Years ago, I met someone whose aim was to keep cooking tools to an absolute minimum, so when they moved, they could fit their core ‘kitchen’ into a shoebox. I can’t remember the full list but do remember they managed to fit in a small pan! As we’ve cooked in different kitchens over the past few weeks, traveling has brought into sharp focus what we would put in our ‘shoebox’ and what we rely on more than we know.
When looking for inspiration at a produce market, we fell into familiar patterns. ‘Ah, we could make that salad!’ one of us would say on spotting an ingredient, quickly followed by ‘but we don’t have a mandoline’ or ‘we could make that sauce’ followed by ‘ah, but we don’t have the mouli’. Being stripped of the tools we usually rely on pushed us out of our comfort zone (though we did make the salad, julienning everything into fine threads by hand, using our single knife).
Being in places where we’re not always speaking English is a challenge in itself. We recently raised a glass and confidently pronounced ‘Zum Wohl!’ (a German toast, which means ‘To health’). It was heard as: ‘To More!’ (which might actually be worth adopting). If a first-language ear is not attuned to a second-language speaker there can be moments lost in translation, not because we don’t know the words but because of how we say them.
It made me realise how conditioned I am to ‘hearing’ some ingredients in a certain way. And how unfamiliar ones force us to – quite literally – get in touch with our food, to taste, to think, to see the beauty. When pouring some local lentils into my hand to examine them more closely, the unique marbling made them look like tiny semiprecious gemstones. The hope is to be that attentive at home too.
And even if we know a word, we may not quite know how to hold it in our mouth. Perhaps in a similar way, I know cabbage but may not know exactly how to handle the flat, round variety at the market, shaped like a giant boiled sweet. But that innocent stumbling can lead to happy, uninhibited creation. And indeed, ‘To more!’ of that.
The tool constraint can do the same. Reading a story about a sourdough bakery one Sunday made me long for the taste of ‘my bread’. So, I got off the couch and mixed up a sourdough starter to see what would happen. Since the German word for flour is Mehl, it was christened Mehlissa (couldn’t resist). She went wild, bubbling up in the jar, strands of the foamy top pulling off as I opened the lid – it was a party in there.
She proved to be a one-hit wonder. The second, Mehlinda, was more restrained, steadier in her rise, the bubbles tiny, but she rose just as high. There was no scale, so I eyeballed the amount of flour – unheard of for someone used to weighing everything including the water. She wasn’t lovingly shaped and inverted from a basket onto a preheated baking steel, but poured into a small cake tin.
She rose, she developed a dark-gold crust, she tasted nothing like the bread I make at home. The crumb had a much finer pore, the flavour was astonishingly yeasty with no obvious acidity and there wasn’t enough salt (easily solved with enough salted butter). It was not a perfect loaf but showed it’s possible make bread, if you can find good-quality stoneground flour and have access to clean water, salt, and an oven.
There’s still part of me that’s tempted to add a small digital scale to our ‘shoebox’ for baking accuracy. But for now, in addition to what we originally packed, we’ve filled the gaps we’ve experienced with an effective vegetable peeler and a lightweight cherry-wood chopping board of perfect dimensions: 22cm x 12cm. (A pair of decent wineglasses would be in there too if they could be transported without risking breakage.)
It also got me thinking about adding some pantry items. Brandon’s life raft in the kitchen is having a big head of garlic on hand, mine is having some source of acidity. But shopping for vinegar can take a long time when you have no idea what you’re looking at. So maybe a small tide-over bottle until you have everything figured out. We found a honey vinegar from Greece that broadened our horizons. And maybe a small jar of sea salt.
Walking back from the market we passed our old address on Skalitzer Straße and the street art we knew and loved had been painted over with new work. At our most recent address in a row of apartment blocks overlooking a park, we’d gotten quite used to wondering who ‘Bibi and Steve’ were, the neon green names spray-painted across our front door. Until we arrived home one day to find it freshly painted, as if they were never there. A reminder of life’s transience, on a macro level with our environment, on a micro level with our tool kit, all of it nudging us to embrace evolution and be open to change.