The California Petaluma Argus-Courier is a weekly paper published in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay area. They’ve just published an article by Houston Porter, their cuisine columnist, in which he tells how he celebrated Thanksgiving with a Basque menu.
We loved it. He started by explaining his family’s decision to celebrate such an important American holiday this way. They prepared a menu based on the traditions of one of their “favorite food-centric cultures: the Basques.”
And it’s not hearsay: they’ve been in the Basque Country. They’ve discovered our cider houses and the amazing ambience in side. They know our nation and our history, and the bases of our culture. And they tell all.
He even offers bibliographic references to the books on Basque cuisine that they’ve used to prepare the different dishes. According to him, these books take up a good part of the shelf space in their kitchen. And then he goes on to show how his family is steeped in the most basic essence of Basque gastronomic culture: they cooked enough food to feed a small army. And, of course, the menu is topped off with some Gazta-Tarta, the cheesecake created in San Sebastian that seems poised to take over the world.
This year, traveling is difficult to say the least, but the Porter family returned to our country through our food. We hope they’ll come back very soon, but this time in person!
Petaluma Argus-Courier – 1/12/2020 – USA
A very Basque Thanksgiving in Petaluma
One of the things we are most thankful for is the travel we have been able to enjoy over the past several years. We have met incredible people, basked in inviting cultures and have discovered some of the most delicious cuisine on the planet (always a prime driver when picking travel destinations). Since the travel lockdown, we have been revisiting some of our favorite food cultures through our own home cooking, with the help of a vast array of available cookbooks. So, as we approached Thanksgiving, with no immediately travel plans on the horizon, we decided to forgo the American tradition and instead, visited some traditions from one of our favorite food-centric cultures: the Basque.
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Last Updated on Jan 27, 2021 by About Basque Country
