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Third Culture Foods
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By definition, third culture is blending another culture with your parent’s culture, so your culture ends up neither one nor the other.
I think we blend foods too - at least I do. For example, I grew up eating fresh tofu (as opposed to packaged supermarket tofu, ugh), since my mother’s third culture was Japanese/Hawaiian and that got passed down to me. Actually, I lived in Hawaii for awhile too. Anyway, she’s also Dutch, and chocolate is a very big cultural food with the Dutch, so I also grew up having chocolate sprinkles on my buttered toast in the morning (hagelslag), as this is a Dutch breakfast tradition.
The TCK part begins when we’d mix Japanese with Dutch - we used to take fresh tofu, and pour chocolate syrup and sprinkles on it and eat it with (gasp) a knife and fork for dessert. The first time I told a Japanese person that, they were horrified and disgusted. Chocolate and tofu? Eeew eeew yuk! They actually doubled over and looked like they were going to vomit… I never told another Japanese person about it after that….
And, we eat sardines straight out of a can with fork or chopsticks, horrifying our Filipino friends who eat sardines but always in recipes and never straight alone.
It must be a TCK thing, eating other culture’s foods, but not quite properly, or mixing them in strange ways with our own culture’s foods. Anyone else do strange TCK concoctions like my chocolate-syrup-and-sprinkles-on-tofu dessert?
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July 21st, 2008 at 9:16 pm
WOW this is SO Weird… I thought of making this exact post today!! haha
I thought I ate weird stuff, until I saw my TCK cousins mixing strawberry jam with goat cheese …. for breakfast.
Another cousin puts Ketchup on toast. Yes, just Ketchup.
I wonder how much of that is being a TCK, and how much is just being… cooking challenged?
BTW, is it just me or does the first toast like look Mickey Mouse?
Great idea Jack, you’re making some interesting posts.
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July 21st, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Haha yea… When I lived in Pakistan, I’d often eat my chapati with these Eritrean dishes my mom would make. One of which was grinded raw meat, heated on a stove [I’m not going to type the name because I have no idea how to spell it]. I didn’t really like the curry our cook would make so I would eat my chapati with the raw meat instead. He would look at me like I was crazy… but hey, it tasted good.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 am
Brice.. I have ketchup and toast too! lol. Sometimes I have mashed potatoes with Indian gravies…which sounds weird but I’ve had some pretty awesome results :)/
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July 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 am
It wasn’t so long ago that a few friends and I had late night munchies, made some quick spaghetti with tomato sauce, ran out of forks, and I ate them with chopsticks. They’re still noodles, after all.
Generally I don’t mix much in the way of foods, though when I really cook, I don’t hold back on ingredients when I experiment.
For example, I’ve been known to toss jalapeños into stir fries, and add some European herbs (Rosemary, usually) into Asian cooking.
At home though, my mother loves to try new things she knows is good. Moving to Europe, she got to try Turkish kebabs, and can kind of make it. The same with different Japanese foods, based on what we’ve had in restaurants. And just about anything else she really likes.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 1:09 am
I generally don’t mix foods either, but I can’t stand eating one kind of food for a long time. After eating pasta day after day after day - I’ll start wanting to eat Indian food or Chinese food. I just had my funny craving for Indian food this past month in fact and had to make it myself as the nearest Indian restaurant was closed.
I also have my cravings for specific things like Marmite/Vegemite which I bought after going without it for 5 years in Spain.
If you look in my cupboard you’ll see a jar of peanut butter, Marmite and Nutella sitting side by side.
Oh…yeah. There is something I do that’s really odd. This is something I started to do when I had a craving for Japanese pickles and rice years ago.
I eat pickled green olives (a certain type they have in Spain) sprinkled with Soy Sauce with a bowl of rice. I usually do this during the summer….like now - when I’m feeling kind of weak.
The other odd thing I eat is like a corrupted version of ‘nikujaga’ (potatoes, onions and meat) - which I make using potatoes, Spanish Pancetta, onions and radishes (those little red ones). I sprinkle sugar, soy sauce and Chinese rice wine over it and bake it in the oven at 250C for 60 minutes.
