Young Writers Society

Everyone has a favorite food. I mean, everyone has to eat, and we'd probably all rather eat one thing than another. We all have different cultures and backgrounds, too, that influence what we eat.

So what are some of your favorite foods from your cultural background?

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Personally, my family's culture is a giant mix and match game, especially since my grandparents were all in the military, so my parents got a lot of exposure to culture outside of their vaguely white American and Canadian backgrounds. My mom lived in Turkey for years (and in Italy for a while) as a kid, and as a result, my family eats a lot of Turkish and Mediterranean foods. I practically grew up begging my parents for baklava, haha, and thankfully South Florida had a big enough Greek community that food wasn't hard to find.

I looooove baklava as a sweet even now, and I've grown into loving gyros (especially with tzatziki), stuffed grape leaves, and yogurt (even if I can't eat a lot of that at once).

What about y'all?

Hmm, my background is kind of a mix too. We have Scottish, English, Dutch (I believe), but mostly Ukrainian (and that's the side of the family I seem to take after, looks-wise). So I grew up on borscht and holopchi. Also, I'm not sure if it is a traditional Ukrainian dish, but sauerkraut chicken is awesome <3 My grandma used to make it with goose but we use chicken for reasons.

But we also grew up with things like shortbread, and yorkshire puddings reflecting the other end of things.

(I love borscht)

EDIT: We also love dishes like curry... we eat a lot of curry.

I'm from Britain, which is pretty multicultural so I ate various foods growing up, but in terms of traditional English food (since I'm English as well as British), chips are my absolute favourite.

For those of you who aren't British, chips are sort of like fries, except they're thicker than American-style ones. They taste really good when they've been deep-fried, and if you go to a traditional English chippie (chip shop) and you time it right, you can get a batch of chips which have been in the deep fryer for enough time that the chips have gone brown and greasy. I like to have just salt and vinegar with mine, but you can often get grated cheese on them as well. And obviously, a lot of people like to have battered fish with their chips (hence the "fish" in the phrase "fish and chips") but I personally find the batter too unhealthy, so I just buy a carton of chips on their own.

Speaking of cheese, I'm a fan. Wensleydale is one of my favourites, which is an English cheese, and I like more regular cheeses like Cheddar and Red Leicester. They taste good on crackers, but continental cheeses such as Edam and Brie are really good in things like salads.

Other great English foods include chocolate digestive biscuits, bourbon / custard creams, meat pies and of course the traditional English breakfast. However, a lot of the foods I like are either pretty ubiquitous or come from cultures other than the UK, so as long as something isn't too spicy then I usually enjoy it.

There's a lot of Italian background in my family, so we have the family pasta sauce that my dad's side of the family has always made, which was never written down until he wanted to make it after he and my mom got married. He called his mom to find out the recipe and she was like, "I don't have a recipe. Your grandma just always threw it together." So he had to get the recipe from his grandma, and then it got typed up and added to Sarah's Big Blue Book of Recipes.

Hence those jarred pasta sauces from the grocery store are disgusting and I can't eat them. They're usually too sugary. Ick.

The Blue Book is the family cookbook, which started off as a binder my mom used for recipes she collected from magazines and grew into two binders plus random papers stuffed in the pockets. I have my own copy now (which only includes recipes I liked) and have been adding other recipes to it. My sister and her husband have their own copy, too. Plus it's now international, as my friend took several recipes from it to Japan with her so she'd be able to cook!

BlueAfrica wrote:
Hence those jarred pasta sauces from the grocery store are disgusting and I can't eat them. They're usually too sugary. Ick.

You don't need a "hence", those are objectively disgusting. I don't like American style "Italian food" at all. Actual Italian food is probably wonderful though.