This summer I spent a few weeks ambling around Europe with a big orange rucksack on my back and two mad friends trotting along beside me. With a hunger for travel, and what was possibly an even greater, more wildly insatiable hunger for all things edible, we traversed the continent one dinner table at a time (using the term dinner table here loosely as quite often our table of choice was the nearest street kerb). We learned a lot, and ate a lot more.
It all kicked off in Paris with a baguette. Touching down in Charles de Gaulle airport there was only one thing on our minds. Sitting within a dilapidated store in the City of Love was a humble and self-conscious baguette, cowering in its undersized paper bag, waiting to be chosen by someone ravenous enough to overlook its underwhelming appearance and appreciate it for the culinary masterpiece that it was. Cue our entry. Wrecked after trawling from our hostel to the city centre, and with rapidly waning standards, I grabbed the little guy and paid. It wasn’t until we tore its fresh crust apart and experienced the sensory beauty of its fluffy, doughy interior on our tongues that we realised what the bread-makers in this neck of the woods were about.
Bread in France is treated with a rough kind of respect. It’s kneaded relentlessly, bakers everywhere beginning in the early hours in a harmonious rhythm — pound, pound, pound and thwack — into the snarling oven, slowly rising, puffing, crisping, before being flung into unforgiving baskets and boxes to be grabbed by hungry hands. The process is pure and unpretentious, allowing its main talking point to shine gloriously through: the bread’s outstanding quality. Standing a few metres from the Louvre with breadcrumbs sprinkled all down our fronts, hunks of crust in each hand and slow-spreading smiles of satisfaction on our faces, we understood what the rest of the world had known all this time: French bread truly is the best out there.
Baguettes became a large part of our lives from then onwards. It was sort of an emotional thing, the profound attachment we felt towards those unassuming lunch items. Each day we spent in Paris began with the careful selection and prompt purchase of a suitable doughy companion, who spent wonderful times with us exploring the inherent romance and entrancing culture of the city… right up until around 1:30 PM — lunchtime.
In every picture I took of a historical monument or memorably decorated house front, I made sure to include the baguette in the frame, held at a jaunty angle for the optimal pleasing effect. My favourite was the picture I took upon my first rapturous sighting of the Eiffel Tower, which would have been incomplete without the presence of that day’s stick of bread, cheekily rearing its head in the bottom right corner.
Fast-track to the sun-warmed cobbled streets of Prague.
Following a brief traipse through Amsterdam (whose brownies I would definitely vouch for) and Berlin (whose curry sausages I most definitely would not), we found ourselves in an old Czech city, famous for its gargantuan castle and historic town squares. Sampling nothing but McDonalds and cheap bruised peaches in a vain effort to remain nutritionally balanced on our first day there, it wasn’t until the first night that I got to try anything out of the ordinary. My world unduly changed that night. Stumbling back to our budget hostel after a visit to the famed ‘Ice Bar’ nestled under Karlovy Lazne, Central Europe’s biggest nightclub comprising 5 floors of varying genres of wince-inducing chart music (mainly Nicki Minaj’s ‘Starships’), I needed some soul-cleansing junk food, and I needed it bad. My heart and pitifully empty stomach cried out for the familiar nourishment that Camden Street grants me, after a night spent swatting other people’s beads of sweat from my shoulders and trying to sway to the beat of ‘Let’s go to the beach, -each’.
That’s the thing about other European countries though. For some unknown reason, that could only be construed as deep-rooted insanity, their food vendors close shop come night time (you’d swear the workers needed to sleep or something). I stood weary and bleary-eyed, closed shutters bearing down on me from all angles, when I spotted the distant gleam of what appeared to be a trading food stall. Hurtling down the street with tunnel vision I decided I’d get whatever was on offer — this was a situation of absolute urgency. I ordered the best of what they had and waited with eager anticipation until I was handed a hot, dripping creation bundled in crumpled newspaper. I stared awestruck at what was essentially an oversized ice-cream cone. Behold the Trundlenik.
It’s highly likely you have never heard of the Trundlenik. That is quite alright because I fabricated that name entirely. This breathtakingly ingenious concoction is essentially a thick cake/sweetbread/manna-from-heaven, made by expertly rolling a narrow length of sugary dough into a triumphant cone shape around a short pole and roasting it to perfection by turning it over open smouldering flames, just like a little pig on a spit. But topped with ice cream, not marinade. This baked street delicacy itself is known to some as a ‘chimney cake’, or in Czech, a trdelník. There is speculation that my own pet name for this glorified 99 cone is a derivation of the Czech term, but I’ll leave that open to interpretation. The dumping of hot syrupy whole strawberries and decadently thick hot chocolate sauce into the cone, with the subsequent addition of creamy whipped ice cream as its crowning glory, was enough to make me weak at the knees on that fateful night in Prague. Delirious with joy, I pottered back down the street with my new finding and long forgotten were the curry chips I had so desperately longed for an hour ago.
I found it hard to stop thinking about Trundleniks over the next few days. I must have eaten about 3 a day during our time in Prague, which thankfully wasn’t a long stop or I would have encountered some real difficulty fitting into my shorts. What intensified my longing for constant Trundlenik consumption was their unwavering scent that permeated every cobblestone and romantically lit street in the place. The enticing aroma of sweet baked goodness chased me everywhere. The Trundleniks knew I was vulnerable and defenceless; one whiff and I was at their mercy.
Two weeks deep into a constant state of blissful dirtiness and enlightening culture shock, I started to recognise a weakness in my own resolve. I found myself dreaming of home comforts: freshly washed bed sheets, clean t-shirts, and most of all the simple potato.
Never in all my years have I experienced anything like that desire I felt for a fluffy baked potato. I accept the fact that I was a living Irish stereotype, but little did I care right then for flying the flag of multiculturalism. I was an Irish girl abroad and I wanted a potato so badly it hurt. All of the travelling, the adventure, the laughter, the long train journeys and mad encounters with all sorts of people, the stunning sights and mind-blowing history; the tantalising foods and musical languages; all this seemed to lead to this pivotal realisation — I missed home.
That’s when I found myself in the vegetable aisle of the closest Tesco I could find in central Prague, thrusting handfuls of familiar baby potatoes into a plastic bag. Whilst my fabulous friends rushed out that night to a brilliant techno club in the city, I remained back in the hostel, quietly boiling my potatoes in a wonky little pot in the kitchen, thinking to myself that Ireland wasn’t half bad after all.
