I can’t really say why I decided to cook, or otherwise procure, a dish representing every nation at the World Cup, except that I thought it might be kind of fun, and it seemed like the least I could do. If you have a family, or a roommate, or even a cat, and are planning to spend a significant percentage of your summer on the couch, watching the most important of the least important things, you ought to find some way to pull your weight around the house—or at least, to say in advance that you’re sorry.
It was a good idea, though. And a doable one: I live in New York, a city where I can obtain just about any ingredient I could possibly need for any kind of cuisine (along with, for some reason, the worst onions you’ve ever imagined). And where, failing that, I can simply ride a few subway stops and procure a critically acclaimed meal representing first-time qualifiers Uzbekistan. Given enough time, I could have knocked this quest off slowly and gracefully.
So that was my first mistake. I neglected to plan for the fact that this men’s World Cup has—for the purposes of squeezing more money out of more people over more games—16 more countries than the last one did. That might have prompted a reconsideration of my mission, but it’s hard to walk away once you’ve announced your plan. People will just keep asking about it, and it becomes increasingly painful to force a smile and say “nope, still working on Curacao.” The burden of expectations, the sense of disappointment…You start to understand, in some small way, what it feels like to play for England.
Everyone has stewed chicken.
But I did it, starting in early March and finishing with one week to spare before Mexico kicks off against South Africa. Even with breaks for work trips, family visits, and emergency mac and cheese—or maybe because so much else kept getting in the way—the three-month odyssey was ultimately more of a burden than a heroic gesture. There were some bangers along the way: the aforementioned Uzbek; a Cape Verdean dish by way of Rhode Island; a West African meal my 3-year-old, somewhat problematically, began referring to as “dad’s chicken.” Spend enough time poking around for recipes—and even more time looking for ones that are vegetable-forward, or are not yet another national version of stewed chicken—and you start to learn a thing or two about tradition, migration, and common bonds. Maybe that was the point.
So here’s how I made it to 48, by eating, more or less in order, through the 12 groups of four teams who will meet in the tournament’s opening rounds. I want to be clear: I was not attempting to create everyone’s national dish. I did not approach this with academic rigor. I took shortcuts. I made liberal substitutions. I used random blogs and Reddit and, in one instance, TikTok. I am not trying to start anything or offend anyone; I was just a soccer fan trying to make dinner.
I started inauspiciously with a Cape Malay curry from South Africa. The dish was brought to the area by Malaysians who were enslaved by the Dutch East India Company. My recipe came from The Today Show and called for 3 tablespoons of turmeric, which I should have immediately clocked as an editing error but—in the spirit of cultural exploration—dutifully followed anyway and paid a price. For South Korea I made kalbijim, from Eric Kim’s excellent Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home, and won back a little credibility in my household; you, or at least I, simply cannot mess up braised short ribs and beef-fat croutons. Mexico was ably represented by a large order from Tacos El Bronco, and Czechia by a 1997 red-cabbage-and-apple salad recipe from the New York Times.
I split a big thing of fondue for Switzerland and wondered why I don’t eat fondue more often. Then I thought about what I had just done. The national dish of Qatar, and several other nearby states, is machboos—meat (in my case chicken) cooked with rice seasoned by an eponymous spice blend. I pulled it from an official government-sponsored cultural program’s website and it was pretty good. But what you come to realize in an eating project like this is that everyone has a national stewed chicken dish and if you aren’t being careful you could make nothing but stewed chicken for a month. For Canada, I made a New York Times recipe for coconut kale from a restaurant in Vancouver, and paired it with some maple-glazed salmon. Bosnia and Herzegovina knocked out Italy in the playoffs with a penalty from a guy who was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m just sharing that so you know. I picked up three huge slices of meat, cheese, and spinach burek from a shop in south Brooklyn, and it kicked ass.
