East and West: how to dine, how to taste!

Rasha Almaqaleh

During my stay here in Western countries, I have noticed significant differences between Arabic and Western dining customs and taste preferences. I strongly believe that taste preference is something we grow up with and our tongues are accustomed to. Maybe that explains why sometimes what is deemed mouth-watering in one country might be considered in another one as puke-inducing, or as Ross said in Friends when he ate Rachel’s trifle “It tastes like feet!” 

While cultural differences are capable of causing a great deal of misunderstanding and awkward situations, they can be sometimes very amusing to observe and interesting to experience. Here are my observations about some of the differences between East and West in eating styles and taste preferences. 

Dining customs 

My brother, on the right, and his friends at dinner at his place

While people in the West are accustomed to eating at dining tables, many people in the Arabian Peninsula eat their meals on the floor. This is something that Westerners would never do unless they go on a picnic. In Yemen for example, every meal is an 'indoor picnic' in which a vinyl or plastic 'tablecloth' is placed on the floor, most probably in the living room. Then, people sit cheerfully in a circle around their meal and enjoyably eat together from one big plate. People in Yemen share food and eating from one plate is considered intimate and polite. If you ask to have your food in a separate plate, that could be rude and offensive; as if you were implying that your fellow diners are not clean or they have a contagious disease. 

Moreover, utensils such as forks and knives are not commonly used in the traditional Arabic dining. Only spoons are used to eat soups and some salads. Other than that, bread is the main utensil and it is used to scoop up the food. In the Western dining style, knives and forks are essential at the table. 'Etiquettely' speaking, a good diner is expected to hold the knife with their right hand while holding the fork with the left one. I personally think that whoever invented this style didn't obviously think of all the existing possibilities! In our culture, people ONLY eat with their right hand and using the left one in eating is literally ' off the table'. 

Spicy food

 Sometimes on the weekend, my husband and I buy Shawarma sandwiches from a Turkish restaurant. We order a spicy one for me and a non-spicy for my husband. Ironically, both sandwiches are not spicy. They almost taste the same to me.  

If you ask Western people whether they like spicy foods or not, the answer most probably is a  'Yes',  with a big smile! The funny thing is what is considered 'spicy' in Western culture is not even recognized as spicy in the East. 

Whipping cream

In Western cuisines, whipping cream is commonly used in soup recipes or with fish. The first time I saw fish with whipping cream was when a lovely friend invited us to a fine fish restaurant. We thought to ourselves that ‘fish is fish and no surprises there’. Well, we were terribly wrong!

 We decided to order whatever our ‘inviter’ was going to order and we didn’t even bother to read the menu carefully. And when our dishes arrived, it was quite a shock! There were three slices of fish topped with whipping cream and more shockingly the fish wasn’t even cooked! Later, after asking the waitress, we found out that the fish was not cooked at all. Instead, it was soaked for a while in a salty solution and then served with cream.

Even though whipping cream is not part of the Arabic cuisine, it is popularly known and widely used in the Arab world.  However, in Yemen for example, we use it ‘on our terms’! That means we add cream only to sweet dishes and desserts. When it comes to using whipping cream in Yemen, there are red lines that no one dare to cross. One of them is whipping cream and fish never meet on the same plate!

Coffee and tea

Coffee and tea are very important hot beverages all over the world. However, the ways these two magical drinks are prepared differ from one place to another. For example, we Yemenis prepare the tea by boiling the water on the stove in a special saucepan called ‘Jazwa’, which is designated to preparing tea or coffee. Then, we add the sugar, the tea, and as desired mint or ground /crushed Cardamom is added as a flavoring. The tea should be served scalding hot and we have the ability to drink it immediately once it is served.

As for coffee, the method of preparation is very similar to preparing tea. We boil the water in the Jazwa and then we add sugar and cardamom and ground coffee - and milk as desired. After that, we leave all the ingredients to boil for a while and then serve the coffee and drink it very hot, too. We enjoy the coffee that is prepared this way and that is probably why the popular Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote a poem, which was later sang by the famous Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife , saying : “I miss my mother’s coffee…” !

On the other hand, preparing coffee and tea in the West has been modernized. Western people don’t use the old saucepan-on-stove method anymore. Instead, they use special cooking appliances such as electrical kettles and coffee makers. While such appliances definitely make life easier, they don’t necessarily make beverages any tastier. Tea bags are very popular here in the West and all you need to do in order to drink a cup of tea is put a tea bag in a cup, boil some water with a water boiler then pour it in the cup. Does this method produce a decent cup of tea? Well, the answer depends completely on geography; people from the Arab world would most probably say ‘NO’ with are-you-kidding tone!

Preparing coffee in the Western world is a whole another story. This is a world where coffee machines control human beings. These powerful appliances come in different sizes, colors and shapes. I remember when we bought our first coffee machine, how we hovered around it trying to figure out how it worked. Thank God we live in the internet age; we found the answer in YouTube. With practice, we became experts at ‘machining’ coffee, and we discovered that this machine has a wonderful feature: whatever type of ground coffee you use or whatever the amount of water you add, you get each time the same awful taste. Such a quality! Moreover, as a person who comes from the East, I find that the cup of coffee produced this way is not hot enough or maybe it gets cold quickly which ruins the fun especially in wintertime. 

Ultimately, culture plays a major role in determining our taste preferences and how we eat our food. Observing these cultural differences at any rate is fascinating. It is a wonderful experience that is rich in details. Even though such details may seem sometimes inappreciable, they are important in drawing a complete picture of cultures and societies.