38. In The Kitchen | Essays on food and life
Got this at my local bookshop after my friend Malinda recommended her (you’ve met her before here, she recommends THE BEST BOOKS!! Get yourself a friend like Malinda please.)
Continuing on the theme of my latest love of short stories, I enjoyed almost all of these.
Thirteen essays, in which the writers share intimate and heartfelt stories on the subjects of cooking and eating and how each of these shape our lives.
There is an hilarious take on the film Mermaids (1990) in a story named “Against Roast Chicken: An Hors d’Oeuvres Theory of Cooking” by the wonderful writer Rebecca May Johnson. (She has a new book coming out in August 2022 which I’ve pre-ordered just because I loved this story so much). The story is about food; mermaids; single moms; the patriarchy and it is hilarious. I won’t ruin it here for you.
Julia Turshen is in here too (one of my faves) and her story on food and community had me in sobbing in the bath. As context and a bit of personal history from me, I grew up white in apartheid South Africa, an ex-British colony, in a home ruled by patriarchal white supremacy. My earliest memories of food are the meals made for us by local, indigenous Zulu people who worked for us as slaves. I was too young to register the oppression I was a part of and I carry that guilt now as an adult. There is a paragraph I have highlighted and it will stay with me for a long time:
“Both of my parents worked full-time since before I was even a thought. Much of my childcare was delegated to Jennie, my childhood babysitter who lived with my family Monday through Friday for a decade of my life starting when I was three years old. Jennie and I could not have more different backgrounds. She is from St Vincent and the Grenadines, a small Caribbean country. She would often spend weekends at her apartment cooking Vincentian food that she would bring with her to my family’s apartment to eat throughout the week. She would make simple American things for my older brother and me, things like macaroni cheese along with sliced hot dogs that she’d crisp in a skillet and coat with ketchup so they would get glossy and sticky. Then she’d warm herself a bowl of pelau, a simple one-pot spiced-rice dish she’d layer lentils and chicken into, or curried goat, or fish-head stew. And I would eat two dinners, the macaroni or whatever, and then some of Jennie’s food, which she generously shared.
It was through that food, the food that I never saw being cooked so it always had an air of mystery, that I got to know Jennie beyond just being my babysitter. In sharing her food, she shared herself. Food was our bridge. And when I graduated college and went to St Vincent with Jennie, where everyone called me ‘Jennie’s baby’ and I never once had to introduce myself to anyone because they all knew who I was already, I ate the food of my childhood in the place it originated even though I didn’t originate there.”
That’s the line that killed me:
“I ate the food of my childhood in the place it originated even though I didn’t originate there.”
Ooooof.