The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  It seems to me that there is something very sensible about keeping your memories in the kitchen with the pots and the spices, especially in New York. They take up no space; they do not crash with your computer; and they collect the voice that you can’t quite hear—in tastes and smells and small gestures that, with any luck, will eventually start to sound like you. I’m not in New York right now. The dinner I was cooking a few pages ago—the clam-and-pork stew with plenty of garlic and piri piri peppers that I first ate in a Portuguese fishermen’s tavern near Salem, the day I tacked wrong and sailed my boyfriend’s sixteen-footer into a very big ketch and broke his mast and, with it, whatever interest he had in me—is not the dinner I am cooking today, at a farmhouse in Umbria. My stove is smaller here (though my pots are bigger). I do not write easily about myself. I am not as tasty or exotic as the characters I usually choose. My first attempt at anything like autobiography was a thinly disguised short story, and it was returned with the gentle suggestion that I replace myself with someone “a little less like the kind of person we know everything about already.” But twenty years later I did manage to produce a reminiscence of sorts. It was about my mother and my daughter and about being a feminist, and it ended where I am writing now, in Umbria, looking across my pond to a field of wheat and watching a family of pheasants cross my garden. It occurred to me, worrying over this ending—not quite a panic but enough of a problem to have already produced a Sardinian saffron-and-sausage pasta, a cold pepper soup with garlic croutons, nightly platters of chicken-liver-and-anchovy bruschetta, pressed through my grandmother’s hand mill, and twenty jars of brandied apricot jam—that I might possibly solve the problem by cooking the same dinner that I’d cooked then. It turns out to be one meal I can’t remember.

  PART II

  Profiles

  THE HUNGRY TRAVELERS

  NOVEMBER 2008

  In the fall of 1985, a few months after China opened the Tibetan border, Jeffrey Alford from Laramie, Wyoming, met Naomi Duguid from Toronto on the roof of a hotel dormitory for foreigners in Lhasa. It was ten at night, and since there were no lights on the roof to see by, they sat in the dark, listening to the sound of chimes and chanting, and began to talk—which turns out to have been the best way to get acquainted. They had this in common: they were restless; they were at home in strange and forbidding places; they were attached to the early albums of Herbie Hancock; and they liked to eat. But it was hard to imagine them getting acquainted in what you would call the real world—let alone getting married, writing cookbooks, and ending up members in high standing of a small scholarly circle of food writers whose work leaves the rest of the food world far behind, collecting recipes.

  Duguid, known to her friends as Nom, was a tall, streaky-blond, hazel-eyed lawyer of thirty-five, with a house and a boyfriend at home, and she was traveling through Asia on a five-month work sabbatical, hoping to resolve the question of why the offer of a partnership in the Toronto firm where she had labored happily for nearly five years had made her want to flee. Alford was thirty-one, a tall, skinny, ponytailed seeker of truth with a master’s degree in creative writing, a passion for the East, a light heroin habit, and a reputation for supporting his wanderlust with tag sales in his parents’ front yard—his father was a vice-president of the University of Wyoming—and with odd jobs as a gold and cash courier on the South Asia smuggling circuit. At the time, he and five recruits were getting ready to cross the Himalayas, from Lhasa to Kathmandu, on mountain bikes, for a magazine called Bicycle Rider, which was planning to run a piece by Alford about cycling in Tibet. Duguid was traveling with the eighty-two-year-old Swiss writer Ella Maillart, a legendary adventurer whose letters Nehru once claimed had saved his sanity in prison, and whom Duguid had met for the first time that September in another foreigners’ dorm, in Kunming. “Nom always meets everybody,” Alford says. “Even me.”

