{"id":6460,"date":"2023-12-14T14:12:06","date_gmt":"2023-12-14T13:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hias-hamburg.de\/?post_type=magazin&p=6460"},"modified":"2024-12-09T14:33:53","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T13:33:53","slug":"kitchen-talk","status":"publish","type":"magazin","link":"https:\/\/hias-hamburg.de\/en\/hias-magazin\/kitchen-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Let me tell you about Mushrooms\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Sol Gruner<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\u00abLet me tell you about mushrooms\u2026\u00bb<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Published in Issue #01 \u2014 Globalized Nature<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Food and mushrooms. HIAS chef Leoni is having one of her \u00abkitchen talks\u00bb with Sol Gruner<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Hi Sol, I\u2019m very happy to have you here! You\u2019re basically just about to leave Hamburg again\u2014can you tell me a little bit about yourself, where you\u2019re from and what you\u2019re doing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Well, I\u2019m here to talk about high pressure biology and x-ray detector technology. But maybe more relevant to food is where I come from: I was raised on a farm in the United States. My parents came from Europe and they quickly managed to find a farm that was available, a small farm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From which part of Europe did your parents emigrate?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Where they were from is today in Western Ukraine; at the time that they were there it was Eastern Poland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you a foodie at all?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Oh yes! I like to cook. One of the things I\u2019ve missed most being in Hamburg is my own kitchen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Coming to Germany was a chance to experience things that I really hadn\u2019t had for a long, long time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I can relate to that very much. Did you miss anything, foodwise?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Oh, many things, but at the same time I\u2019ve enjoyed being here. Let me explain why: As I pointed out, my parents were from Eastern Europe and I was raised on Eastern European food. My tastes diverged from that when I was in college; they got much broader. Coming to Germany was a chance to experience things that I really hadn\u2019t had for a long, long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, that\u2019s wonderful! Do you have a favorite dish your mom used to make?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Pierogies! She used to make pierogies with a filling of potatoes, with pepper and onions. Just spectacular \u2026 I never was able to get the recipe out of her, which is one of my greatest regrets. I mean, it\u2019s not that we didn\u2019t try and it\u2019s not that she wasn\u2019t cooperative. It\u2019s just that like with many parents: \u00abA little bit of this and a little bit of that\u00bb and trying to get all the little bits right didn\u2019t work. It didn\u2019t taste right. I asked my mother, \u00abWhat happened?\u00bb And then she said \u00abWhat did you do?\u00bb and I would go through the recipe just as she told it to me and she said, \u00abWell, you forgot the \u2014\u2014,\u00bb and I said, \u00abYou didn\u2019t tell me about\u2009\u2014\u2014!\u00bb And she would reply \u00abEverybody knows, you put \u2014\u2014 into the recipe!\u00bb After two or three rounds of this, I gave up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I can relate to that. What comes to your mind when it comes to your stay in Hamburg: Which food was extraordinary or special?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Well, one thing that we almost never get in the United States is the mixture of fish that is common here. And as someone who likes herring, likes smoked fish, you know, this is delightful!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was the most extreme food you\u2019ve ever eaten?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most extreme \u2026. Well, let me tell you about mushrooms: The way that I learned about mushrooms from my mother is to fry them up with sour cream and onions. But that\u2019s not my extreme encounter with mushrooms. My extreme encounter with mushrooms was when I was in college, this was at MIT in Boston. I would frequently visit the bookstores and I spotted a book by Louis C.C. Krieger called The Mushroom Handbook. It is a reprint of a classic mushroom book from, I believe, the mid-1930s. And being the kind of person that I am, I bought the book and started looking through it. It identified edible versus non-edible mushrooms. And I said to myself: \u00abI\u2019m going to try to find some wild mushrooms.\u00bb I found a place where there was a hillside covered with mushrooms. I worked hard and keyed them down to identify them. I fried them up and tried them and they were very, very good. That same day, I went to my mailbox and there was an envelope without a return address. It was a handwritten little cartoon booklet of about ten pages. It told the story of a young man who goes out and tries wild mushrooms which were poisonous, and he dies. This was about an hour and a half after I consumed my first wild mushrooms!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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It told the story of a young man who goes out and tries wild mushrooms which were poisonous, and he dies. This was about an hour and a half after I consumed my first wild mushrooms!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Oh nooo, what a nightmare!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It turned out afterwards that it was a girlfriend; I had been telling her what I was going to do and she wrote the booklet not because she thought I would eat mushrooms at that time; that was pure coincidence. She was just writing this little story so that we could talk about. I loved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which was your most memorable meal you\u2019ve ever had?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It was in Rome, and it involved\u2014mushrooms! My spouse and I were visiting Rome, and we had this fantastic meal\u2014we both said it\u2019s the best meal we\u2019d ever had\u2014the night before we were to depart Rome, having been there for a week. The best part of the meal was a dish of wild mushrooms. It was excellent. And that night, we got food poisoning. It was the exactly the worst result of the best meal of our lives! We felt like we wouldn\u2019t survive. I was very worried, in fact, that we might have to go to the hospital. By morning we felt a bit better, good enough to practically crawl on our hands and knees onto the airplane to go home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My God! That was the most memorable and best meal?! Is there anything you would like to take from Hamburg back to the States?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

No, most of the things I have really enjoyed here are prepared in a way that you would not be able to take back with you. For example, there\u2019s one place down the street\u2014it\u2019s actually a bar\u2014which has the best Caesar salad I\u2019ve ever had. I would love to have that bar somewhere nearby at home, but obviously, I\u2019m not going to take a Caesar salad with me.

But a good reason to come back \u2026

That\u2019s right!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Listen to the entire conversation here:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n