Between Two Pantries: The Wonderfully Messy Cooking Lives of Americans Abroad

Marcus Webb has been living in Oaxaca, Mexico for six years. He moved there from Portland, Oregon with a background in Pacific Northwest cooking — salmon, Dungeness crab, hazelnuts, lots of good local produce. He had no intention of becoming a Mexican cook. He just wanted a change of scenery.

Now his signature dish is a smoked salmon tlayuda with a mole negro base, topped with crème fraîche he makes himself because sour cream in Oaxaca, he says, "just isn't the same." He serves it to friends at dinner parties and nobody quite knows what to call it. Marcus doesn't care. "It tastes like my life," he says, laughing. "That's the only category it fits in."

That kind of culinary identity crisis — the beautiful, confusing, occasionally disastrous experience of cooking between two food cultures — is something thousands of American expats know intimately. And the dishes that emerge from that in-between space are some of the most genuinely creative food being made anywhere.

The Moment the Pantry Changes

Every expat has a version of the same story: the moment they went looking for a familiar ingredient and came up empty. No canned pumpkin. No ranch dressing. No all-purpose flour that behaves the way all-purpose flour is supposed to behave. No decent cheddar within a reasonable budget.

For Jenna Kowalski, who relocated from suburban Ohio to Taipei, Taiwan three years ago for her tech job, that moment came when she tried to make her mother's Thanksgiving stuffing in November and couldn't find sage anywhere in her neighborhood. "I wandered around three different markets," she says. "I found every herb I'd never cooked with. No sage."

She ended up using a combination of scallions, a little dried shiitake mushroom powder, and five-spice — not because she planned to, but because those were the savory, aromatic things she had available. The stuffing, she reports, was genuinely delicious. Different. A little surprising. Her Taiwanese colleagues, who she invited over for the meal, ate seconds.

"My mom is never going to believe me," Jenna says, "but I think I accidentally improved on her recipe."

Cooking as a Language You Learn by Doing

What's striking about talking to American expats about their cooking is how quickly the process moves from panic to improvisation to something like fluency. In the early months, most describe a desperate clinging to familiar techniques — trying to recreate the foods of home with whatever ingredients are available. But gradually, the local pantry starts to feel less like an obstacle and more like a vocabulary.

Derek Osei, a graphic designer from Atlanta who has been living in Lisbon, Portugal for four years, describes the shift clearly. "At first I was always looking for what I couldn't find," he says. "Now I cook with what's here, and I just add the Atlanta parts."

For Derek, that means a Sunday chicken that's marinated in piri piri sauce — the fiery Portuguese condiment he's become obsessed with — but finished with a dry rub that's closer to the seasoned salt and smoked paprika blend his grandmother used on her baked chicken. He serves it with batatas fritas (Portuguese fries) and a collard green preparation he makes with olive oil and garlic instead of the smoked ham hock his grandmother would have used. "It's not Portuguese and it's not Southern," he says. "It's just mine."

The Mishaps That Become the Best Dishes

Not every cross-cultural cooking experiment lands gracefully. Ask any expat and they'll give you a list of disasters: the Japanese milk bread attempt that collapsed into a dense brick, the homemade kimchi that fermented too aggressively and cleared out the refrigerator, the attempt to make enchiladas in Germany using a spice mix assembled from scratch that was, in the words of one expat in Berlin, "technically correct but spiritually wrong."

But some of the best discoveries come directly from these failures.

Sarah Lindqvist moved from Minnesota to Seoul, South Korea five years ago to teach English. She grew up eating her Swedish-American family's traditional foods — lefse, pickled herring, cardamom-spiced breads — alongside very Midwestern staples like hotdish and Jell-O salad. In Seoul, she found herself gravitating toward the fermented, umami-rich flavors of Korean cuisine, and started drawing unexpected parallels to the Scandinavian foods she grew up with.

"Both cultures are obsessed with fermentation," she realized. "Kimchi and pickled herring aren't that different philosophically. They're both about preservation, about funk, about things that taste alive."

Her current obsession is a fermented cabbage dish she calls "Nordic kimchi" — napa cabbage fermented with gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes), ginger, and garlic, but finished with a splash of apple cider vinegar and caraway seeds. "It sounds weird," she admits. "It tastes incredible."

What Expat Cooking Reveals About Food Identity

There's something philosophically interesting about what happens when you remove someone from their culinary context. The foods we grew up with are so deeply tied to place, season, and community that when we try to recreate them in a different environment, we're forced to ask: what is this dish, actually? What's essential and what's just habit?

Marcus, back in Oaxaca, puts it this way: "I used to think I was a Pacific Northwest cook. Now I think I'm just a cook who grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Those are different things."

The distinction matters. Being a Pacific Northwest cook implies a fixed identity, a regional allegiance, a specific set of ingredients and techniques. Being a cook who grew up in the Pacific Northwest means you carry those influences with you — but you're not limited by them. You can set them in conversation with mole negro and dried chiles and the incredible produce of Oaxacan markets, and see what happens.

What happens, more often than not, is something that couldn't have existed anywhere else. Not Pacific Northwest cooking. Not Mexican cooking. Something new, shaped by the specific life of one specific person navigating two worlds from a single kitchen.

That's not cultural confusion. That's culture doing exactly what it's always done — moving, mixing, adapting, and occasionally producing something that makes everyone at the table stop and ask, "Wait — what is this?"

The best answer, usually, is: I have no idea, but do you want more?