On Friday, resident Jesuit Father Gene invited nine students to his apartment to cook and eat delicious Ibero-Latino food. It was a very fun night in which we shared laughs, spices, recipes, and stories about our first month in China.
To get the ingredients for the dishes, we went to South Market right next to our university and got fresh vegetables, fruits, meat, and spices. Then we went to his apartment on campus and started cooking! Being the only Hispanic person while cooking was an interesting experience; while I don’t know much about cooking, I felt excited to give my classmates a taste of my country’s food and try dishes from other Hispanic countries. I followed recipes by memory, handed down from my grandmother and mother. It was the first time I was cooking food from my home country of Spain by myself and I felt really proud of myself by being able to show my heritage through cuisine. Father Gene provided us with recipes, and all the dishes turned out amazing. From Central and South America, we made arroz con pollo, salsa, guacamole, shrimp and chicken quesadillas and from Spain, I made gazpacho and sangria and tortilla de patata with my friend Mike.
While my dishes are going to need more practice to end up perfect, everyone else’s foods turned out pretty and delicious. However, my sangria, made from watching my parents make it year after year at family parties, turned out exactly how I wanted it to: fruitful, fresh and light.
Father Gene will be doing this every month, providing ingredients and recipes to make dishes from different parts of the world. I had a great experience learning about cultures through food and I can’t wait to see what other amazing dishes we prepare in the future.
This is the first American edition of Anderson’s fascinating account of Britain’s first diplomatic mission to China in 1792. By the end of the eighteenth century the East India Company had been trading with Chinese merchants for two hundred years, but in a strictly limited way.
At the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, as the 18th century drew to a close, the Western world was eager for knowledge—driven by a philosophical movement that championed reason and science. King Louis XV of France asked for the advice of his trusted Minister of State, Henri Bertin, about how to reform the spirit of the nation, after giving it some thought, Bertin famously responded, “Sire, to inoculate the French with the Chinese spirit.”