Food culture around the world

[kavalkada]

I must say I got hungry just reading about food on AIBU this morning on Mumsnet, so I wanted to write about different customs regarding food and eating around the world. Write your country and things that are unique for your country and maybe different from UK considering that this is UK site. And what has UK thought you and you implemented in your daily cooking.

Croatia

What UK and Mumsnet taught me

I tasted carrot cake first time on holiday in Britain twenty years ago, and since then it is always on my menu. Carrot cakes became popular in my country maybe five or six years ago, but before that nobody made them.

Thanks to Mumsnet I started doing porridge, Shepard's pie and Chilli con carne, something you do not see often or ever on menu in Croatia. Porridge grew in popularity in last few years, but before 2010 it was hard to find somebody who ate it before.

I love english breakfast and do it sometimes, but not for breakfast but lunch.

Differences

Main difference is Croatians eat main meal around one pm, and for dinner you eat leftovers or something like porridge, cereals, maybe eggs. Even with working hours longer then they used to be, that custom remains. People take full lunch to work. It does change, but slowly.

We eat lot of sea food, not processed but in original shape. Octopus salad is perfectly normal meal in my child's kindergarten, and almost every Friday they have calamari for lunch.

Ready meals and takeaways are expensive, and if somebody buys that you know they have extra money. Poor people and people on a budget cook. It is always funny to me when somebody on mumsnet writes that cooking from scratch is a sign of middle class snobbery because it couldn't be more different from the world where I live.

When I'm in UK, I love walking around your food aisles, and I love watching ready meals and cakes. It would be a heaven to be able a reasonably priced cake and not to make it myself. Although there are more of them now in our shops, they are usually rubbish and you want to throw up after you eat them.

When I was growing up in 80-es and 90-es every damn lunch started with chicken soup or beef bouillon. Let's be honest, I never make the damn things when I cook.

Most popular cake in my country is apple strudel and we always bake pancakes, not thick like american ones but like french crepes. When Croatian teenagers meet, they always make pancakes and pizza - well they used to when I was a teen, maybe that has changed.

We eat lot of beans, but never on toast. They are usually baked (google recipe gravce na tavce, delicious and vegan) like in North Macedonia or pasta e fagioli the way Italians make it.

The trouble with Croatia is that we were Italian and Austrian and Hungarian colony till 1918 so we haven't really developed our own cuisine, but some strange mix of these three, but things are changing.

So let me hear about other countries. Pictures please if you had something unique and delicious today.

I love this! I am British so no use but it is so interesting to hear

This is so interesting, thank you for sharing. We grew up with Hungarian au pairs so learnt a lot about food from them

I'm Italian and DHs family are from the Philippines.

I love pasta and fagioli! We eat a mixture of English and Italian foods. DH only knows how to cook a couple of Filipino dishes and he is the only one that likes them. He makes good rice/noodles but they are not really dishes by themselves.

Italy is the same, big lunch lighter dinner. DH is used to bigger dinners though, I'm enjoying wfh so we can all have a proper hot lunch, then the DC and I happy with a lighter dinner and some fruit.

English food wise I really like cottage pie but mine never comes out that well, I've gotten good at making quiche though. I also love the look of English cakes, they are often so nicely decorated (I think pasticini taste better though).

Sorry I was meant to be talking about Italian food culture If anyone has a question I'll happily try to answer.

@Subeccoo

This is so interesting, thank you for sharing. We grew up with Hungarian au pairs so learnt a lot about food from them

I forget to write that goulash is the big part of our cuisine.

When I was 18 I taught in Nepal and we had lentil curry and rice for every meal including breakfast. It would be varied with veggie curry in the week and goat curry at the weekend drom a goat they would "sacrifice" on the school roof .
Started off being so bored ...ended up loving it and preferring it over Western food.
Came back reeking of curry...out of every pore!

And the chai there is amazing...7 teaspoons of sugar though!

They also make beer out of millet.

From*

Also the tibetans make a porridge called tsampa out of millet...
I am aware that I was gap yah student rather than a local so it was easy to apprechiate the food when I knew id be returning to cariety and choice but it kept me going.

Variety*

I live in Asia (don't want to specify where as too outing) but the main food differences I have noticed here are:

1. set meals are SO important. Nobody skips any meal. People are horrified if theh find out you didnt eat a meal, or just grabbed something quick.
2. Every meal is a hot, cooked meal, as opposed to in the UK where 3 hot meals a day is unusual. No toast/cereal etc for breakfast, no salad/sandwiches etc for lunch.
3. Everything is cooked from scratch. It isnt considered something to be proud about - a meal being cooked 'from scratch' - because they all are. No jarred sauces of convenience food available.
4. like you said about Croatia, meat and fish will be cooked in their natural, unprocessed form in kid's school meals - they will have stews/curries/dishes with meat on the bone, fresh fish etc. Nobody squemish about meat like in the UK where lots of people (me included!) don't like meat to look like a dead animal even though I know it is!
5. Meals not 'dished up' onto.own plates but everyone, kids included, serve themselves.
6. Food often incredibly spicy, even for the kids
7. No kids menus full of bland beige food like bafk home in the UK which I think is a good thing.

Trinidad & Tobago. Very unqiue cuisine as we have a huge ethnic mix in this country with no clear ethnic majority. The people here a mix of the following: descendants of African slaves or Indian and Chinese indentured labourers, a few remaining descendants of British and French slave owners , Syria and Lebanese immigrants as well as recently, a large influx of Venezuelan refugees.

