What They’re Packing

Inside the special bag Isabelle Vajda brings back each year from Paris are four things (five if she has room): five packets of couscous fin, four cans of Clement Faugier chestnut paste, two large cans of duck confit and lots of Haribo chocolate-covered marshmallow teddy bears. Any extra space and she might add a few boxes of green lentils. Yes, she knows she can get them here, but the ones she buys in France she thinks are just a bit firmer. “Of course, that just might be my imagination,” she says.

But she’s certain about the difference between the medium-grind couscous she sees at Bay Area stores and the finely textured couscous she buys in Paris. “The medium just doesn’t have the same taste and texture,” says Vajda, a teacher at the French American International School in San Francisco. She loves the couscous so much she rations it, a packet every two months. She’s just as careful with the chestnut paste, which is prohibitively expensive here. She and her husband spoon it right out of the cans, like a treat.

The confit, which she is careful to declare because she knows U.S. Customs regulations are strict on meat products, is in the suitcase because the imported version is drier. “People here don’t like the fat,” she says. The marshmallow bears? She ate them as a child, and “now we’re adults and we still have the habit.”

Her colleague at the international school, Minakshi Capur, finds just about all her favorite ingredients in the Bay Area’s Indian markets--exceptional places, really--but sadly lacking the kokum she needs for her pork curry. Similar to tamarind, it looks like a bit of licorice with bat-like wings, its flavor earthier and even more citrusy than tamarind. She makes a point of bringing it back from India, along with the silver-coated cardamom that’s a popular digestive. She buys the kokum at a roadside stand from a woman who’s grown and dried it on her little plot of land. When you’re busy running the English department at a prestigious school, it’s nice to have the memory of shopping at a country market.

Capur’s husband, Balraj, loves tea--he worked for many years for a company that owned high-end plantations--and there is one tea they can’t find here, a variety that has been flavored with ginger, so they buy it at a supermarket in India for the flight home. He wishes he could bring back mangos, the ones with that extraordinary smell that are frightfully expensive in the U.S., and if he’s homesick for something, you can tell it’s those mangos.

You don’t have to be a chef to see your suitcase as more than a clothes satchel, as part treasure chest in which you will carry the ingredients you crave from hotel to hotel to home. Why you lug them back from abroad is part physical need or necessity (despite the proliferation of international foods in markets and on the Internet, there are some things just not to be had, or only at bankrupting prices) and part mental. Beatrice Leibson, a San Franciscan who’s lived and traveled in many hemispheres, put it perfectly:

“I love to bring back foods from vacations,” says Leibson, who describes herself as a “Chinese American who eats and enjoys all sorts of strange things.” The food she brings back “seems to extend the vacation, plus I’m able to share that vacation with family and friends.”

Leibson has carted back tagine spices from Morocco, fleur de sel from France, brik wrappers from Tunisia, “stuff that’s easy to transport and not too smelly,” she says, having once perfumed an entire airplane with the aroma of roast duck.

“There’s so much homogeneity in food,” says Bob Merlis, a foodie and L.A.-based music publicist. On vacations “I’m always going shopping to see what they have that we don’t have.”

Like Capur, Merlis has a roadside stand story, in Corsica, about buying the local herbes de maquis--the aromatic maquis is Corsica’s equivalent of California chaparral and the reason it’s called the “perfumed isle.” Cooking with it was a revelation. Now Merlis berates himself for not bringing back a whole flour sack. “You use it and then you’re out of it and you’re like everybody else again.”

Any quirky discovery--like when he walked into a wine shop in Romania and asked for the country’s greatest wine--is a chance to “tell a war story,” says Merlis. “You feel superior that you have it, and it’s very depressing when you run out. I let that wine sit around for a long time because once it was gone, well, then your memory diminishes.”

Georges Laguerre couldn’t operate his Haitian restaurant, TiGeorges’ Chicken in Echo Park, were it not for his two trips home a year and the many times he exhorts his friends, “Hey, don’t forget me” before their visits to the Caribbean. Haitian ingredients aren’t exactly jumping off the shelves in the States, and substituting just isn’t the same: The soil of Haiti has a volcanic composition that’s impossible to duplicate, says Laguerre. As a result, the Haitian-grown thyme that he uses in his signature Ti Malis hot sauce has a distinctive flavor he swears by. So does the peanut butter infused with red pepper that he brings back to sell in his Glendale Boulevard restaurant.

