Pack Rat In The Kitchen
I’ve been reading articles recently about how, with travel restricted due to COVID-19, people are looking to souvenirs to remind them of their past sojourns: a piece of beautifully designed Venetian glass, a framed pair of tickets to a coveted and sold-out concert at Wembley stadium, handmade woven baskets from the Caribbean, etc.
Unpacking boxes of long forgotten detritus, however, has been our primary distraction since moving to a new house just as coronavirus was breaking out in the United States in mid-March. We have the usual plethora of things that have moved with us many times, and yet stay in a state of entombment, untouched over and over again, until one day during lockdown we decide to confront what is actually in those dusty brown boxes with yellowing packing tape.
In going through those mostly un-treasurely chests, I haven’t found objet d’art, but rather some remnants that do bring back fond and funny memories of places we have visited. In a moldering box of kitchen spices, for example, I found a small jar of Folger’s coffee crystals, long ago expired. Since I can’t recall anyone I know voluntarily imbibing instant coffee since the 1970s, I had to ponder on that purchase. But in the same box was a recipe for coffee and pecan flavored cookies, from a B&B in Blenheim, New Zealand. It was on the grounds with a vineyard lodge, and the cookies were thoughtfully left in the house where a friend and I stayed in 2013, along with a bottle of sauvignon blanc as well as the recipe. I see now the recipe calls for “coffee powder” -- something that wasn’t then easy to locate in the United States (again given the post-disco era demise of a cup of Sanka in the morning) but was in fact pretty frequently found in New Zealand at the time. I don’t recall if I ever made them after leaving the South Island (the unopened jar is a clue), but I do remember they were delicious.
In a stack of foodie magazines in another box, I found an empanadas recipe from a hotel in Mendoza, Argentina. These, too, I remember fondly – they were ones my husband and I learned to make in a cooking class there. I don’t think we were able to make them as well as the chefs teaching us, but the recipe seems straightforward enough: flour, water, fat, steak and plenty of spicy seasoning. If the coronavirus flour shortage lets up anytime soon, we will give those a try as well.
In other foodie finds, we have discovered we have: not one but two olive oil dispensing cans from a shop in Normandy; an enticing but possibly past-its-reasonable-usable-life bottle of truffle oil from Lake Como; a surfeit of madeleine pans and assorted kitchen implements from E. Dehillerin in Paris (I think Julia Child bought less there than we have); some Swedish meatball sauce packets (no wait, those are from IKEA in Atlanta), an empty tin from some shortbread made in Edinburgh; mysterious and very pungent red tea I received as a gift at a business meeting in China; and salt from the Berchtesgaden mine in Bavaria.
The age of some of these items is truly embarrassing, but most are still consumable/usable. So, in the age of the staycation, we are working our way through our culinary travel supplies. Now back to that stash of Food & Wine issues from 2003!
-Laura Flippin
