022/365: I Hath Wrought Ranch! (Patreon)

Long time readers will know that I'm quite the fan of Spanish culinary culture. In its simplicity, it is complex, and I've seldom encountered another culture in the world where so much deliberate time and attention is paid toward something as simple as eating.

That being the case, I am an American by birth, and in some regards, by inclination. And there are certain comfort foods that I was raised with that, on a cold, dreary winter's night, I yearn for.

One of them is arguably the greatest staple our constitutional republic has put forth in the last 243 years. Ranch dressing, you delightful, fattening, tangy, zesty shit — how I love you.

The thing is, it's not until you live in another place for a while, that you realize the things you take for granted simply don't exist. Hidden Valley ranch dressing. The Spaniards have never heard of it. No foul, obviously. They are too busy concocting earthy takes on French cheese sauces, so, as my grandmother used to say, they have their own fish to fry.

Still, when the craving got too intense, I decided to look up a recipe. Turns out, it's actually pretty simple, if you have the right ingredients.

1/2 cup of sour cream, 1/2 cup of mayonnaise, 1/2 cup of buttermilk. Mix those together with dill, salt, black pepper, dried parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, and some lemon juice, and there you have it! Whip out the celery sticks, and have yourself a party.

A couple of hiccups. Sour cream is not very common over here either. Neither is buttermilk. For the sour cream, I stockpiled that shit when I went to a specialty store in Salamanca recently. I cleaned them out. Yours truly literally purchased 2 gallons of sour cream. The cashier was very confused, that this busty American girl was so excited about her acquisition of a startling amount of specialty dairy.

As for the buttermilk, that's actually pretty easy to get around. Take regular milk, add a healthy squirt of vinegar, and let it set for half an hour. The maltic acid in the vinegar reacts with the lactic acid in the milk, and the whole thing gets thickened and tart. It's essentially the same thing.

So, I returned to my trusty kitchen/laboratory, and got to work. I had a bunch of mason jars laying around, so I thought I would do something fun.

I'm not a very political person, but when you're in another country, it's very easy for the natives to assume that you, the individual, are representative of your nation's politics at that time, and that the rest of your identity exists nebulously, somewhere outside of those narrow confines. I suppose we all do that, in a way. For my part, I generally try to be an ambassador of all the wonderful magic that my country has birthed into the world, usually in some pretty (intentionally) stereotypical ways. If I have people over, I play The Beach Boys and mid-century jazz. If I'm making dinner, I'll do a giant pot of Gulf Coast gumbo and a huge loaf of cornbread. If I'm speaking with somebody who I know doesn't speak a lick of English, they will say como esta, and I'll say, "Hey, how's it goin'" before continuing the conversation in Spanish, because everybody in the world has seen enough American movies to know that "Hey, how's it goin'" is just a nice combination of sounds that means hello.

In celebrating your cultural differences, even in small ways, and with good humor, you invite others to do the same, and get that much closer to realizing that every one of us is, in fact not different at all. There's something terribly romantic about that.

So in that spirit, I decided to make a shitload of ranch dressing, and hand it out to people. The initial reaction was one of curiosity, but I will wager to say that about 90% of everyone who tried it thought it was pretty decent.

I told a few people that if you go to a certain store in the United States, you can buy the stuff in 5-gallon drums, complete with a little spigot on the bottom.

They'd laugh, roll their eyes, and imply that that sounded like a very American product indeed.