  The logistics of love are daunting at twelve thousand feet—Alford describes their attempt at a kiss as “two sheets of sandpaper scraping”—but not, as it were, insurmountable. Ten days later, Duguid wrote a letter of resignation to her law firm—“Dear guys, It’s not the altitude, but I’m not coming back”—placed an awkward call to her boyfriend, and set out to explore Nepal with a couple of anthropologists she had just met, while Alford finished his assignment. She wasn’t worried about their future, because they had already covered all the big, important “life things.” Did they want a family? Could they have one and keep traveling? How would they pay for “a life open to the world”? By November, they had made their way south to Thailand and were camped on an island beach, where Alford started to withdraw. (“I had scored this big hit in Hong Kong. I gave it away. But I had thought, ‘How do I explain this part of my life to Nom?’ She was great.”) It took four days, and they got through them talking about all the places that were left to see and how to get there.

  A month later, they flew home. Alford met Duguid’s friends, including her old law-firm colleagues at Sack, Charney, Goldblatt & Mitchell, whose view of her defection, as she describes it, ran from disbelief to “we’re sorry for us but exhilarated for you.” Duguid met Alford’s friends and got to know his family. Her own family—her father, a navigational engineer; her mother, a physiotherapist for disabled children; and her only brother—had died by the time she was twenty-seven, and she told the Alfords that until Jeff “so much loss” had kept her running from anything like a settled life. A few months later, they were married and back in Asia, crossing the Pamir and Karakoram mountains—from Kashgar, in the Turkic province of Xinjiang, to Gilgit, in Pakistan—on a pair of red mountain bikes.

  They began writing together about biking together, perhaps because in those days Duguid was better on a bike than in the kitchen, where long workdays had left her pretty much limited to baking bread—something her mother had taught her—and boiling pasta. But Alford, by his account, was already obsessed with food. He had cooked his way through his mother’s Joy of Cooking by the age of twenty, worked as “the sauté guy” at a fancy Laramie restaurant as a University of Wyoming undergraduate, and learned the rudiments of Thai cooking from a student from Bangkok who worked there with him. He was also passionate about baking. When he wrote his master’s thesis—his adviser, the novelist John Edgar Wideman, had told him, “Write me a story about the things you know”—he called it “Bread, Travel, and Drugs,” which just about covered nine months he had just spent in a cottage-cum-student crash pad on the Dingle Peninsula, hiking, smoking pot, and perfecting his landlady’s recipe for Irish soda bread. “I love utilitarian things,” he says. “I loved being in that kitchen, I loved the smell of the bread and the steamy windows and my sour-green-apple jam sitting on the sill.” After a month in the Pamirs—in the course of which he tasted “some amazing flatbreads,” and confessed to Duguid that he wanted to write a flatbread book—he started looking through food magazines and said to her, “Wait a minute, I can do this. I know more about food than anything.” Their first food article, “Delicious Asian Flatbreads,” appeared in Bon Appétit in 1988. (They got a thousand dollars for it, or about what Duguid would have been bringing in for a day’s work as a partner at Sack, Charney.) A year later, they published a piece on Thai drinking food—the tapas of Southeast Asia—in Food & Wine, which discreetly called it “Be Cool … with Spicy Thai Salads.” “We write to travel” is how Duguid describes their life since then. “It was never the other way around.”

  By now, Alford and Duguid have raised two sons and written six books. And while their books are undeniably cookbooks (two James Beard Awards for Cookbook of the Year, for a start), they are also cultural encounters—travel journals, stories, history lessons, and photographic essays that, taken together, explore the imagination and the exigencies that produce a cuisine and in many ways define the people who create it. The couple have been called culinary anthropologists, but culinary geographers is at least as accurate. They prefer “friendly amateurs.” Ann Bramson, their editor and publisher at Art
isan Books in New York—who inherited their first manuscript in the mid-nineties, languishing neglected at another press, and has been shepherding their books since then—says that she recognized them right away as “prodigious readers and unaccredited scholars,” and was determined to do justice to them with books that were serious enough to accommodate their field photographs and uncommon texts and at the same time striking enough to make you stop, look, read, and reflect on your way to a recipe that you might otherwise never think of trying. (Duguid, an accomplished photographer, “does people,” and Alford, who has turned himself into one, does the mise-en-scène, a job he more or less described this way: “I’m not a ruin kind of guy, but there were these ruins, so I took the picture.”) A few critics have found them too striking or, as Mark Bittman in the Times once put it, would have preferred more recipes. James Oseland, the editor of Saveur, disagreed. “People pick up a book of Nom and Jeff’s, and they know that it’s something else, something more than a cookbook,” he told me after a lecture they gave at the Asia Society in New York. “It’s their overriding sense of humanity that sets them apart from the flock. They’re taking the exotic out of the everyday in every sense, not simply the recipe sense. They’re telling you, ‘It’s just the world. The world won’t hurt you. Don’t be scared.’”

