The delicacies we leave behind

Everybody on the expat circuit has some delicacies from home that they pine for.  After writing about shopping in Kazakh supermarkets I started thinking about what I cannot live without.  I think, because I have moved around all my life I am both lucky and unlucky in this regard.  Most countries I have lived in have left me with some absolute 'must have' item that I miss when I leave.  This gives me more to miss but also means that I am used to doing without a lot of the things I love.

Some things are more difficult to get than others.  My favorite food is a gammon roast - not easy to find in some places.   Pork Products can be difficult to source in the Middle East and expensive when you do find them, I did find gammon here in Astana but when I cooked it it turned out to be ordinary pork - quite pleasant but not what I was looking for.    But then you always miss what you cannot have: in Nigeria we could get a most amazing array of local fruits but we could not get apples.  Every time I came home for the holidays I would bring a bag of them with me.  My mother would slice and freeze these.  I don’t recall that we ever used these in baking or fruit salads but single slices would be taken from the freezer as a special treat on difficult days.

When I was very young my favourite treat, on visiting my relatives in Ireland, was to eat a Creme Egg.  This is a deliciously disgusting Easter confection popular in the UK and Ireland consisting of low cocoa chocolate and creamy fondant.  Even today I have to limit myself to just one as they are incredibly addictive.  I have found a recipe for homemade eggs but they are even more lethal than the processed version.  100% sugar!

Ontbijtkoek from the Netherlands, a real favourite with me but
I have to make my own if I want to eat it.

My current 'must haves' are the things I go and buy straight away as soon as I return to a certain country.  In the UK it is a gammon roast and Aussie Mega shampoo, in the Netherlands a Krokett and Ontbijtkoek with a trip to the pharmacy for some Henna Plus hair balm.  When I am in Turkey I stock up on Lokum, Apple Tea and Mavi jeans (to my mind the most comfortable jeans in the world).  I have not been back to Nigeria or Venezuela since we moved away but were I to return I would make a beeline for a can of Limca (a sour lemon fizzy drink which comes, originally, from India) and churros respectively.  My husband really misses red Leicester cheese (a typical English cheese that is excellent on sandwiches) and pickles/chutneys.  I sometimes make a batch at home to use on sandwiches although perhaps not as often as I should.  We were thinking about what we will miss when we leave Astana - my husband will miss the very tasty shashlik (grilled kabab style meat) and I will miss pelmeni, a ground meat dumpling wrapped in thin dough.

Many of my British friends love Marmite (I cannot stand the stuff and was almost ill the one and only time I ate it), this is difficult to buy outside of the UK, other items my British friends seem to miss are Cadbury's chocolate and biscuits such as Bourbons and Custard Creams.  Rather inexplicably plain black tea seems to be on the list, although it is easily found just about everywhere in the world.  My English relatives joke that I just cannot understand how important the right tea is, an English tea company even exploited this habit by using it as the joke in an advertising campaign they were running - quite funny but oh so true. My Dutch friends have similar difficulties finding delicacies from home. 

Good old fashioned English scones are another yummy delicacy we
have to make at home.

As the world becomes smaller and supply chains easier to manage it becomes easier for supermarkets to devote sections to expatriates.  Many British supermarkets have a Polish Section for Polish expatriates living and working in the UK who want a taste of home.  Most large British towns have an oriental supermarket and online retailers will ship anywhere in the world.  I have a catalogue that lists all sorts of delicacies that can be delivered anywhere in the world but this ends up being very expensive so we tend to live on what we can get in the local supermarkets without hankering too much for what we can't.  I do, however, stockpile a little, when I first arrived in Astana I could not find muscovado sugar, it is easy enough to make a substitute but when I found it in stock one day I bought four kilogrammes.  I have not seen it since so it was a good call.    

Every now and then, however, it is great to have a treat or to lift the spirits so I stuff the empty corners of my suitcases with treats and keep one or two packets of biscuits stashed away at the back of a cupboard.  We all need to feel a connection with home from time to time whether it is apples in Nigeria, custard creams in Astana or Ontbijtkoek (Breakfast Cake), Kroketten or  Hagelslag (Chocolate sprinkles for sandwiches) just about anywhere outside of the Netherlands.

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Click on the picture for more posts on the challenges of expat cooking.

Click on the picture for more posts on the challenges of expat life.