A Slippery Wedding Present
Today’s tale will have you either squirming in your seat or make your mouth water and excite your tastebuds… let’s find out!
Smoked eel is considered a delicacy in many countries, such as northern Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden. In Italian cuisine, eels from Comacchio are especially prized, along with freshwater eels from the Bolsena Lake and the ponds in Sardinia. And eel is part of dishes eaten by the Japanese, Vietnamese, and other Asians. For most people in those countries, eel makes their mouth water. And yes, also my taste buds get excited by the very thought of it. This of course is not the case in for example the United States, where even the thought of this dish causes digestive systems to react …. not cool, euphemistically speaking.
When I grew up in Holland, we had the custom that on our birthday we could choose the meal mom would cook. I invariably chose eel, which my dad and I would get from a fresh fish store at the nearby lake. These were large eels, over an inch thick and over two feet long. Even without their removed teethy heads, they would keep squirming for hours in the kitchen sink. Mom would broil them and serve the eel with butter sauce and lemon…... terrific! Other times, we would get smoked eel and serve them on little crackers as an Hors D’oeuvre at birthday parties and special celebrations. A delicatesse.
Enter my wedding with Sherry. It was wintertime in Massachusetts, and the wedding could not have been more romantic with the snow falling slowly on and around the classic New England steepled church. The pews were full of friends and family, which to my delight included my parents who had flown in for the occasion all the way from Alkmaar, the Netherlands. Never had they travelled this far. They had arrived a week earlier to make what for them was the trip of their lifetime and of course they brought the customary present for their hosts, Sherry’s parents. I remember how much they enjoyed their stay and even with the language challenges our mutual parents got along very well.
But the next morning after their arrival, things got tricky for sure. I can still see the horror on all my American family’s faces and hear my father-in-law exclaim in his typical understated New England speak: “now that is an interesting present!”
See, my dad had brought them two kilos of …you guessed it…smoked eel. A Dutch treat!
I hope you enjoyed that memory, it's truly an honor to share our stories with you. Next week’s episode will keep us with the Dutch culture one more time, and this one will be a contribution by my dear friend Fons Trompenaars. Now that we are well into this weekly storytelling, I would like to introduce stories submitted by others and it is a sincere honor to start with a submission by Fons Trompenaars – an internationally well-known speaker and teacher on the subject of Intercultural Relations.
With that, I would like to invite you, my listeners, to send your intercultural stories to the Memory Keeper’s website so I may include them in this Alzheimer’s supporting project and credit you directly. Just go to TheMemoryKeeper.org and click the button that says, “share a story.”
I’ll see you next week with Fons’ story, which we have titled: “A Customary Double Dutch.”
Ready to share your own cherished memories? Submit your story by using the form below! We can't wait to hear your unique experiences and celebrate the power of memories together.