By Irene Gasser Rodrigues

Every time I take the same ingredients, follow a recipe precisely and bake it at the correct temperature, I get the same result: something sweet and fluffy that makes everyone smile around the table. Fairly predictable, right?

But four years ago, when our little family of five moved from Switzerland to Brazil, the country of origin of my husband, I discovered that intercultural baking has its own twists, and this hobby started mirroring the complex process of cultural adaptation I was going through.

All of a sudden it wasn’t good enough to follow a recipe precisely, in other words to do things the way I had always done them. Some ingredients wouldn’t be at hand. The gas oven would develop a life of its own. How on the earth should I discover the right temperature and get that golden crust only with under-heat? My sweat would drop in the batter. The mixer wouldn’t do his job properly in a 110V power outlet. The measurement in the local recipes would be in cups instead of grams. All sorts of little bugs would love to proliferate in the flour jar in my absence. I guess I could somehow describe what I was going through as the phenomenon of “KCS”, standing for “Kitchen Culture Shock”. Anyways, it perfectly illustrated my struggles in other areas: different understandings of punctuality, driving in crazy traffic with a hand always ready to honk a horn, help the kids with homework in another language, and so on.

At first I got a bit frustrated. Just a tiny, little bit. I guess it makes us humble when we are suddenly unable to do what has worked well during years. Then I burnt a series of bread loaves, cookies and muffins, and cakes would go undercooked in the middle. Only after repeated failed experiments did I finally make friends with my gas oven. In a slow process I started to understand at which level and at which temperature I had to bake depending on the type of food. On the outside, I learned just the right way to give a hug, I started understanding in which settings punctuality was expected and when guests would arrive an hour later, and that community comes before individual decisions. I started packing less appointments in one day and going with the flow, knowing that a simple medical appointment could cost me half a day, and that each day had its own surprises ready to test your flexibility.

Then, out of the blue, started the most creative, fascinating journey of experimentation with new ingredients. I would adapt my Swiss recipes with local ingredients and the results started to show while I entertained for coffee or tea at our place. People would bite in a walnut-sugar cane molasses-muffin and close their eyes, moaning something like “mmmmmmhhh” and tell me I should open a cafeteria in Aracaju! I would make jams and give them away whenever I was invited somewhere or I wanted to return a favour. Soon I started to experiment with a “secret ingredient” – little sachets of gelling agent from back home – to produce sugar-free jams. I was quite new to FIGT then, but the informal online meetings like SUAW, sharing my experiences on the What’s App group as well as an absurd amount of researching on the subject of transition helped me processing all of what I was going through. When I started reading Jo Parfitt’s “A career in your suitcase” and discovered that one of the first meaningful remunerated activities she created for herself overseas was producing and selling date chutney, I thought to myself: “If she did it, I can do it, too. It doesn’t mean I’ll have to do this to the end of my life”. There are so many inspiring people withing the community of FIGT who seem to be just waiting to tell you: “You can do it! I’ve been there, too!” On a local conference about “female entrepreneurship”, the Brazilian speaker told us that one of the benefits of building up your own business was overcoming low self-esteem. I definitely needed that, as I was still feeling the pain of some invisible losses from the life I left back there in Switzerland.

So I started my informal little business called “Geleias da Irene” (Irene’s Jams), producing and selling home-made jams. I had no capital to start with. Everything I earned was re-invested in the business. My brother-in-law made the logo for me and helped me to create an Instagram and Facebook Page. It was fun, and I liked everything about it: the contact with clients, publicity, doing the numbers, experimenting with new flavours, decoration the jars, selling at a fair in our neighbourhood together with a friend, doing seasonal specials like a set of mini-jams for Christmas, and so on. I shared a few adventures with my FIGT online friends who cheered me on at every step of the way, like the day when an Uber driver didn’t deliver my cupcakes for the birthday of a little girl, and brought them back at night apologizing profusely…

After a year or so the prices for jars went up a lot and I realized the profit margin just wasn’t worth all the work I put in it (specially on very hot days in the kitchen) and wouldn’t pay for our holidays, so I jumped to the next opportunity that appeared on my way: teaching English in small groups in a beautiful corporative house. But that’s the beginning of another story.

Cultural adaptation requires the disposition to fail forward, humility to try until you get it right, and a lot of creativity. You have to be flexible enough to find new ways to do things. You might use your abilities in totally unexpected ways, and finally find true, deep joy in living your life in a different, slower and maybe more disrupted, but good way. It’s an exciting journey with ups and downs, but the good news is we are not alone on it!

Irene Gasser Rodrigues is a multilingual Swiss Adult Third Culture Kid, born and raised in Togo. As an adult, she has lived in Senegal as well as Swiss German and French speaking parts of Switzerland. She moved to Aracaju in 2021 with her Brazilian husband, where they are raising three wonderful TCKs. She is a teacher and a passionate hobby baker, and between cooking and driving around as Uber Mama, she loves writing articles. She recently started volunteering as admin for the FIGT Parenting Community.