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By virtue of being first-generation, perhaps my true inheritance is one of multiplicity. Or perhaps not inheriting a solid food culture simply makes me truly American.
Food inheritance doesn’t seem that distant a concept from class, or any of the other abstract concepts we use to arbitrarily classify. We so often press for categorization, but if compelled to honesty, most of us would admit to fluctuations in lifestyle. Who of us hasn’t subsisted on ramen and sardines, in hard times? Who hasn’t also splurged on relatively fancy meals, in moments of celebration? Who hasn’t sought out new flavors or stumbled upon ones by accident, which become ones we then seek out with regularity?
* * *
I used to eat at a Yemeni restaurant with a Swedish-Eritrean colleague, with fresh flatbread, foul madammas (fava beans cooked in garlic, tomatoes, and oil, then mashed), hunks of lamb to eat with one’s fingers. I hadn’t grown up eating such food, but it still felt homey, more honest and real, in a way, than the food that surrounded me in youth—heavily processed, heavily advertised by America’s food conglomerates, nostalgic in the way of junk food, but not substantial or healthy—ever has. Good food seems to have more in common than otherwise.
Then, too, I spent a weekend with Russian oligarchs in the Hamptons once. They’d taken a helicopter in from Manhattan. The rock on her finger was massive. My sister was recovering from rounds of chemo, her boyfriend at the time was courting clients, and her boyfriend’s friends were visiting. As a houseguest with a tenuous link and little else to contribute, I spent much of my time cooking fancy food, on the fancy professional-grade stove. Lobster, sea scallops, clams from the beach.
As I kept cooking, to my surprise, one of the oligarchs joined in. She corrected me when I nearly threw in the gills along with the exoskeletons, when I made lobster stock for risotto. She took over the kitchen entirely for an evening, made a pot of meat-stuffed cabbage rolls, and another dish, as well, something hearty and meaty, mentioning her experience in restaurants. We never talked of anything weighty, never saw each other again, but food served as the ultimate connector, the ultimate leveler.
These are the sorts of memories that have changed me. The act of cooking is a rare one in which being technically proficient can provide both the basics of human survival—sustenance—and also something equally valuable but intangible. We bring all our past life experience to bear when we cook a meal for someone, when we share. We bring, more importantly, the truth of ourselves forward.
* * *
Food can be an opportunity for both novelty in unexpected discoveries and nostalgia. It can be both necessity and indulgence. Wealth doesn’t always translate to advantage—in so many other countries, those who are poor can still afford to eat well.
In cooking and in writing, I derive real pleasure and comfort from converting raw material into something finished, something realized. Sustaining oneself might be drudgery—just another example of the many small tasks we must perform. But as with any other task, we can also find joy in executing it well.
Friends used to mock me for being “domestic,” in that I like to cook. I’m proud of being able to take care of myself, as well as loved ones, in this way. Food and culture and identity and family and love are tangled together, inseparable.
Generally the skills we teach ourselves are pointless accumulations of knowledge, but for the pleasure we derive from them. Cooking is an act
scientific, technical, controlled, and also, in its final surrender to mystery, artistic. Its complexity translates to reward in how there’s endless challenge to be found, endless comfort to be taken.
* * *
My taste in food has always been for diversity, for variety. I can chart my shifts in diet against the backdrop of my current versus former partners’ tastes. My index of recipes is tied to the people and places I’ve loved. I see this now as a positive—that my food vocabulary is more expansive, for its lack of groundedness in one cultural inheritance.
My ex-boyfriend was influenced by his proudly Sicilian heritage—it was with him that I became accustomed to cooking with pork and wine. My ex-girlfriend was influenced by growing up in Chicago’s diversity, by time spent working in Southeast Asia, by her Turkish and Polish heritage. I saw these influences unfold gradually over time, as memories and associations emerged, as stories were told—not by making assumptions or prodding for a particular story. Taking individuals as such often requires asking questions that render us vulnerable and listening without expectation, rather than dictating the terms of conversation.
I grew up hearing only certain kinds of food stories. Writers like Ligaya Mishan, Tejal Rao, Pete Wells, Samin Nosrat are changing those stories—shining spotlights on the places and cuisines that were once ignored in mainstream media, or writing explicitly about their own tangled food inheritances. It’s exciting—to see change in the knowledge disseminated.
The more recipes we own, the more we can play when we’re in the kitchen. By borrowing bits of vocabulary, we can slowly develop our own points of view, arriving at newness in how we combine flavors.
* * *
When my girlfriend and I first started dating, we recognized our lack of a common food vocabulary. My favorite food is Thai, with which she was unfamiliar. I knew close to nothing about Pakistani food, which she told me she’d eat every day, if she could.
The first time I cooked for her, before I attempted nihari, I opted for hearty and healthy: lamb shanks braised in red wine, garlic yogurt sauce, butternut squash, and quinoa. Given her penchant for heavily spiced food, she admitted she found the food “bland.”
The reaction surprised me. I’d grown to like simple flavors in sharp relief—the sourness of Greek yogurt, the earthiness of meat cooked with little seasoning, the taste of vegetables roasted for their own sake. Some of my favorite things to cook—mercimek çorbasi, a lentil soup I’d first tasted in Turkey—featured only one or two spices, with lots of acidity.
Then, too, my ex-girlfriend had been allergic to nearly everything, including black pepper and spices. With her I’d gotten accustomed to seasoning with little more than pink salt.
“I’m not like her,” she told me. “You can cook whatever you want for me and I’ll eat it. Just not pork.”
She told me this because she knew of the ways my cooking had changed to accommodate my ex, who’d subscribed to a bulletproof-inspired and gluten-free diet, meaning my grocery bills expanded significantly in buying grass-fed butter and red meat, coconut oil, gluten-free bread, Himalayan salt, MCT oil, and other ingredients I didn’t fully understand. But in reality my ex-girlfriend had expressed similar sentiments to my girlfriend’s, with an accompanying litany of things she wouldn’t eat—things like sesame oil, or ideally no soy sauce, which essentially ruled out most Asian dishes.
“Bacon isn’t pork, is it?” I asked. That same ex ate bacon religiously, and so I’d somehow fallen into the habit of eating a sizzling slice every morning, that iconic staple of American breakfast.
In her case, the consumption of pork is explicitly irreligious. More than just religion, she scorns it. “Ugh, disgusting,” she says, whenever I mention the meat. She considers this scorn a Pakistani norm.
I offered trying to make nihari because I wanted to make something she would actually enjoy, something she loved. And because, too, I wanted to meet her on her own territory, rather than expecting her to meet me on mine.
She shrugged off my offer after I mentioned my difficulty in finding spices, telling me nihari was too much of a hassle to make. But I’d already offered, and the dish still seemed like any other—simple to execute, with a little practice. Shortly after I ate nihari for the first time, I cooked it as a surprise, on one of her weekend visits down from Chicago.
The recipe was simple, on the surface. Making it was a surprisingly laborious adventure, for the sourcing of ingredients more than anything else. I visited the greenmarket farmer from whom I often bought lamb, to get beef shank and marrow bones. He sold me substitute cuts, the closest versions he had.
