Swapping Recipes With a Pen Pal
Food is the easiest subject to share across cultures, and a recipe swap gives two pen pals something to do as well as something to say. Here is how to write a recipe someone abroad can actually cook, and what to do once you have cooked theirs.
By Sander · October 1, 2026 · 6 min read
If you run out of things to say to a pen pal, ask what they had for dinner.
Food is the easiest way into another culture. Everyone eats, everyone has opinions about it, and a dish brings a whole household with it: who cooks, what is cheap, what is only made on holidays.
A recipe swap goes one step further: you cook each other's food and write back about how it went. It gives you something to do as well as something to say.
Why food works so well
Most cross-cultural subjects need care. Religion, politics, money and family set-ups can all go wrong if you ask carelessly (the across cultures guide covers that). Food rarely does. It is personal without being private, and it opens the door to bigger subjects without you having to push.
Ask someone how to make their favourite soup and you will usually find out who taught them, what season it belongs to and what their family argues about at the table.
Writing a recipe for someone in another country
A recipe that works in your kitchen depends on things you never think about: your measuring tools, your oven, your shops and your words for ingredients. Your pen pal has none of those.
Measurements
Give weights in grams wherever you can, and add a second measure if you know your pen pal uses one.
- Cups are not universal. A US cup is roughly 240 ml. Australia and some other countries use a 250 ml metric cup. Many European kitchens have no measuring cups at all, just scales.
- Spoons vary too. A tablespoon is 15 ml in most places but 20 ml in Australia. For anything where the amount really matters, such as baking powder or salt in bread, say so.
- Liquids: give millilitres, and add fluid ounces or cups for an American pen pal. Remember that UK and US pints are different sizes, so avoid pints altogether.
- "A knob of butter" and "a handful" mean nothing to someone who has never watched you cook. Give a rough weight: "a knob of butter (about 20 g, a piece the size of a walnut)."
Ovens
- Give the temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, and gas mark if your pen pal might be in the UK or Ireland. For example: 180°C / 350°F / gas mark 4.
- Say whether you mean a fan oven. Fan (convection) ovens usually run hotter, and many recipes suggest about 20°C lower for them. If your temperature is for a fan oven, write that down.
- Do not assume they have an oven. In many homes around the world a stovetop, a rice cooker or a single hob is the whole kitchen. If the dish can be made in a frying pan, say how.
Ingredients and substitutes
Name ingredients clearly, and give a fallback for anything that might not travel.
- Watch the words. Plain flour is all-purpose flour in the US. Bicarbonate of soda is baking soda. Double cream is roughly heavy cream. Coriander leaves are cilantro in American English. Courgette is zucchini, aubergine is eggplant.
- Describe anything regional. "Speculaas spice" means nothing in Brazil. "Speculaas spice (mostly cinnamon, with a little nutmeg, cloves and ginger)" is something they can put together.
- Offer the substitute yourself. "If you can't get quark, thick plain yoghurt works." You know your dish best, so you know which swaps ruin it and which ones nobody would notice.
- Say which ingredients matter. "The smoked paprika matters, the onion doesn't" is very useful information.
Technique without assuming tools
Describe what the food should look like, not just which tool to use or how long to wait.
- Not "beat for 5 minutes in a stand mixer" but "beat until it is pale and thick enough that a trail stays on the surface for a few seconds. A whisk and some patience works."
- Not "cook for 8 minutes" but "cook until the edges go golden and the middle no longer looks wet, about 8 minutes on my stove, but go by the look."
- Not "blitz in a food processor" but "chop as finely as you can. A food processor makes it quicker, but a knife is fine."
Hobs and pans differ. What the food looks and smells like travels better than a number of minutes.
Asking for theirs
Do not ask for "a recipe from your country". That is the "tell me about your culture" question in an apron, and it gets you a recipe copied from the internet. Ask for something specific to them:
- "What's something you cook on an ordinary Wednesday when you're tired?"
- "Is there a dish your family makes that you've never seen anywhere else?"
- "What do you make when you're ill or homesick?"
Then ask who taught them, and what they eat it with.
Cooking it and writing back
This is the best part. Cook their dish, and then write a proper letter about what happened, especially if it went wrong.
Say what you had to substitute. Say what you got wrong. Say what your household thought of it. A photo helps if you are both comfortable sending them. Then ask the question that only a real attempt can produce: "Mine came out quite runny. Is it meant to be like that, or did I do something wrong?" The answer usually comes with a story.
"I burned the first batch and my flatmate ate the second" is a much better letter than "it was delicious, thank you".
A sample recipe letter
This is an illustration, but it shows the shape:
Dear Ana,
You asked what we eat when nobody can be bothered, so here it is: pannenkoeken, Dutch pancakes. They're big and thin, bigger than American ones and a bit thicker than French crêpes, and in our house they were always Friday dinner.
For about 8 pancakes: 250 g plain (all-purpose) flour, 500 ml milk (about 2 US cups), 2 eggs, a pinch of salt, and butter or oil for the pan.
Put the flour and salt in a bowl, make a hole in the middle, crack in the eggs and add about a third of the milk. Whisk from the middle outwards until it's smooth and thick with no lumps, then add the rest of the milk bit by bit. If you pour it all in at once you'll get lumps, which is what I did for most of my teenage years. It should end up like thin cream.
Heat a big frying pan until a drop of water fizzes on it, add a little butter, pour in enough batter to just cover the bottom and tilt the pan so it spreads. When the top no longer looks wet and the edges lift up, flip it. The first one is always bad. That's the cook's one.
The proper Dutch thing is to cook slices of apple or bacon into the batter, or eat them plain with stroop, a thick dark syrup you probably can't get. Golden syrup, maple syrup or honey will all do. Icing sugar and lemon is also allowed.
Now I want your Wednesday dish. And tell me what goes wrong when you make it.
Femke
It gives both measures, explains the ingredient that will not travel, describes how things should look instead of giving timings, and ends by asking for theirs.
Keeping it going
A recipe swap can carry a correspondence for months: work through the seasons, or both cook the same dish and compare. If you want ideas for which country to look at next, the country hubs are a good start, and the what to write about list has more food questions.
Keep the letters. In a few years you will have a small cookbook, mistakes included.