We used to have a children’s book by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt in which one of the characters refers to herself as “a tagine machine.” It’s stuck with me, long after all the pages were torn out—so I made a chicken tagine for 2022 semi-finalists Morocco and a green-pepper salad with preserved lemon to go with. It was probably too much preserved lemon for one meal, but both were nice on their own. Haiti, back for the first time since 1974, is one of the great stories of this World Cup, and the poul ak nwa I made (another stew-adjacent chicken dish, with cashews) was a worthy entry, for the first several days I ate it. Scotland showed out with rumbledethumps, which, even if you’ve never heard of it before, I feel like you intuitively know is a dish of cabbage, potatoes, and cheese. For Brazil, I baked pão de queijo, little balls of cheesy tapioca bread. They make incredible sliders.
One of the few major upsides of the Global War on Terror is that New York has a lot of people from Australia, which enabled me to get really tremendous sausage rolls from the NoMad outpost of Bourke Street Bakery in April. On balance, you would not say it was all worth it, but I would eat these every day. I should have just made chipa for Paraguay, but that felt too similar to the pão de queijo I’d just made, so I made chipa guazu instead—a sort of cheese-and-corn souffle (at least that’s how it turned out) that I take full responsibility for. At this point, a month into the project, I was starting to hear rumblings from the loved-ones I was feeding that more vegetables would be in order. Googling “Turkey” and “vegetable dish,” I found karnabahar mucveri, a baked cauliflower recipe from Ozlem Warren. The United States is also in this group; I got Tacos El Bronco again.
I had never had döner kebab before, but our entry for Germany immediately slotted itself into the family sandwich rotation. I’ll admit to not having put too much thought into the choice—we have a local döner kebab shop, it has Berlin in its name, that’s good enough for me—but the kebab has become a symbol among members of JD Vance’s beloved German far-white for the kinds of people they don’t like. One of my rules for normal living is to live your life without being triggered by a sandwich. Less controversially, I made keshi yena—ground meat baked in gouda—for World Cup debutantes Curaçao, using a recipe from Oprah.com. It’s a little bit of Holland, a little bit Caribbean, but where it really shined for me was as leftovers, where you could easily repurpose the filling for chopped cheese. For Ecuador, who I rate as dark horses this year, I made llapingachos—potato patties with a bit of achiote—and a nice peanut sauce. But the real winner here might have been Côte d’Ivoire and its maafe, a stew with chicken and ground nuts that’s popular across West Africa. It was a standout in the highly competitive braised poultry category; naturally, I left it on the stovetop overnight and had to toss the rest.
Many of the Netherlands’ greatest players have roots in Suriname, which in turn has deep ties to Java, so I made goedangan, a cabbage salad with coconut dressing. Japan’s oyakodon, another saucy chicken dish, did a job when it needed to. My wife chipped in (or intervened) to make shakshuka for Tunisia; whenever I have shakshuka, I think: “I should have shakshuka more often.” And then there was Sweden. As a gift this year, I got a copy of The Nordic Cookbook, an absolute doorstop of a treatise by Magnus Nilsson that includes recipes for pilot whale and fermented Greenland shark (definitely read the instructions closely for that one). I opted for the book’s more straightforward weeknight dish of nikkaluokta soppa, a.k.a. cabbage and ground beef soup. Perfect January fare, but I made it in May.
They do eat Brussels sprouts in Brussels, it turns out. In search of roughage, I opted for “Flemish-style” sprouts, sauteed in lots of butter. I don’t like these as much as I like Belgium’s Tintin jerseys, but they’ll do right by you. For Egypt, I made dukkah, a nuts-and-spices mixture with various interpretations. Mine came from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food: The Classic Cookbook, Expanded and Updated, with New Recipes and Contemporary Variations on Old Themes—an essential volume for Roden heads. I was unduly confident about making Samin Nosrat’s kuku sabzi for Iran because the process is similar to that of tortilla española. But there’s always a moment of hesitation, when you’re preparing to flip the puck, when you can envision the whole thing going horribly wrong, eggs and herbs ending up everywhere, a deep clean-up job, tears, apologies, a hasty search for delivery options. It turned out quite nicely, though. We spent a long time talking about making pavlova, because there was a recipe for it in the Bluey cookbook, and further research confirmed that it’s also eaten in New Zealand, but by this point, I was starting to grow wary of ambitious projects, and picked up fish and chips.
