In the old days it was a quite common part of education to send the buds of society abroad where they should learn about other countries’ culture, language, ways of life, the arts and the traditional cuisine.

Travelling has nothing to do with the tourism of today; a traveller takes his/her time, makes contact with the people he meets on the road, people he finds in local inns, he will sit down with and talk or rather listen to, or with just ordinary people he meets during their daily routines; from those the traveller will start to understand the mentality of a people. I have just finished reading a book by an English author – Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts -  who went travelling on foot across Germany shortly before the second world war began, when he was a young man of 18 years, with the aim to reach Istanbul; he did not have much money so he often knocked on farm doors and,  always welcome, he tasted their simple food, he ate with the families and thus he learnt their traditions. Although travellers also go to art exhibitions, museums and visit historical places, in first place they want to mingle with the locals and read the stories from their lips and taste what they taste. Without prejudice. At least thus it should be.

When I started travelling in the 60s, our globe maps still had many white spots, undiscovered and unspoilt, just natural. A journey by plane to some places in Africa still took three days; we flew with propeller machines… I remember the Super Constellation, we called them Super Complication…but the things you saw and experienced were still original and not changed for the tourists’ sake, also the food you got was original, sort of hand made with local supplies, not deep frozen or in tins, or adjusted to the tourists’ taste - and that ahhh so badly.

I always loved going to the green markets wherever I was to get an idea what vegetables and fruit were grown locally; often they had food stalls, mostly operated by native people, farmers, and I tasted the most weird dishes, for example in Peru guinea pigs on the spit with head and claws on, or iguana meat on a sandwich which tasted like chicken. These dishes are rather extreme and - just from the visual point of view - not to everyone’s taste but you find a big variety of recipes for things we know from home so that it is interesting to get to know the way the others do it.

It is actually the primitive cuisine of a country, dishes of the ‘cuisine populaire’ which have become famous such as pizza, spaghetti, pommes frites, tortillas, paella, bouillabaisse, dumplings, Molahiye,  beans in endless variations,  etc etc. It is not an art to make nice dishes from expensive ingredients but to create a dish from the things that are at hand, simple and not costly, just think of the many dishes you can create from potatoes, from beans, that is where the artists are born.

Pizza: the very best pizza I had was in a mountain village on the island of Elba, a small restaurant in an old castle,  crisp with nothing but tomatoes, cheese and basil, but how delicious; spaghetti alle vongole (clams) in a small place near Naples, I have never eaten anything better; or the paella I cooked together with a Spanish lady….unrivalled; it is the knowledge of hundreds of years, it is the fresh and proper ingredients, it is the time one takes to prepare the dish; or just recently here in Cyprus, in the village of Iskele, a small village eating place, the best chick peas soup I have ever tasted, heavenly.

But what stays in my mind when I feel the taste of these dishes on my tongue, are the stories that go with it, that very special day, and the people I have shared the meal with. It may be at a friend’s house in Upper Bavaria having a proper Sunday pork roast with dumplings, or it may be on a farm in Namibia under a starry sky grilling a piece of goat meat on the open fire, it can be on a sailing boat sharing the fish one has caught with the boaties anchored next to us.

I have transcribed the recipes of a handwritten family cookbook from the 1940s and mixed it with the entries from a diary of the same time to get the feeling of that time and I was amazed how people got along with so little to feed their families by using things and techniques we would today not even think of. It were those times when they cut ice blocks from the frozen lake and kept it under straw in dugouts for use in summer, although in households of a normal size families kept provisions for one or two days only or they made preserves from what they harvested or collected in the woods. But in those days they still knew what to make out of little things and they made the dishes so well that they became famous, and the recipes were handed on from mothers to daughters and when you are lucky you will be invited into such a family.

The secret of its success lies in the ingredients and in their preparation; this is something I should not have to repeat. The dough for a pizza should not be bought readymade but prepared carefully, the tomatoes should be fresh and not from the tin and the cheese on top should be the correct one. But you will understand what I mean. And its success will furthermore have a direct connection to the culture of a country and its people because whenever you eat a pizza or any other of these simple dishes I mentioned, you will remember the day and the place where you had the best one.