Food From Around the World
16/04/13 05:28
We live in a world culture. Even in relatively remote Rapid City we see increasing influences from other places on the way we conduct our lives. There was a time when eating out in Rapid City was a choice between a good steak house and an excellent home cooked meal. These days there are a lot more options. Seafood, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Japanese, including Sushi, Korean, Nepalese, Mexican, specialty sandwich shops, micro-brewed beer, coffee shops galore, a couple of Buffalo wings restaurants, bagels, specialty bakeries, health food, vegetarian, buffets, Irish, different varieties of ice cream and frozen yogurt, smoothies, pizzas in lots of different styles including “Colorado Style Pizza” whatever that is, sports bars, donut shops, fast food restaurants of every stripe, and a lot more. One Internet directory lists 220 restaurants in Rapid City – about the same number as the count of churches. You can still find a good steak house and a nearly home cooked meal. Times are changing. There are more choices and more influence from outside of our area when it comes to eating.
There are a few foods that are still difficult to find in our town. It’s a bit of a challenge to find Vegemite, for example. We first heard of Vegemite when we became close to a family from Australia during our seminary days. After a few months in the United States, they began to miss the dark brown food paste. After more than a year, they would occasionally wax poetically about how good Vegemite tastes spread on toast. From their descriptions, I imagined something like peanut butter, a food that was in nearly constant supply around our house. Now, having visited Australia, I can say that Vegemite is definitely an acquired taste. It is made from used brewer’s yeast. It is very salty. Perhaps its flavor is enhanced by drinking more beer, or by growing up singing the song:
We’re happy little Vegemites, as bright as bright can be,
We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea,
Our mummies say we’re growing stronger every single week,
Because we love our Vegemite,
We all adore our Vegemite,
It puts a rose in every cheek.
Of course these days, our friends would not have to miss their Vegemite. It is only a click and a $10 charge to your credit card away on the Internet. I can have it delivered to your house before 10 tomorrow morning.
But I don’t think you can find it on the shelves in Safeway or Family Thrift or Wal-Mart in Rapid City.
I don’t think you’ll find goose grease in jars on the shelves of the stores in our town, either. We don’t eat all that many geese, come to think of it. We sing, “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat,” and then sit down to turkey for Christmas Dinner. Goose grease, however, isn’t really needed for cooking a goose. The goose provides enough fat on its own. I suppose it could be used for basting the bird. There are some purists who use goose grease for basting chickens and swear that it adds to the flavor, buy it is a taste distinction that I’m not sure I would catch. If you come from some parts of the British Isles, however, you need goose grease to make a proper Yorkshire pudding. I have heard of those who use duck fat in their Yorkshire puddings, but for those who take their British cooking seriously, there is no substitute for goose grease. In hard times and periods of national disaster, some Britains have eaten Yorkshire Puddings flavored with beef drippings or even lard. Only goose grease, however, provides the proper crisp outside, soft inside and distinct flavor variation for serving with roast beef.
You can buy a jar of goose grease off of the Internet for less than $10.
I actually don’t know the first thing about British cooking and the proper use of goose grease. I thought that it is just a good thing to know just in case I one day develop an insatiable craving for steak and kidney pie. Really, I just like the sound of “goose grease” and find it fun to right and say the words over and over. Proper cooks probably call it goose fat.
Here in Rapid City, you’ll do a bit better shopping for ingredients to make foods that originate closer to home. Most of our stores have an aisle of Mexican and pseudo-Mexican food ingredients. You can purchase dried corn husks to make tamales and all of the proper spices, chilies and other ingredients.
Canadian cuisine is a bit harder to put your finger on, but there are ingredients for a lot of different French foods in most of our supermarkets. Add in some basic British foods even without goose grease and add a dollop of Maple Syrup and you could probably pass off your cooking as at least having been influenced by our north of the border neighbors. Grab some basic beef gravy and a few cheese curds and mix them in with some French fries and you can call it Poutine and they’ll think you were born there. OK, maybe I’m simplifying things a bit.
