by Elena De Giacomo, Fernanda Balzacchi de Moura Morais, Kasey Gardner, Nouha Khelfa, Teresa Donà
What does home taste like?
For us Euroculture students, home can shift from one country to another, carried in a suitcase or tucked into memory. We live between new cultures, new languages, new cities, and we start over in new places continuously. Amid all the movement, food remains a steady anchor. It’s how we return to where we’ve been—or how we begin to belong in a new place, even if just for a moment.
This cookbook was created as part of the Eurocompetence II project at Jagiellonian University in beautiful Kraków. Inspired by that central question—what does home taste like?—we, a diverse all-women team of Euroculture students from Italy, Algeria, the United States, and Brazil, decided to explore the answer through shared stories and recipes. Though we come from different corners of the world, we share the same goal: to capture the feeling of home through food, and how we carry it with us through constant change in places, environments, and people.
Culture Bites is a collection of those small, yet powerful, moments that bring us home, wherever we are. It’s the warmth we feel when we share a meaningful dish from our past with our present surroundings. It’s the unique comfort that comes from cooking that one specific recipe, the one that transports us back home with one single bite.
Born from the lived experiences of Euroculture students, this cookbook brings together recipes that hold meaning across borders (which is also the theme of our IP papers this year 😊). These are the dishes we turn to when we miss home, when we want to share a piece of ourselves with new friends, or when we try to make a new place, a new city, feel a little more like our own.
Within the pages of Culture Bites, you’ll find, for instance, Maria’s traditional Romanian Tocană, which, ever since moving abroad, has become her way to connect with her roots and her family back home. Or Krit’s Pad Kra Pao, which reminds him of the simple joys of home in Thailand, when he would just walk up to a street cart and order it.
Each page holds more than a recipe—it holds a story. As museum pieces, these recipes tell the story of how we, as high-mobility students, get through the experience of changing places so often that instead of taking root wherever we go, we take our roots wherever we go. They offer a glimpse of how we navigate the challenge of belonging through the language of food.
Together, they reflect what it means to live in-between places: always moving, always growing, always adapting, and always finding comfort in a bite of something familiar.
Whether you’re flipping through its pages from a dorm in Uppsala, a kitchen in Strasbourg, or a café in your hometown, we hope it reminds you of the many meanings of home—and the many people who make it.
Thank you for sharing your table 💛
The Euroculturer 