On Jul 13, 2005, at 16:45, Joy Beeson wrote:
*More* sugar than American peanut butter? GAAAH!
Yesterday I went up and down the bread aisle muttering
"If I wanted to to eat cake, I'd buy cake!"
*Everything* in America has sugar in it.
Including *pickles* :) I buy pickled herring (can't find any fresh,
from a barrel), ditch its brine, make new brine, then let the herring
sit in it for a few days before I eat it... You also use *salt* in
everything, including cakes - that's why you need so much sugar :)
As to who doesn't have what...
Poland doesn't have peanut butter (though you may now be able to buy
it, imported). It's an acquired taste, and since I never acquired it, I
don't care what the stores here carry.
Poland doesn't have salted butter. Since I'm able to find unsalted
here, I'm happy. Salted butter is another taste I never acquired :)
Unseasoned (hamburger) or over-seasoned (hot-dogs) meat is another
thing I never miss. We have our own versions of both, and I pig out on
them whenever I visit (just as I do on all other things I can't get in
US).
DH loves green tomatoes, but he bakes, not fries, them. He indulges in
them when the season is almpost over, and frost threatens to kill hte
plants. I love the red ones from the garden (he just brought in the
first two, today. One for each of us. Yum <g>)
Poland doesn't have sour-mash bourbon - a taste I acquired very fast,
so I take a half-gallon with me every time I go :)
Poland doesn't *grow* a lot of fruits that are available here - we
don't have enough sun - but we have them all; imported. So I knew
watermelon from childhood.
The list of "t'other way 'round" is mammoth - very few comfort foods
from my childhood are available here (esp in a small town like mine).
So I either make them myself, or pig-out while in Poland, or settle on
half measures while visiting DS in Northern CA (San Francisco has a
very good Polish deli)
Martha Krieg wrote:
I grew up having bread with supper every night, and potatoes every
night we didn't have something like chop suey that takes rice - but I
don't put bread on the table for dinner, and we often don't have a
starchy food with it, either.
<VBG> My mother's mantra had always been: "we are not as poor as the
Russians, so we do not have to have bread *and* potatoes (or rice, or
pasta) together". The aim was to have a piece of meat (or fish), a
starch (potato, rice, pasta, *or* bread, if she didn't feel much like
cooking), a raw veg and a cooked veg (the cooked being a soup, as often
as not. Otherwise, the raw veg became a piece of fruit).
Imagine my surprise, when I came here - to *rich* America - and was
offered bread with my dinner, which had a starch on the plate already!
I never told my mother about it, because I could hardly wait till she
came to visit and was offered same :)
Also from Martha:
More of a problem even than eating fried food is the non-walkability
of American suburbs.
And I think that's really the crux of the matter - the lack of
exercise. A lot of Polish food *is* fried and, while I no longer cook
that way for DH, I still indulge myself once in a while. Not *deep
fried* - nobody but a commercial establishment can afford it, and not
many Polish foods call for such cooking - but fat does improve the
taste (if you eat it right away; let it cool off and its hateful <g>)
to an extent. And, while the restaurant portions here are about twice
the size of those I remember from Poland (we didn't have "doggie bags";
you were still hungry, you ordered another dish), at home, they weren't
all that small, either - they were sized to suit. My father "ate enough
for a legion" and I not much less (once I started eating normally, at
about 12), while my mother "pecked around the edges".
But. She hardly moved, once she retired and didn't have her daily dose
of the walk to and from the tram-stop (ca 3/4 of a mile), while I still
had to (and, half of the time, it was simpler to just walk to school or
U, than wait for the - crowded - bus to take me the measly 3 stops),
and my father had made a fetish of exercising. So, she looked, *almost*
like what's now known as "an American whale" in Poland.
Though Poland is now getting more and more whales of its own. The food
habits are changing, but not much. OTOH, more and more people - of all
ages - are spending more and more time sittting (many, many,
reasons)...
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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