Our grocery stores do have most of the ingredients, spices and herbs for Italian cooking and you can find the foods to follow the basic recipes in a Greek cookbook. There is also an Oriental market and Curry Masala restaurant has a shelf of spices and other ingredients to make curries and other Indian foods.
Modern advances in travel and shipping have made the world seem a bit smaller and distant neighbors a bit closer than was the case a few decades ago. It makes sense that our options for eating have changed with the times. I suspect, however, that it may take a while longer for our palates to become discriminating enough to catch all of the differences between say Nepalese and Indian cooking.
All of which reminds me that I’m responsible for the snack at our Tuesday book club meeting this morning. Hmm . . . Jerry’s Donuts always hits the spot.
There are a few foods that are still difficult to find in our town. It’s a bit of a challenge to find Vegemite, for example. We first heard of Vegemite when we became close to a family from Australia during our seminary days. After a few months in the United States, they began to miss the dark brown food paste. After more than a year, they would occasionally wax poetically about how good Vegemite tastes spread on toast. From their descriptions, I imagined something like peanut butter, a food that was in nearly constant supply around our house. Now, having visited Australia, I can say that Vegemite is definitely an acquired taste. It is made from used brewer’s yeast. It is very salty. Perhaps its flavor is enhanced by drinking more beer, or by growing up singing the song:
We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea,
Our mummies say we’re growing stronger every single week,
Because we love our Vegemite,
We all adore our Vegemite,
It puts a rose in every cheek.
Of course these days, our friends would not have to miss their Vegemite. It is only a click and a $10 charge to your credit card away on the Internet. I can have it delivered to your house before 10 tomorrow morning.
But I don’t think you can find it on the shelves in Safeway or Family Thrift or Wal-Mart in Rapid City.
I don’t think you’ll find goose grease in jars on the shelves of the stores in our town, either. We don’t eat all that many geese, come to think of it. We sing, “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat,” and then sit down to turkey for Christmas Dinner. Goose grease, however, isn’t really needed for cooking a goose. The goose provides enough fat on its own. I suppose it could be used for basting the bird. There are some purists who use goose grease for basting chickens and swear that it adds to the flavor, buy it is a taste distinction that I’m not sure I would catch. If you come from some parts of the British Isles, however, you need goose grease to make a proper Yorkshire pudding. I have heard of those who use duck fat in their Yorkshire puddings, but for those who take their British cooking seriously, there is no substitute for goose grease. In hard times and periods of national disaster, some Britains have eaten Yorkshire Puddings flavored with beef drippings or even lard. Only goose grease, however, provides the proper crisp outside, soft inside and distinct flavor variation for serving with roast beef.
I actually don’t know the first thing about British cooking and the proper use of goose grease. I thought that it is just a good thing to know just in case I one day develop an insatiable craving for steak and kidney pie. Really, I just like the sound of “goose grease” and find it fun to right and say the words over and over. Proper cooks probably call it goose fat.
Here in Rapid City, you’ll do a bit better shopping for ingredients to make foods that originate closer to home. Most of our stores have an aisle of Mexican and pseudo-Mexican food ingredients. You can purchase dried corn husks to make tamales and all of the proper spices, chilies and other ingredients.
Canadian cuisine is a bit harder to put your finger on, but there are ingredients for a lot of different French foods in most of our supermarkets. Add in some basic British foods even without goose grease and add a dollop of Maple Syrup and you could probably pass off your cooking as at least having been influenced by our north of the border neighbors. Grab some basic beef gravy and a few cheese curds and mix them in with some French fries and you can call it Poutine and they’ll think you were born there. OK, maybe I’m simplifying things a bit.
Our grocery stores do have most of the ingredients, spices and herbs for Italian cooking and you can find the foods to follow the basic recipes in a Greek cookbook. There is also an Oriental market and Curry Masala restaurant has a shelf of spices and other ingredients to make curries and other Indian foods.
Modern advances in travel and shipping have made the world seem a bit smaller and distant neighbors a bit closer than was the case a few decades ago. It makes sense that our options for eating have changed with the times. I suspect, however, that it may take a while longer for our palates to become discriminating enough to catch all of the differences between say Nepalese and Indian cooking.