I hope this was weird enough. :p
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July 22nd, 2008 at 4:35 am
Hagelslag! Yeah…I love hagels on toast, as a topping for ice-cream, mixed w/peanut butter and spread on bagels (how come bagels and hagels are pronounced the same?) or crackers, etc., etc.
I have to drive down to the “Asian” side of town to buy the Ritz brand of Hagelslag, as it is not carried anywhere else in the Atlanta area. At the same shop where I purchase Ritz Hagelslag, I also get Thai Coffee, ABC Kecup Manis, and Maggi Soy. It’s a great little shop - while I am shopping, the owner stays busy watching a Vietnamese soap opera on TV, while simultaneously separating leaves of spinach. Amazing!
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July 22nd, 2008 at 4:36 am
that should be “How come bagels and hagels are NOT pronounced the same?”
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July 22nd, 2008 at 4:52 am
Hagelslag sounds really interesting, I’d love to try it!
Well the weirdest I’ve eaten yet is McDs icecream and chips together. XD
But usually I eat rice with just about anything, not just chinese dishes. I’ve been known to eat rice with those pork chops and steaks that most normal western people would eat alone with potatoes or something. Sometimes when we run out of vermicelli noodles [bee/mee hoon?] I use spaghetti to compensate. And- Uncle Dan- YES! I’ve done that before as a kid when I was just learning how to eat pasta whilst trying out my newfound handy dandy skills with chopsticks, and decided that since spag looked like noodles, it’d be alright to just use chopsticks. XD I know better now, but sometimes when the fancy strikes, I’ll just pick up a pair of chopsticks and wolf down my pasta with them. =)
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July 22nd, 2008 at 6:45 am
Oh, I also routinely mix sauces.
Let’s say you cook two dishes. There’s leftover sauce for one, and still some meat/veggies in the other.
I will happily mix them, figuring that in general it’s still good, or possibly even better.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 10:18 am
Today my partner put chili con carne on the pizza before it went into the oven and he’s not even a TCK. Maybe that’s why I can live with this guy :p
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July 22nd, 2008 at 11:34 am
I made an apple pie, an American iconic dish, but I put cardamon, cloves and honey (not cinnamon) in it without a second thought. Where I grew up, cardamon, not sugar, makes a dish a dessert. My husband loved it, but the rest of his family thought it was strange.
In the land of breakfast burritos, I eat chapati and scrambled eggs for breakfast and with real chai - not the slop from Starbucks.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Not mine, but when my buddy from Perth came up to visit a few years ago, he put vegemite all over a bunch of stuff. How he put that vile shit on ANY food is beyond me, so seeing that awful stuff on almost every sandwich he made (regardless of whether there was meat on it or not), was horrifying.
I’m not so sure how much this qualifies, but a few years ago, my mom made some spectacular chocolate-chip lamingtons.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Brice - goat cheese with jam? I love that! I usually mix apricot jam with it though, not strawberry, and it’s great.
And I noticed more than one person on here mentioned chapatis - I miss those! Now I have to go eat some!
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July 23rd, 2008 at 6:51 am
MajorTom- I could not agree with you more…*shudder* The thought of vegemite on ANYTHING creeps me out.
There’s this advert going around Perth now where they ask you how you like your vegemite. I’vve seen people just eat it straight out of the tub, some, like you said, just glomping on their sandwhiches, and apparently there’s a series of these adverts coming out, so I haven’t seen the others yet.
I swear vegemite is the only thing I’ve never truely been able to get used to.
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July 23rd, 2008 at 8:29 am
Vegemite is an acquired taste and not something you usually acquire after you are past a certain age. I eat it myself, but I’d never offer it anyone who didn’t ask for it. That said I wouldn’t offer Kalles to many people either unless I knew they liked fish roe - and I’d tell them what it is. I would not slip it into every sandwich and have people biting into them and screaming and throwing up all over the place because I didn’t tell them I was putting fish roe in the sandwiches. That would be a waste of a lot of good food. So it makes me wonder what your friend was thinking when he put Vegemite on everything :p
I think we all just need to respect that there are some things that give us the creeps and there are some things that will give the creeps to other people.
