Practicing culinary diplomacy
About a month ago my new boss asked me if I could cook some Ukrainian dish for him since he’s never tried it. “Ohhh no…It’s not a good idea,” I thought. (Saying out loud “Of course! My pleasure!”). The reason I was frightened by this request is not that I’m a bad cook, I’m a decent one, I think. The reason is a weird coincidence I’ve noticed: almost every time I cook for someone some peculiar or simply not positive things happen to my relationship with those people. Spoiler of the story with a boss: I did cook for him. One week later we had a serious conflict, and I was even thinking to leave this workplace because of it.
Nevertheless, since there’s a part of comedy in every tragedy (and vice versa, obviously), all of these cooking stories of mine have also a funny side. And a romantic one….
A couple of years ago I had an admirer from Puerto Rico. During one of his visits, I decided to cook him a Ukrainian-Soviet style lunch: to cook crepes, make a traditional beet salad and some sandwiches with red caviar and smoked fish. I got all required ingredients two hours before his arrival. How successful was my cooking attempt, what do you think? It was a failure. Something happened that day, and all my crepes were coming out lumpy or simply burned! Good for me, back then I was living in a Soviet-Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn, so I had time to run into the store and to simply buy crepes. However, the Puerto Rican wasn’t exited neither about crepes, nor about beet salad and sandwiches with the caviar. It didn’t upset me. I was even pretty happy to have all those delicious foods only for myself! (Sandwiches with caviar serve as a good snack for Cuba-libre, by the way.)
To smooth out the situation, I decided to cut some papaya for my admirer - so he can eat something he’s familiar with. When I was doing it, I got a call from my mom. When she saw the way, I was cutting papaya, she said that this is the way how people cut food for a livestock... I parried that I’m a Ukrainian woman and I don’t have to know how to deal with papaya! I have to know how to make crepes (Of course not telling the fact of buying them at the nearest store an hour ago. Well, two-thirds of me is Jewish.)
Probably, soviet food was something that didn’t impress the Puerto Rican guy at all, so the next day he invited me to a Michelin restaurant in Manhattan. (I can’t say the food there was significantly better than my caviar sandwiches, though.)
The story with this guy ended up pretty trivially: he started sending me some creepy messages, and I blocked him.
The next situation happened with my American I-don’t-know-who David (In the states very often it’s hard to say: know who is who to whom in the relationship.) I don’t know what happened to me that day, but I decided to bake David a cake. The simplest one, but a cake. So, in the best characteristics of a pathetic female genre, I put on a beautiful dress and went to his home with a cake. Honestly, I don’t remember what happened that night, but the next morning I came back home crying and carrying back a half of the cake. By the way, it was very delicious.
The most grateful admirers of my cooking were my Polish home mate and my ex-French boyfriend.
For the first one, obviously, I didn’t cook anything. From time to time I was just giving him to try something I was cooking for myself. One day he was even lucky to get some varenyky - Ukrainian traditional dumplings. (It takes so much effort to cook them – I hate it.) The polish liked everything. Even too much. To that scale that once, he probably decided to look for some varynyky in my room when I wasn't at home…When I came back from vacation and found the signs of his searching, I was more than surprised!... The guy turned out to be kind of a psycho, and the way I escaped from him deserves another post.
Keeping in mind all these unsuccessful experiments, I decided to take it easy when I met my French love. For our first dinner together, I cooked rice (put some salt in it, yes), cut some tomato (a bit better than I cut papaya) and cooked some yucca - a root popular in African and Latin American cuisines. What can be easier? Yes, you read it correctly: rice, tomato and a root for a French guy. Surprisingly, he actually liked it, and when I came to France to visit him, he even asked me to cook yucca for his father! Unfortunately, I didn’t stop with a yucca. Me and my big mouth: I offered to cook traditional Ukrainian soup – Borsht, for the mother of my boyfriend. As you can guess, last time I’d cooked it was…never.
Long story short: I called my mom whining that in this case the method “to cut like for a livestock” won’t work out and I did have to cook Borsht properly. Not to beat around the bush: the soup came out being very tasty. The family of my ex liked it (however, they were so kind and cultured in general, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were pretending enjoying it so to not make me upset.) The only tricky thing was: while cooking it, I asked the mother of my boyfriend if she would like to help me? Of course, the kind well-mannered woman said “yes.” And the kind but the short-sighted woman – I, asked her to peel the beets…Jesus Christ…You should’ve seen the color of the delicate soft fingers of a French music teacher… Bright purple color stained into them after first minute of her help. “Tomorrow my students will think that I killed somebody” carefully joked the sweet French woman. “You killed me” though I with shame.
Looking back at these stories, I think I’d better play safe: keep making only rum and coke, fried bananas and cooked yucca. They haven’t harmed anybody yet!