Thanksgiving abroad: easy as pie

This year I decided against two days of travel for three days at home and went with a friend to Long Island for Thanksgiving. Between us, another roommate, his nuclear family, aunts, uncles, cousins and a grandmother, we were quite the crowd. The house and the family may not have been mine, but the hustle and bustle, the kids running around and the loud exchanges across the long table all reminded me of home. Even the selection of pie matched what I find in West Virginia: pumpkin, apple, and pecan. In all the confusion, I only deeply missed one person — my sister.

My 18-year-old sister is currently an exchange student in Ecuador, a land where the sun rises and sets at 6 and the direction of the Coreolis Effect is undecided. She lives with a family in Quito, the capital, and attends an Ecuadorian high school, represents her home country and attempts to learn about her host one.

Apparently, this two-way learning process didn't go so well in regards to Thanksgiving. Because her family works late, she was home alone until 10 pm. So she celebrated on her own with a peanut butter sandwich — swapping one quintessentially American food for another — and called friends and family. She spent an hour on the phone with another American exchange student in Quito, and decided against going to visit a third who lives within walking distance, since he's Canadian and therefore had celebrated Thanksgiving in October.

To make her feel better, I told her about my Thanksgiving experience as an exchange student in Italy, a land of pork in lieu of turkey, pasta and gnocchi instead of sweet potatoes. My last Thursday in November that year was less than typical. My host grandfather had died that week, so my family was in the throes of mourning, not in the mood for experimenting with an unfamiliar American holiday. It was a normal day, I suppose — the long bus rides to and from Gorizia, the painful six hours of Italian school, the torturous wait for lunch at 3 pm (it was probably pasta). We celebrated Thanksgiving on the Thursday after, when my host mom made turkey and I contributed an apple pie.

I had brought the measuring cups with me when I had arrived, plastic and nesting to save weight and space. My mother had emailed me the Joy of Cooking recipe, tried and true. At home we'd always used the Cuisinart to prepare the pie dough, but in my smaller lower-tech kitchen in Cormòns, Italy, I found myself using two blunt knives to cut butter into flour. Only an agonizing 30 minutes later did anything approaching dough appear.

The apple filling would be easier, I thought. Fruit washed, cored, and sectioned, plus sugar, lemon juice, a bit of cinnamon, then mixed together. Not until the entire mixture stood sickeningly brown and gritty in the bowl before me did I realize that I'd committed a cardinal error by mistaking "tablespoons" for "teaspoons." Praying the mistake was limited to cinnamon and that my unschooled Italian family wouldn't know the difference, I moved on to rolling out the dough.

Cooking pans, oven settings, and the metric system proved an additional challenge. The closest approximation to a nine-inch pie pan that my host mother could find was a cake pan, which by my eye was slightly too small in radius, twice too tall, and thin metal rather than thick glass. Rolling my rather small ball of dough into a circle large enough to cover the pan's odd shape presented significant complications. I patched over several holes only with difficulty. Trying to gauge the correct oven temperature completed the conversion nightmare.

Finally the pie was done. I pulled it out of the oven and placed it on the table. It seemed more or less like it did at home — brown, bubbly, aromatic. I watched as my Italian family and friends took their first bites of my attempt at the American classic. They heartily approved, especially of the triple dosage of cinnamon.

I still have pictures of that dinner, everyone posing with grins and empty plates. It was one of my favorite cultural experiences in Italy — one where I actually gave, as supposed to only taking. I suggested to my sister that she do the same thing and bake her family a piece of American Thanksgiving. Sometimes making yourself feel at home while abroad is as easy as pie. Emily Stolzenberg is a German major from Morgantown, W. Va. She can be reached at estolzen@princeton.edu.