Warming Up - Exercise 2

Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Cooking I Learned in Moldova

or

Please Forgive Me, Mrs. Farden

Please forgive me, Mrs. Farden.  I suppose those of you reading this don’t know Mrs. Farden.  To clarify, Mrs. Farden was my home economics teacher in 8^th grade.  I learned a great deal from her about cooking.  But I learned the most important lessons years later – in Moldova.  In fact, Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Cooking I Learned in Moldova.

I suppose many of you reading this don't know where Moldova is either.  A lot of people think I made up the place when I have told stories of my experiences there. But I actually lived in Moldova twice.  The first time was from 1977 to 1978 when I taught English at the University in Iasi, Romania.  Iasi is the capital of the Romanian province of Moldova.  The second time was from 1992 to 1994 when I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Chisinau, Moldova.  Both Moldovas are small little places that don’t get much attention.  Nor, for that matter, much food.

During my first Moldovan experience, I learned to cook when there was almost no food – or at least little variety.

During my second Moldovan experience, I learned to cook without a kitchen.

The first lesson I learned is that the Department of Agriculture food pyramid isn’t the only one.  The Moldovan food pyramid consists of white vegetables, green vegetables, yellow vegetables, poultry, and sour cream.

The second lesson:  vegetables that fit into more than one of the food pyramid categories are better.  Cabbage, for example, is both a white vegetable and a green vegetable.  In fact, I think the term “food pyramid” comes from the 20-foot high pyramids of cabbage I saw outside the village produce markets as I drove around the country.

So just how did I learn to cook in Moldova?  First, I checked out all the markets to figure out what always seemed to be available:  chicken was one of them.  Then I checked out the poultry section of Joy of Cooking in search of recipes that called for as many of those items as possible.  And when I ran out of those, I started making a list of substitutions.  I evaluated each item in the recipe to determine what it contributed to the final product:  flavor, texture, bulk, color, thickening or even if the item was optional.  Then I figured out what substitutions were available.  

How did this work?  Let’s try a recipe:  Coq au vin.

Ingredient	Contribution	Substitutions
Chicken	bulk and flavor	No problem – chicken
onions	texture and flavor	cabbage
mushrooms	texture and flavor	optional
garlic	flavor	onions
bay leaves	flavor	basil
thyme	flavor	basil
red wine	flavor and thinning agent	No problem – red wine or beer or water

butter	flavor	oil
oil	flavor	butter
flour	thickening agent	bread crumbs or sour cream
salt and pepper	flavor	optional

   

Get the picture?  Beef stroganoff became chicken stroganoff served over sauteed slices of cabbage.  Lasagna became chicken chunks in tomato sauce layered over slices of cabbage.  Salad?  Coleslaw, of course!  

But the real challenge waited for me until I was assigned to the country of Moldova in 1992 where I lived in an apartment that was huge by Moldovan standards – a large living room, separate dining room, a bedroom, entry way, bathroom and guest bathroom.  But no kitchen.  I couldn’t let this stop me.  After all, with occasional support flights from Frankfurt, I didn’t have to do without food this time – just without a kitchen.

While it may be distasteful to some, the only available room to turn into a kitchen was the bathroom.  We modified a Walmart build-it-yourself bookshelf to fit over the bidet to serve as our cupboard.  A card table was the counter for the microwave oven, an electric wok and a sandwich maker to complete our kitchen.

The wok was the centerpiece of the kitchen.  In it I cooked roasts, vegetables, rice and pasta.  And I served meals to as many as a dozen hungry construction workers by this means.  For dessert:  fresh bread spread with jam sprinkled with nuts, toasted in the sandwich maker became faux turnovers.  I could even make a decent cake in the microwave oven.

When my husband and I left Moldova, we thought we had left the need to improvise in the kitchen behind as well.  But global climate change events have made me recall all the lessons I learned in Moldova.  The images of thousands of people stranded in Louisiana and Mississippi and New York after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, with little more than their ingenuity to solve problems brought the image of my Moldovan kitchen to mind.  And when we remodeled our kitchen, I put my Moldovan lessons into practice again.