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“It’s the turmeric,” I tease her, after reading a study about curcumin’s ability to impair fear responses and treat symptoms of PTSD. I’ve seen her season nearly everything with the yellow powder. In classic fashion, Americans have since tried to stuff into pill form what others naturally ingest. “That’s why you’re so chilled out.”
We each earn just enough. I could have my freedom taken away from me. She could have her right to live in this country revoked. My country may recognize our right to a relationship, but her country does not. Despite our shared happiness, due to powers beyond our own, our relationship is also insecure.
I know how unpredictable the future is. I know how quickly relationships can warp. And I know, too, despite all of this, how fundamental our relationships are to grounding us on this earth.
She and I know full well the impermanence of built constructions. We choose to build family with each other, anyway. Perhaps just as the sacred and the profane coexist, so, too, does innocence and wide-eyed perception of the world.
8 LINEAGES OF FOOD
My cooking tendencies reflect my own muddled roots. No one style of food predominates, because that wasn’t how I was raised.
One day last fall, I stopped by my local Indian/Pakistani grocery store. Since I lived in a rural location, Lafayette, Indiana, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew I wanted a wide array of spices—cumin seeds, cardamom, coriander, turmeric, dry ginger, and more.
On my first visit, after taking a few wrong turns, I found the tiny market, which offered
little in the way of consumables. The store felt overly lit, bathed in a harsh white light that revealed all the scratches and dinged walls. The commercial chest refrigerator was askew. The metal shelves and wire wall displays were empty save for some knocked over, randomly organized boxes and bags of dry goods and cleaning supplies.
“Come back in a week,” the owner told me cheerfully, following me out onto the sidewalk as I turned and walked out the door. “We’ll be stocked then.”
I nodded, though I didn’t think I would return.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“My parents are Korean,” I told him. I knew what he really meant.
“Ah, Korean,” he said. “Come back next week.”
I came to the grocery store in the first place because I’d made the mistake of telling my new girlfriend I was a good cook. I’d answered her question honestly, without thinking too deeply about it.
“I’ll cook for you,” I told her. It was only later, when brainstorming what I might be able to cook for her, given her tastes, that I realized I should have been more specific. I’m good at cooking certain kinds of things.
In any area of life, surely this is true. We contain indices of knowledge that we fall back on, in the skills we already possess, effortlessly. As a rock climber, for example, I know my strengths and weaknesses in terms of body movements, preferred handgrips, and preferred rock angles. I know my style and its hallmarks, as do most climbers.
At a reading I heard rising-star poet Kaveh Akbar mention how, on a daily basis, we draw upon a bank of three thousand to five thousand words that we use regularly, despite the English language holding so many more possibilities. This is probably why we can so easily identify the language of someone close to us, even if we see only their words, stripped of orality—because we recognize the unique speech patterns they’ve developed.
Style carries over to the simplest things, including how we communicate. And in cooking, surely the same accumulation of knowledge exists. Just as do other cooks, I know the flavor profiles, techniques, and recipes that I own, as well as those I don’t.
“I wanna make you nihari,” I told her, in a moment of optimism in my abilities. Never mind that I hadn’t yet tasted the dish. Nor had I known, prior to meeting her and hearing her salivate over the dish each week—and then relying on Wikipedia and internet research—that it was the “national dish of Pakistan.” I’d never cooked Pakistani food before, but theoretically, it seemed easy enough to make. She laughed at me then, poked fun, but also lit up at the idea.
After looking through recipes online, I told her to ask her mother, whom she said made the best nihari, for the recipe. Her mother’s advice? “It’s too difficult for her. Tell her to buy a box of Shan’s nihari masala and follow the recipe on the back of the box.”
“Your mother must be appalled,” I said then, “at the idea of me trying to make nihari.”
“No,” she replied confidently. “An American cooking nihari? She’d be proud.”
When I lived in New York City, I cooked frequently, and my spice collection was fully stocked. Whether I sought ingredients for Italian, Thai, or nearly any other cuisine, I knew I had a wealth of options a subway ride away. These were the things I took for granted. I could stop into Sahadi’s during lunch break in Brooklyn, or Kalustyan’s in Murray Hill, or even trek to Jackson Heights, if I had a craving for seasonal shipments of fruit. A coworker, knowing I was a foodie, once offered to bring me a few alphonso mangos from the stand near her subway stop.
Since relocating to rural Indiana for graduate school, I’d downsized my selection and lived simply. I might need to drive an hour south to Indianapolis, or more than two hours north to Chicago, to find the sort of fully stocked stores I’d once taken for granted. This had been an adjustment for me—the idea that choice meant at least an hour’s trek.
A week later I found myself returning to the tiny store two miles from my home, curious to see what its full selection might look like. Surely enough, shelves had been restocked, and though I knew I wouldn’t be able to find the whole spices I preferred, a spice blend seemed a possibility.
“Let me know if I can help you find anything,” the owner said, smiling at me.
Since he offered, I asked, “Do you have Shan’s nihari masala?”
“You know nihari?” His face lit up in genuine surprise and recognition, and he began laughing with pleasure. I looked at him more closely then—at his striped white button-down shirt, at the closely shaved whiskers on his face.
We chatted comfortably after that, about the renovations he had underway, about whether I lived nearby. I left the store thinking about much more than groceries—though the three boxes of spices I bought were remarkably cheap, costing $5 and change. I thought instead about the recognition we each desire—what it means when we feel seen by others, and the ways in which food can serve as a vehicle for feeling known.
