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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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