Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany by Ruth Paget

Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany by Ruth Paget 

Stuttgart is Germany’s richest city. Mercedes-Benz and Porsche cars are manufactured here. The city is surrounded by Riesling vineyards. The city’s cash flow is also assured as the home of reasonably priced Ritter-Sport chocolate. 

One of Stuttgart’s star attractions is the Porsche Museum. My husband Laurent and I decided to visit it and contribute to the local economy when we lived in Stuttgart for five years. 

I felt like Laurent was getting to do something he liked as one of our cultural outings. We usually visit lots of castle kitchens and monasteries with pre-Columbian vegetable gardens. I like studying medieval household management, but do recognize that cars make modern life nice, especially in the Western United States. 

We drove our GM product to the Porsche Museum, and had fun walking around the red, white, and yellow race cars in the gleaming white museum. 

Germans make great merchandise, so we headed to the gift shop to make some purchases. We bought USB ports for our computers that had model Porsche cars on their ends and looked through T-shirts, caps cups, and decks of cards with Porsche models as jacks, queens, and kings. 

I thought the T-shirts were informal surveys to see which Porsche models might sell well. 

At home, I made shrimp kebabs with shrimp I had marinated in lemon juice and crushed garlic overnight. 

We ate chic Weihenstephan yogurt as dessert. Weihenstephan is better known for its beer. The monastery brewery was founded in 1040 and has a limited number of other food products for sale in Germany. 

To finish off our meal, we drank smooth Dallmayr coffee from the department store of the same name in Munich. 

I thought the lunch was something a trim and well-off German might like. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exchange Student in Mexico Day by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in Mexico Day by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In high school, I could eat my body weight in food and was a welcome guest at my Mexican friend B’s home where they teased me about not eating enough.

Whenever I had been invited to lunch, B. would show up to escort me on the bus from my apartment in downtown Detroit to the west side of town where he lived.

“I can take the bus alone to your house,” I said as we sat down.

He would always tell me that a young lady always gets escorted when she has been invited to lunch.

“That’s the Mexican way,” he would say as I sat in my seat by the window.

I felt like an exchange student for the day when I entered the house and did not know how many times to kiss people on the cheeks.  In my home, we only gave each other bear hugs and pats on the back.

The five-foot high painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her blue cloak with golden stars on it seemed mysterious to me, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  B’s parents only spoke Spanish, which made me feel like I was in a foreign country, too.

I was always surprised how meals in my friend’s home did not resemble the combinations of tacos, tostadas, and enchiladas that I liked to eat in restaurants with what I thought was hot sauce.

We would usually start our meals with familiar looking sour cream, guacamole, and warm flour tortillas typical of northern Mexico as an appetizer.

My friend’s mother puréed avocado, tomato, onion, cilantro and jalapeño peppers into her version of guacamole.

“Dairy products kill the flames,” my friend said the first time I innocently delved into the jalapeño-guacamole.

Then, we would have soup.  Looking through cookbooks years later, I found a recipe for my favorite corn soup from the northern Mexican state of Sonora.  The Sonoran soup has squares of green and sweet red pepper and whole ears of baby corn colorfully flavoring a chicken soup.

After the soup, we would eat one of my favorite dishes – tamales.  Steamed masa flour surrounded the spicy pork in these tamales wrapped up in a corn husk wrapper for steaming.

The savory pork was preserved in its own fat like carnitas and was seasoned with oregano, cumin, coriander, onions, and carrots.

I helped make my favorite dessert – buñuelos.  To make these we sat in the kitchen and pulled the elastic dough over our knees and stretched the dough into rounds that were fried and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

I loved the buñuelos with coffee and knowing that the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe was also my birthday.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exchange Student in London: Making a Trifle Dessert with an English Family - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in London:  Making a Trifle Dessert with an English Family – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When we arrived at the house, my husband’s colleague’s wife made tea and served us larges mug of it with milk and called it a “cuppa.” 

She opened several boxes of biscuits, placed pretty paper doilies on a plate, and nicely arranged the butter cookies for us to dunk in our tea.  I had indulged in so much stroller aerobics during my visit that I knew I could indulge a bit.

Florence sat in her stroller throne and ate butter cookies while the trifle class began, and I loaded up on cookies (biscuits).

The day before, our hostess cut up a sponge cake and layered the bottom of a round bowl with it.  As I watched, she placed a layer of strawberry jam on top of the sponge cake and sliced fresh strawberries on top of this.

She said you could use any kind of fruit and jelly of the same fruit in the trifle.  Next, you add a layer of yolk-colored vanilla custard on top of this fruit and jelly layer.

On top of this custard layer, she placed shavings of chocolate, which we ate with our “cuppas” of tea.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exchange Student in London: Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in London:  Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session – Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of the best memories I have of our trips to London was spending a day with one of my husband’s colleague’s wives making a trifle pudding dessert. Trifles resemble Appalachian Banana Pudding, so this has become a two-part series.

Our family friend picked Florence and me up early in the morning and off we went to do grocery shopping at Tesco.  We bought vegetables to cut up for crudités as well as hummus and taramosalata – Greek caviar spread. 

I liked being able to buy ethnic food items at the local grocery store like Laurent and I did in Chicago at the Treasure Island store downtown where we lived in Marina City – the corncob towers.

Back in London, we bought a package of vanilla custard to make the “trifle.”

I told Laurent’s colleague’s wife about the banana pudding my aunts used to make where you would layer the sides and bottoms of a glass baking dish with vanilla wafers and place sliced bananas on top of the vanilla wafers.

Then, my aunts would place a layer of cooked butterscotch pudding on top of the bananas and let it cool and then put a layer of vanilla pudding on top of the butterscotch pudding.  Finally, they would place a 1-inch layer of homemade whipped cream on top of this and refrigerate it.

They would eat a big piece of this with a lot of coffee with milk in it for breakfast and say it was their beauty secret.  (They all looked like Marilyn Monroe or Lucille Ball even without make-up.  I have tried to pattern a lot of my domestic life on theirs no matter where I live.  They clean their own homes, cook, do laundry, and tend to work at secretarial jobs when children are small.)

My sister Kathie babysat me as a child.  We often ate banana pudding for breakfast before going out for walks and shopping in all sorts of weather.  In the summer, we went out for a morning bus ride to Palmer Park Woods in Detroit to go for a walk and feed the ducks Cheez-Its. 

On the way back home, we would sometimes stop at a Lebanese or Chinese restaurant for lunch or Howard Johnsons.  In the summer, Howard Johnsons would let me swim, if we bought a full lunch afterwards. 

We both cleaned house after I was six years old.  I could do some simple tasks that my sister showed me how to do. 

Laurent’s colleague’s wife asked me why I did not go to private school as a child.  I told her that we all knew about Winston Churchill’s boarding school experience, because his mother Jennie was American. 

We really did not like too much corporeal punishment.  My family tried to reason with children, yelled, took away privileges, and would finally swat you once on the behind (in private), if these other measures did not work instead of hitting children.

I told her my mother preferred Montessori teaching methods and had books about it at home.  (The Sunday School I went to taught us the methods in it like cleaning up after butter cookies and lemonade at a very young age.) 

She raised both of us according to its “castello or castle management” organizational style in addition to traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I added Waldorf-Montessori-Jesuit Catholic to this later in life, because I knew how important art and music and Biblical knowledge are for personal relaxation and ethics.  I especially liked how the Hungarian Esterházys ran a great estate and hired the composer Joseph Haydn as their personal musician for nightly entertainment.

This was the American side of trifle making and child rearing practices.  To be continued….

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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