Some things in China, it turns out, are decidedly NOT cheaper than they are in America. For example, many savored American foods. Specifically, the Chinese aren't big into dairy products.
For Thanksgiving dinner at Logan and Sarah's house, I volunteered to bring the apple pie, and Austin would make Sweet Potato Casserole. You need a lot of butter for these dishes. I went to the nearby
choashi where I usually buy my bread and milk to look for butter. Bewteen our two recipes, I needed to buy 1.5 cups worth of butter. The cheapest I could find ended up costing me RMB60--or roughly $10. TEN DOLLARS for 3/4 a box of butter??! Good heavens! But we had decided that we would splurge because it was a holiday.
I returned home and made my pie crust dough. When I put the pie together the next day, it was quite a sight to behold. The crust looked perfect and was neatly crimped at the edges. The crumble topping (because
why would you hide a perfectly good apple pie filling with a top crust?) was beautifully and delicately spread over the mound of cinnamon-y apples inside. I wish I had taken a picture. I've never made a pie crust before, and it looked to be a resounding success.
However, about 5 minutes into the bake time, I peeked into the oven to see that my once-lovely crust had melted into a bubbly drizzle around the edges of the pie, and the crumble had also melted and seeped into the apple filling. It was shortly thereafter that I realised that the 227g blocks of butter I had purchased were ONE CUP each, or ONE-HALF POUND each. Not the half CUP I had calculated. Cup? Pound? A box of butter at home is 1 pound or 2 cups. So the block I bought was equivalent to two American sized sticks. I confused myself. And man, that was one BUTTERY pie.
So I bought and used twice as much butter as I needed. And where there was usually apple juice drizzling out of the bottom of my pie, there was butter juice. It was not the best pie ever. (Although the crust--tho not as lovely as it once was--was the lightest, flakiest crust you could imagine.) And I have to concede that the price of butter is not
quite as outrageous as I once thought it was--only $5 per cup and a half.