  That world has nothing to do with states and borders. They write about foods, like grains or rice, that nearly everyone cultivates and, in one form or another, eats—their first book, Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas, took them to four continents in six years—and, most often, about the kind of cooking that defines what they call the “real regions,” which are ethnic or even tribal and topographical and ignore the boundaries of nation-states to form culinary countries of their own. Hot Sour Salty Sweet, their third book, was about the food cooked by the peoples of the Mekong Valley, and for it, they followed the river from near its source, high on the Tibetan plateau, through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, and down to the delta in Vietnam where it meets the South China Sea. Beyond the Great Wall, their sixth, was a culinary tour through the hinterland cultures of “the other China”—cultures beyond the pale of the country’s insistent Han identity—and took the Alford-Duguids from Tibet to the Xinjiang-Kazakh border, and from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the rice terraces of southern Yunnan. Alford calls it a book about survival.

  They travel light, on anything headed in the right direction—a riverboat, a mountain bus, a truck that stops for them on an empty road, a train with a thousand people hanging out the windows. When nothing shows up, they hitchhike or rent a bike or walk. Duguid, who on one trip to China rode from a Dong village in Guizhou to a bus stop near the Guangxi border “strapped onto the back of someone’s motorcycle with my backpack, my camera pack, my tripod, and three Guizhou stools,” calls this “staying vulnerable” to the people, the place, and the possibility of a new taste wherever they get dropped off. “They still travel the way I did when I was twenty and backpacking through Europe, going where the wind blew me,” Tina Ujlaki, the food editor at Food & Wine, says. “They talk about arriving in a place and having no idea of what they’ll find there. The awe that comes with that—it’s always present.”

  Alford once told me that his father’s idea of travel was to cajole one of his three boys into the family Rambler—Jeff was the most willing—and drive to Colorado to play the dog races. “We’d sleep in the car and in the morning head for the truck stop with the best cinnamon rolls,” he said, sending me back to Alford and Duguid’s fourth cookbook—Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World—for the recipe: yeast, water, oil, salt, brown sugar, cinnamon, and thirteen cups of flour make a dozen rolls, and you won’t need anything else on the ride home. The first real traveling that Alford did was a bicycle trip through Wales, the summer after his freshman year in college, and he describes it this way: “I was sooooo lonesome. I missed my parents. I wanted to go home.”

  Duguid, however, had been traveling since childhood—first with her family, and then as a student after her father died, on a legacy from a great-aunt who “saw to it that I didn’t owe.” By the time she finished college—she read geography at Queen’s University in Ontario, with a year abroad at the London School of Economics—she had already seen “some nice bits” of Africa. By the end of law school, she knew India and Nepal. Two years after getting her degree, she was back in India. She calls that trip an experiment in “living undefended, unintroduced, and depending on serendipity.” She was also, by all accounts, a brilliant lawyer. She had what her college roommate and University of Toronto law-school classmate Trisha Jackson calls “that special combination of intellect and intuition and engagement.” But she had no interest in a white-shoe practice. At law school, she had volunteered to work with immigrants at a legal-aid clinic. As a lawyer, she specialized in labor arbitration, “always for the labor side.” She was a radical in a suit. She loved immigrant Toronto and rented an apartment in a house on Henry Street, just around the corner from the ethnic olio of food stores known in the city as Kensington Market. (The year before she left for Tibet, she bought a house of her own on the same block.) She wanted to know where everybody came from, what their families did, and what their lives had been like in, say, India or China. And whenever she could, she went back to Asia.