As a result, our cuisine is now a hybrid of African, South East Asian and Latin influences. Some examples of typical Trini dishes below:

Pelau - browned rice dish with lots of green seasoning, coconut milk, pigeon peas, meat. IMG - 3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZapnZcpuImE/XFNvBRZ9KxI/AAAAAAAAJ1s/ry3mEb_okqQJBYVjWdCETA_gpmbFcDCigCLcBGAs/s1600/Trinidad-Pelau-in-the-Instant-Pot.jpg

Oildown - a one-pot meal made with breadfruit, ground provisions, dasheen leaves, salted meat such as pigtails, coconut milk and green seasoning. IMG - 2.bp.blogspot.com/-7WLTYi6tmLI/UoeXU0c1rpI/AAAAAAAAAGs/4qQMsd2n1iE/s1600/Oil-Down-209.jpg

Callaloo - dasheen bush leaves cooked with ochroes/okras, pumpkins, carrots and you guessed it...coconut milk and green seasoning. IMG - cookingwithria.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Cooking-With-Ria-callaloo-1.jpg

Dhal, rice and curried duck or goat /smoked herring / some other vegetable. Curry is a regular part of our cuisine and cooked by everyone, be they black, Indian, even Latinos. IMG - i.pinimg.com/736x/5c/0f/da/5c0fdab7d4137716fcde5081ced5a514.jpg

Crab and Dumplings - fresh crabs curried in coconut milk and green seasoning once again served our heavy large dumplings. IMG - 1.bp.blogspot.com/-yqeGt2iWxDg/XZk21sBzGMI/AAAAAAAAKJw/BDHviEXKaZUatmHqc7o-PhnZQsr8Hf2SwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/tobago-curry-crab-and-dumplin-min.jpg

We also have our world famous bake and shark (look up Anthony Bourdain's review of this). It's a sandwich made of fried bake with batter fried shark or fish and toppings of pineapples, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, garlic sauce, hot sauce and what we call bandania sauce (bandania is culantro and forms the basis of our green seasoning). IMG - i2.wp.com/www.goatrotichronicles.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Bake-and-Shark.jpg?fit=1080%2C1075&ssl=1

Breakfast is things like roti or fried bake (essentially a small fried roti, also known as Johnny cakes in Jamaica) with buljol (salted fish dish) or smoked herring or some kind of vegetable choka (roasted spicy vegetable dish) like tomato, eggplant (baigan) or maybe pumpkin or bhagi (dasheen bush leaves). Things like bacon and pancakes and waffles are popular in cafes and breakfast joints but at home, people prefer the traditional, much tastier and healthier home-cooked options. IMG - i.pinimg.com/originals/7b/d8/e5/7bd8e55b8219f21401375daaeb557b70.jpg

You see our Latin influences in our Caribbean dishes for example. We don't really do eggnog, we do Ponce de Crema which is far superior, IMO. We also do pastelles which essentially look like a tamale but with a different flavour profile. It's a filling of ground meat, olives, capers and raisins stuffed into a corn-flour wrapping and steamed in banana leaves. It's delicious. IMG - i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/2f/1a/ce2f1a7b3fdb9d1957484cc435e6cf11.jpg

And of course, what many consider to be our national dish - DOUBLES. Normally eaten for breakfast but can be found at street vendors all day long, it is made of two flat friedbreads with a spicy filling of curried chickpeas or channa as we call it with lots of toppins - tamarind sauce, sweet mango sauce, hot pepper sauce, coconut chutney, cucumber chutney. In Trinidad, chutnies are different to the UK. They are spicy, usually uncooked sauces made from feuits or vegetables. You cannot come to Trinidad and not have a doubles. IMG - miro.medium.com/max/6048/1*1kSeq1anjpObwz29MoOrFA.jpeg
And the sauces - 2.bp.blogspot.com/-bNPDkEzsL4s/XBu8t6Ptr4I/AAAAAAAAFcE/BPZM0jf63xEJLWwws5M90zIL0bPmQv6IQCLcBGAs/s1600/Trinidad%2BDoubles-condiments.jpg

Because of our cultural diversity, Divali amd EID are also national holidays so we also make special meals on those days, regardless of religious persuasion or lack thereof.
Divali foods - travelsintransit.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/dsc04276.jpg
Sawine for Eid - images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/5cd4c1e19b7d151e483d9965/1590264645885-NGZO6A9MBD1BHUT3CHWR/IMG-20200523-WA0008~2.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg

In general, we do not use lots of creams and fats to create flavours like a more traditional European cuisine. We use tons of spices, peppers and fresh seaaoning in everything. Our green seasoning is a blended mix of culantro (NOT cilantro), chives, parsley, Spanish and traditional thyme, lots of garlic, habanero peppers and pimentos. It adds amazing flavour to anything and it's so easy to do a huge batch and just pop in a spoonful to your dish...the difference in flavour os obvious. IMG - healthiersteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Caribbean-green-seasoning.jpg

Whew...that was a long post. There's a lot more that I can write but it would take all day. I'll see if I can find a good article that highlights our most popular foods. The interesting thing about our cuisine is the diversity of it and also the history of some of the dishes. Lots of foods contain ground provisions and salted cuts of meat that would normally be discarded like pig tails aa this is what the slaves were fed. It was cheap, high calorie foods and was not eaten by the Europeans. Indian food is also very common as I am of Indian descent, it is what I love most. Their cuisine was one of the ways that the indentured labourers tried to hold on to their homeland and culture. Our proximity to South America has added the latin influences, being an island in the Caribbean has meant that fresh fish and lots of tropical fruits and vegetables are a big part of our cuisine. I will conclude by saying that our food is ABSOLUTELY delicious and I can almost guarantee that if you have sampled all our foods, you'd find at least one that will become a favourite.