For example for me it’s mustard and vinegar.
It’s like a vampire and holy water or Ayako and mustard/vinegar.
If you threw the stuff on me I would be screaming. If you sprinkled vinegar on the doorstep and rubbed mustard all over the door knob, I wouldn’t enter that house.
Now you know how to keep me out of your flat or house. It’s very easy really - and can be done with stuff that’s in your very own kitchen at almost no cost!
I don’t know how many meals I’ve had to sit through feeling nauseous because people were using vinegar or mustard at the table.
Vinegar is especially bad because you can smell it.
The worst incident was at a German household where the mother had been warned about my near hysteria regarding mustard and she made a mustard sauce for the fish…because she ‘forgot’. She also seemed to forget a lot that I couldn’t stomach vinegar and put it in a lot of things.
I put the fish in my mouth and I could taste the mustard, and I wanted to throw-up but was too polite to and I swallowed it, mainly because I was 40 years old and sitting at a dinner at someone’s house and 40 year olds do not spit out their food unless it’s at their own home and nobody is watching.
What was annoying about the mother of this household was that she has a long list of things she couldn’t eat:
1. Olives
2. Olive Oil
3. Soy Sauce
4. Chinese food
5. Legumes
6. Anything that’s not western food is not food to her
7. A lot of western food that’s not something Germans traditionally eat is also ‘iffy’
…and yet she has no respect for other people who can’t eat some of the things she eats :p
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July 23rd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
@ AYAKO
Damn. I guess I can’t invite you over for dinner when I cook Southern Thai food. My cucumber salad that accompanies the satay is the best…but it utilizes vinegar
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July 23rd, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I eat natto sandwiches (because I don’t have a rice cooker.) I told one of my Japanese friends about it and she was like “that’s weird. I don’t do that, because I’m Japanese.” For those who don’t know, natto is fermented soybeans. It tastes exactly like it sounds. There’s no way you can like it if you didn’t grow up eating it, and it has a really, uh…pungent smell. I also eat couscous but eat it with sugar and milk and cinnamon, rather than…the normal way of eating it. That’s all I can think of right now.
Goat cheese and jam sounds amazing. I can’t afford goat cheese, but that sounds sooooooooooo good…
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July 23rd, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Ha-ha Ayako, I’m almost the same, except my nemesises are vinegar and ketchup. Apparently though I’m not the only one who almost vomits at the smell of ketchup… once on the set of a short film we had ketchup mixed into the fake blood recipe and I was applying the blood to an extra’s face and the main actor ran about fifteen feet away and stood with his hands over his nose, saying the smell of ketchup made him nauseaus. But since I was the one applying the make up I had no hands free to cover MY nose…
BTW it never occured to me anyone would find fish roe gross. I mean, caviar is a delicacy, right? And when we were fishing on the reservation and we’d pull up a female fish full of roe, we’d clean eat it. Come to think of it, most fisherman who open up a fish and find it full of eggs dump all the roe in the trash.
One food I’ve found which no non-Dutch person can handle, strangely, is salt licorice. To me, real licorice is supposed to have salt in it, that’s how I grew up. I like double salt and triple salt licorice too. But give it to anyone who’s not Dutch and they’re spitting and gagging. I only ever found one non-Dutch person who liked it. I wonder why that is - do Dutch people like salt licorice because they’ve grown up eating it from little, or because we actually have genetic taste preferences hardwired into our tastebuds?
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July 24th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Haha, yeah, at the moment, what you say makes sense Ayako. My brother and my dad have learnt to eat it, but the females of the household have a passionate hatred for Vegemite. I used to eat bovril with prridge [is it just me or does anyone else do this?] but now I’d just use soya sauce.
Ahhh, Jackrabbit: I agree with the ketchup. I don’t get nauseaus, but I dislike the taste instensely. And cooked whole tomatoes are another thing, lol. I hace no idea what makes them so sour.
Fish roe is good.
Wouldn’t eat it in a sandwhich though. XD
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