Uruguay has one food everyone talks about and it’s a sandwich called a chivito. I used to get it at a gas station in DC, but you can just make them. And then keep making them, for several days, because assembling the ingredients for even one means you end up with a ton of sliced steak, ham, bacon, and mozzarella. Most of what I know about Cape Verde is that there are lots of Cape Verdeans in southern New England, and lo if you search for the national dish—a hearty stew called cachupa—one of the first recipes comes from the University of Rhode Island. About 10,000 fans showed up to watch the national team play in Hartford in June and I think I made enough for all of them. Saudi Arabia was ably represented by chicken shawarma. For Spain, I made a tortilla española. (See above.) Versatile, filling, does what it says on the tin.
If I had to put money on anyone to win this year—and I don’t, and won’t—I guess it would be France. And if I could only have one sandwich for the rest of my life…I’m not sure it would be a jambon-beurre, but I’d be hard-pressed to improve on it. Hot dogs in Norway are often wrapped in a potato flatbread called lefse, but I put them in flour tortillas and topped mine with potato salad, fried onions, and—in lieu of lingonberries—a black cherry jam. Senegal came through with coconut collard greens and butternut squash from Pierre Thiam’s Simply West African cookbook. FIFA may have expanded the tournament to make money, but Iraq’s participation, for the first time since 1986, does feel like one small point in favor of a 48-team tournament. I picked up some lahm bi ajeen—spiced meat and yogurt served on a doughy disc. It came in a pizza box. It’s always nice when something that isn’t pizza comes in a pizza box.
I made choripan for defending world champions Argentina. It’s a portmanteau of chorizo and pan. I don’t want to insult anyone by saying it “reminds me of what you get outside of Fenway,” because it’s very different—chimichurri, salsa criolla, etc.—but still: grilled sausage with peppers and onion in any variety will transport you to the sporting cathedral of your homeland. It just feels right. We needed vegetables again, so for Jordan, making its World Cup debut, I got fattoush from a Palestinian spot in my neighborhood, and for Algeria I made a nice cucumber salad with green bell peppers and mint. Austria was one of the stars of this gustatory competition, for the simple reason that we went to a restaurant called Werkstatt (fun to say) and got some schnitzel (also fun to say!) and rösti and a giant pretzel with an anchovy-infused cheese sauce. Very nice.
If the World Cup hadn’t expanded to 48 teams, I’d already have been done. But it did expand, and I was running out of time. So by this point in late May, I was cooking a lot less and getting a lot more takeout. Arguably this entire project was just a ploy to get food for Uzbekistan from Laghman Express, a Central Asian restaurant in south Brooklyn that also has a location in Atlanta. I have already made plans to get it again on Christmas. I picked up egg tarts for Portugal from a place in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, and they tasted like a sweet, eggy cloud. For Colombia I sourced an order of bandeja paisa—a platter with steak, chicharron, rice, and egg—and some papas criollas. The last time Democratic Republic of Congo was in the World Cup it was still called Zaire. I made poulet mayo, which is chicken cooked with mayonnaise, spices, peppers, and onions. It hit the spot.
I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant that only serves canapés, sort of like a Golden Corral for things you eat at weddings. We would not serve the exact mini empanadas I made for Panama, which were pulled from one of the first recipes that showed up when I searched “Panama + empanadas,” and looked vaguely like what a child might come back with if you asked them to draw the moon. But some other version might work. For Croatia we got burek again from the same place. Burek is shaping up to be a breakout star of this year’s World Cup; don’t mess with a good thing. For England, I got a bag of meat pies and pasties from Myers of Keswick in Greenwich Village. Is it coming home? Talk to me in July. But I’m definitely getting these again. For Ghana, I made kelewele—a dish of roasted plantains with an absolutely tremendous citrus, miso, and peanut butter marinade, topped with fried shallots for good measure. It was the last thing I made, with one day to spare before a family road trip that would take us out of pocket and away from our kitchen until the opening match. It might also have been the best.
