My favourite kind
of memories are the ones evoked by food and how we are transported to specific
times, places and (especially) people through it. Sometimes I find myself
talking about my favourite restaurant and lighting up with the sheer joy of the
thought of salted butter on warm bread or the wasabi laced mayo that dresses a
well made ceviche.
I've created this
very personal relationship with the idea of well roasted meat and balanced
accompaniments that it isn't a wonder that no real diet of cutting joy out has
stuck for very long. I have, through food, wandered through many journeys of
the heart and also journeys of loss too. This may just be a half-finished quilt
of stories that happen to tie into food, but they are my favourite stories
about very simple feasts.
(Also featured: doodles about food and my associated anxieties)
The Chicken And Chip Roll
A month or two
before I started high school, a family friend whose daughter went to the same
school gave me some kind advice. The conversation digressed suddenly when she
remembered to tell me about the chicken and chip rolls they sold at the tuck
shop. Of course, it was the thing I bought on orientation day because it was
the only thing that seemed like a concrete clue in a world that was very
strange and unfamiliar.
The roll itself
is now a thing of the past, phased out in lieu of healthier options I believe-
but it was a work of art to a 13 year old in 2009. Picture a soft bread roll
(the long kind) split down the top and not the middle. It is filled with
slightly soft slap chips and then covered in a concoction of chicken pieces
prepared in a strange brown sauce (maybe BBQ, maybe something else). I liked to
add the vinegary and sweet notes of cheap mustard and tomato sauce. I won't
really understand the allure but there's something about the sharp notes of the
mingling sauces and the softness of the roll that would bring a smile to my
face if ever I had the chance to encounter it again.
Millennial investments:
Avos and Avos and Avos
My best friend’s
mother makes this salsa that is sublime. It has buttery chunks of avo and a
melody of corn and coriander and citrus notes running through it. It is a happy
salsa because I have always eaten it in the company of someone I love very
much. But the memory avocados invariably invoke are ones of being very young.
My grandparents
have this garden, you see, and I spent a large portion of my infancy in it. I
sometimes think I was born, then left in the soil for a time before being
pulled out with carrots and left to grow amongst the tendrils of bean plants
along a fence. My Appa had a tree that occasionally bore an avocado and like
all other fruits in his garden, it was creamy and sweet the first time I had a
piece.
I didn't really like it.
Ismashed it up in my little hands
and rubbed all over my arms as if it wasn't precious. I washed my arms in the
sun-warmed water of a tap that is on the side of the house that faces sunset. I
cannot eat avocados now without smelling the metallic water that gushed out and
often rinsed away muddy toes and hands that had been made sticky from eating
fruit under the trees.
There are some
rather firm, stubborn avocados in our fruit bowl.
Simple feasts
My mother's
mother makes the best toasted cheese. It is always perfectly golden; the cheese
has melted and it was always just perfect. It tastes like every day after
school when the relief of coming home felt like something that almost didn't
happen because the days feel so long when you are young. She has a sandwich press that would crisp up
little bits of cheese that melted out of the sandwich. When I am desperately
homesick for my childhood (rather, when I have hiraeth for that time of my
life) I can make a toasted cheese sandwich and feel a little less lost. I used
to see my Ma every day until I was 18.
She lived close to us throughout my life
and then for two years when we were in the midst of moving our lives across the
country she lived with us. Sometimes the world feels like so much and all you
want is a sandwich and her very small soft hand giving yours a squeeze. Because
then it would feel alright.
Let's Get Coffee... Or?
I once fell in
love with a boy who met me in a coffee shop with exposed copper piping, that
served their coffee with cardamom biscuits. Of course, I didn't know it at the
time, I just knew he was beautiful and fascinating and that I almost forgot to
order coffee because I just wanted to talk to him. He called the biscuits
medicinal tasting which is how I knew he had never been exposed to the delights
of milky vermicelli or buttery soji with hits of elachi laced through them (I
always prefer calling it elachi).
The combination
of the spiced biscuit dipped in the warm dregs of coffee were an afterthought
until months later I remembered that the root of my habit of mixing cinnamon
and elachi powder into the coffee grounds I had, came from a rainy afternoon
that turned to sunshine. And from a taste so familiar to me, that when he
called it medicinal I almost laughed, I think.
I take my coffee the
way I take my romances- bittersweet, stirred with spices and reminders. It
isn't always wise to fall in love with boys who have candyfloss hair and
captivate you over a simple cup of coffee. But we do it anyway.
Chops and mash
My father’s
mother died when I was in my third year of university. She liked expressive
words, bold lipstick and I fear that for a long time I misunderstood a lot
about her. I think of her often but my happiest memory of her was tied to food.
It was a weekend
my cousins, my sister and I stayed with her and my grandfather in their flat
near the beach. We had all lived about 45 minutes away from her and up until
that point we mostly just visited when we went into the city. The entrance of
the block of flats smelled of mothballs and floor wax, her flat had parquet
floors and a fluffy white carpet that lost its grip. I didn't think of it until
now, but I have a similar fluffy white rug next to my bed. On her dining room
table was a black metal teapot that had been issued in WWII I think when her
uncle was a cook in armed forces, she loved to tell stories about those things.
I hope that someone took a moment to make sure her teapot was left safely on
her table when they organised her things in the weeks after the funeral.
My sister cried
the first night we stayed over when we went to see the cricket and she
desperately missed home without the distractions of the flat or the milkshakes
my uncle bought us. That weekend I recall eating chocolate covered peanuts and
watching (with confusion) Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
The next morning,
she cooked and packed a picnic basket. We walked to the beach and sat at one of
the bench and table sets and ate mash with soft rolls, baked beans and these
lamb chops fried in onions and spices. It might have been a mutton chop because
there was a lovely crispness to the fat and a pull to the juicy meat.
Even as I mourned
her passing, I remembered the bright pure joy of being eight or nine years old
and sitting on the beach, having a breakfast with someone who was pleased as
anything to have her grandchildren visit.
And I think that maybe that's the
point of it all. That we can't forget.