He has a particular affection for the organic coffee beans that are always on his Haiti shopping list. His father was a coffee speculator, and Laguerre roasts his own coffee “the old-fashioned way,” he says, unadulterated by the addition of oils now used in commercial roasting. “I do it out of love,” he says of his stickler nature. “How else can I share what is really my culture with the rest of the world?”

Aryana Farshad is thinking of her friends when she brings back the 15 or so packets of saffron from her trips to Iran as a documentary filmmaker. “I know where to get the best saffron in Iran,” she says, “and Persian saffron is the best saffron in the world.”

In Iran she’s also paying a mere $4 for each nine-gram packet. When I call an importer of the more common Spanish saffron, I’m told the good stuff can go for up to $40 a gram. Funny how a tiny corner of a suitcase can mean a wealth of culinary blessings for your friends.

The delectably amber wheel of cheese in the shop in Parma didn’t look anything like the Parmesan my mother used in her cooking or the dry-as-gator-skin chunks that were selling for a fortune in L.A. markets under the dubious label: Parmigiano-Reggiano.

After I had stopped gaping at the elegantly dressed women and other wonders of this underrated Italian city, I bought a 3-pound triangular chunk of the cheese to share suitcase space with a bottle of white truffles from Alba (cooked, sadly, but the only way to legally bring them home) and a bottle of homemade walnut liqueur from Switzerland with an incredible taste I haven’t found since.

I didn’t eat the cheese until I got home, and then I wanted that amazing experience to last forever. But even L.A.’s highest of the high-end cheese shops didn’t have the Parmigiano-Reggiano that I had come to judge as the real deal.

I called Sacramento-based Darrell Corti, pioneer importer of Italian foods to the U.S. He laughed at me. I wasn’t going to find that quality in any store here, he said. He gave me the name of a Milan cheese purveyor and wished me luck. I thought about my lack of Italian. I thought about the quantity they would expect me to buy. I thought about the cost (Beatrice Leibson once had a friend bring her an entire wheel, and that was $300 in the 1980s).

Then I happened to flip through a Williams-Sonoma catalog. Staring back at me was the real deal. The 2 1/2-pound chunk was not cheap, but it was cheaper than a flight to Milan. I use it on everything. And the best thing I have ever eaten was a drop of decades-old balsamic vinegar on a sliver of that cheese. Thank God for online shopping.

“I used to have to pack an extra bag” just for foodstuffs, says cookbook author Paula Wolfert, whose must-have list included pebrella from Spain for curing green olives, the Camargue red rice of France for its heady flavor, “unlike any other rice,” and the pungent Maras pepper from Turkey. Now she can order all these by computer from her Sonoma home. And the wide world of the Web just gets wider. She was thinking she would have to buy turnip juice on an upcoming trip to Turkey when she found an online purveyor with 20 varieties.

Still, some things elude the Internet. The avgotaraho, a mullet roe sealed in wax that’s sold at the Athens airport that Wolfert has never found online. The dried eggplant shells from Turkey that are threaded on a string, that she can’t bear to eat because then they would be gone. The Iberian ham that “is the greatest ham in the world; it puts prosciutto in the Dark Ages.”

Although the Internet has eliminated much of the need for that other, darker side of food obsession--smuggling--the Iberian ham is still otherwise unobtainable. I have heard many a tale of its illegal entry.

The best one came from Art Korngiebel, and he was telling it on himself. Korngiebel, a buyer at Produce Available, a supplier to Santa Barbara restaurants, was returning from Spain with a whole leg of the contraband ham. His daughter and wife watched in horror as he packed it in a suitcase with coffee grounds and dirty laundry, hoping to evade the Customs dogs and the $20,000 fine. It worked. But two weeks later, just as he was celebrating his birthday with family and friends, a letter arrived with the official masthead of the U.S. Customs Service.

Agents had been reviewing X-rays, the letter said, and saw in his suitcase the unmistakable silhouette of a pig leg. He was to report immediately to the main office in L.A. to determine the fine.

Just as he was about to have a urinary accident, he got to the bottom, signed: Porky Pig.

Payback for the terror his family had gone through.