My love of travel and marriage to a Brit have meant that, at the age of 41, I have made a home in four countries outside the U.S. Throughout my life as an expat, food has always been my favorite portal to a culture: A country reveals itself in the way it breaks bread. In Singapore, citizens belied their buttoned-up reputation in the raucous aisles of the evening hawker stalls, where my favorite meal was nasi goreng, served up on a plastic plate and washed down with a large bottle of Tiger beer. In Berlin, pragmatic stereotypes prevailed, and I acquired a Teutonic appreciation for the importance of the first meal of the day, Frühstück. And in England, where I have lived the longest, I made a rookie error in assuming the tourist staple of high tea at a fancy hotel was the country’s quintessential meal, prim and proper as the Queen herself. It turns out that Sunday lunch, a far more languorous affair, holds that mantel. In the below excerpt from Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage, my memoir of life in the English Cotswolds, I recount one of my favorite experiences of this most British of meals…Read the rest over on Transitions Abroad, who were kind enough to post the excerpt.
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