  Alford began what he calls his “Asia adventures” in 1977. He says that, unlike Duguid, who is instantly at ease with strangers, he was “too shy” for conversation and would simply dig in wherever he landed for a couple of months, not saying much until people got used to him. He was able to live in Asia on very little money, and when he ran out, he usually found a way to make more. (His brother Jim, who is an artist in Santa Fe, told me, “He left on that first trip with twelve hundred dollars, and he came home two years later with twelve hundred dollars, and I didn’t ask.”) He bought clove oil in Sri Lanka and sold it to Ayurvedics in India, and then he bought Indian saris to sell in Sri Lanka. He bought jewelry in Thailand and Nepal, hawked it at his Laramie yard sales, and paid for his next plane ticket with the profits. His days as a smugglers’ courier began in 1981, and they took him from Hong Kong to Kathmandu (where the airport metal detectors were always broken) with, as he usually describes it, “five pounds of gold up my bum.” He made eight hundred dollars for every flight, with two hundred more thrown in for the flight back, which involved the arguably easier job of carrying twenty thousand dollars in a money belt. He could live for a year on a thousand dollars. That was his life until he decided to write a story about bicycling across the Himalayas and met Duguid on a roof in Lhasa. “Here was my vagabond brother, moving into her life,” Jim Alford told me. “It took a lot of courage, maybe even more for him than for her.”

  One of the things that Alford and Duguid decided, early on in Lhasa, was that any children they had should travel with them—which means that for the better part of fifteen years they packed up their boys in November, along with the books and the homework, the Beanie Babies and the Legos, and deposited them back in their classrooms at the end of January. Dominic—a senior at the University of Toronto now—rode from Cholon to Saigon on the back of a motorcycle at the age of two; Tashi, a Toronto freshman, started walking at one, in Tafraout. Neither seems to have suffered from his peripatetic life, or in fact to have found it at all unusual. (It lasted until Dom’s eleventh-grade French teacher started giving him zeros for incomplete assignments.) Sometimes they missed the sandwiches—bread by Duguid—in their school lunch boxes, or at least preferred them to some of the food they tasted traveling; Tash hates onions, garlic, scallions, chives, and “every other oniony thing,” and Dom’s view of seafood is “I have trouble being at the same table with a fish.” But Tash talks casually about the day he ran off a path in Laos—he was eight then—hoping to climb the biggest funeral jar in the Plain of Jars, and had to be rescued from a minefield. And Dom includes in his list of “fun times” the night a plane taking the family from Rangoon to Mandalay made
a mysterious stop and left them stranded on a darkened airstrip outside Taunggyi, the capital of Burma’s dissident Shan State; they ended up in a hotel room with one bed and a television set and got to watch the playoffs between the Denver Broncos and the Pittsburgh Steelers. (He was eleven when that happened.) Between them, the boys can name twenty-five or thirty countries where they have traveled. When I asked Dom if they were ever scared, he said, “Why? Nom and Jeff were with us.”

  Tash describes his parents’ way of working abroad like this: “When we traveled, I was always very confused. We’d eat somewhere, leave, go back to the same place, eat more. I’d say, ‘Guys, call back! Get the recipe!’ But they didn’t need to. They ‘see’ recipes.” Alford and Duguid’s methods are, by their own admission, odd. “We don’t ‘do’ interviews,” Duguid says. “We don’t take notes unless we’re asked to. We engage. We appreciate. We’re there to learn.” (They don’t use translators, either; they figure that by now, between them, they can get by in about a dozen languages.) Even the diaries they keep at night on the road are sketchy. Mainly they depend on the photographs they take—at last count, an archive of more than a hundred thousand color slides—as aides-mémoire and on the kind of confidence that comes from months spent watching and tasting and listening, or as Alford calls it, “hanging out.”