipes never turned out so well with that method as they do now with these nesting cups and spoons.  Thanks for the lifeline, Emily!