A Kitchen Drawer
My mother wrote her recipes in prose, linking ingredients together into homespun expressions, putting you at ease, making it seem as effortless as boiling an egg: “Just add a handful of sugar to a pot of cherries and cook them until they stop bobbing to the surface.” These cherries were later folded into saffron rice with slivered almonds and orange peel, but never mind that now, the cherries are tiny and take a while to pit – a task we’ll share over a cup of tea. So that’s how I learned to cook Persian food, by knowing a handful could mean a half a cup or more, that only lazy cooks don’t bother to pit stone fruit before cooking it, and patience is an essential ingredient.
I should not have been surprised then, to find a drawer brimming with recipes in her long hand on paper ripped from bank deposit slips and prescription pads, some in Farsi, some in English, and written like words of advice versus formulas. But on that afternoon, just days after she died, I felt compelled to dismantle her kitchen, lining up boxes like little coffins and filling them with cups and saucers. When I pulled open a drawer, I didn’t expect to find a dozen variations of tuna casserole, macaroni and cheese, and banana bread – a compilation of American dishes she had made great efforts to master. I put all the recipes in a manila file tied with string and brought them home. They sat on my bookshelf for a year before I could bear to look at them again. But I thought about them every day like solving an equation backwards, trying to understand how I had come upon the result. My mother, a woman well versed in Persian cookery, was taking notes on the multiple ways to make coleslaw. There was Jenny’s version with shredded apples, and a restaurant version with whole grain mustard. In Pat’s oatmeal raisin cookies, she had overruled her neighbor’s attempt at precise measurements and written loose instructions to give herself plenty of room to make mistakes. I think it was her way of making it her own. Amassed haphazardly over the course of twenty five years, since her immigration to America in 1980, these handwritten recipes were a testament to her diligent efforts to assimilate, expand her repertoire, and teach herself American cookery.
In my efforts to understand what happens to those left behind and how to cope with loss, my first instinct was simply to write my parent’s story – a doctor and a nurse who escaped execution and took refuge in America. I soon realized that the only story I could write, other than an anecdotal account of their lives, was my story: my experience as their daughter, how I was shaped as an Iranian-American, and the role I played within the family unit as a link between two cultures. A persistent feeling occupied my thoughts that I had not appreciated my mother’s tenacity, her will to piece together a new life in an unfamiliar land, to recreate a sense of place for her children, and foster friendships and love for their adopted country. They say that survivors look for messages. I saw her collection of recipes as an incentive to understand her experience in exile, following our path as we made our way to America while looking over my shoulder at what we left behind.
In my family food was the language we used to tell stories, to communicate love, share our passions, and our values. I am intrigued by the fact that a country can be ravaged by fundamentalism and war, its citizens scattered like shards of glass over the globe, and yet its food remains intact. Food allows us to hold on to something sensory, providing not only nourishment, but security, dignity, and love. In writing this book I have followed a yearning certainly for comfort and solace, but also to unravel the interior world that all immigrants inhabit. My mother looked in between cultures to find meaning, to understand how we are all connected in a world of appetites. She wrote recipes like stories, knowing instructions are not compelling, but hunger is.
