“Cooking Class”
by Rachel Feller

Smith College Junior Year in Geneva

The scent of potatoes, onions, and oil always filled my Geneva apartment. In the morning when Phillipp cooked his German rösti, the smell of grated, fried potatoes and onions blended with the aroma of coffee. At lunch, Matt frequently burned his typical British dish of cubed red potatoes, onions, and meat. In the evening, Sayouba prepared his traditional Burkina Faso stews, always beginning by sautéing potatoes and onions in oil before adding vegetables and meats that simmered for over an hour. Even Serela’s Sri Lankan vegetable curries usually included our apartment’s staples. When Maria-Reina missed home, she cooked her favorite Spanish cuisine, most often Spanish tortilla, a traditional omelet of fried onion and potato slices. For the month of Ramadan, Abdel-Malek prepared hearty Algerian evening meals, combining his grandmother’s hand-made couscous with roasted potatoes, onions, chick peas, cinnamon, cumin, and olive oil, and invited Muslim and non-Muslim friends alike to dine together.

I never cooked with potatoes. I didn’t even know how to cook traditional American food. So I made it my goal to learn about my roommates’ traditional cuisines. Thus the first few months of the year became my intensive, international, nutritional education. I learned about different kinds of curry powders, how to flip a tortilla, and how Ramadan played a significant role in Algerian culture. Cooking together led to discussion of the culture of tea time in England, the experience of living in a Burkinabe family that practices polygamy, and what it was like to grow up in Communist Germany.

Just as my flat mates brought the world map to life for me, I became a new face of America for them. Even amongst a group of highly-educated, potential international leaders, my apartment mates expressed surprise that I wished to learn about their cultures, histories, and politics. What they did not realize was that as much as they enjoyed telling me about their lives back home, I had an even greater desire to listen and learn. I felt like the international students with whom I lived knew so much more about the United States than I did about their home cultures. My year in Geneva provided me with an opportunity to make up for lost time.

In December, after months of living in an apartment that smelled of onions, potatoes, and oil, I finally contributed my own cooking. For the Jewish festival of Chanukah, I decided to throw a big party. Since I was the first Jewish person that most of my Swiss and international friends had met, I thought that this provided the perfect opportunity to begin dialogue. After calling my parents for recipes, scrambling around Geneva to find a menorah and dreidels, translating the Hebrew prayers into French and French transliteration, and buying and grating pounds of potatoes and onions, I began to fry latkes. By the time that my Swiss friends arrived so that we could begin the celebration together at sundown, my clothes reeked and the kitchen was a disaster. But as I began to tell the story of Chanukah before I lit the candles for the first night, I truly appreciated the cross-cultural opportunities living in Geneva offered me. My friends asked questions about the rituals and chuckles as they struggled to read along in the French transliterations of the prayers. Over a dinner of Chanukah latkes, my international roommates, my Swiss university friends, and I laughed and shared stories about our own families’ traditions and holidays. Students from almost every continent sat together not as people from different nationalities, religions, or political views, but as friends.

I still might not be the world’s greatest chef. But what I gained in the process of my Swiss cooking lessons will remain with me longer than any recipe. In Geneva, I discovered that some things do not discriminate between countries on a map or religious affiliation. Potatoes, onions, and oil allow everyone to express their individuality, whether they are a Muslim from Burkina Faso, a Protestant from East Germany, or a Jew from the United States.

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