Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  My grandmother would place a quart of Whoppers in the cart, murmuring, “I know how you love these.”

  As we shopped, Gram treated us to a running critique of our father. “Oh, he thinks he’s high-and-mighty. So typical. He thinks he runs everything. Well, just let the Great Dictator stop me now.” Gram said exactly whatever you weren’t supposed to say. She said it like she didn’t even have to think about it first. Like she couldn’t even imagine not saying it. And this daring and this freedom was mixed up with the sugar, as if they all went together. We were a family of women, sugar fiends, shameless and unbowed.

  A few days later, I sit in an audience, each of us with notebooks on our laps as a celebrated health writer leans on the podium and lifts a hand, saying, “What is food? Food is not entertainment or comfort or pleasure or love or distraction. Food is not good or evil. It’s not your friend, it’s not your mother, it’s not your enemy.” She scans the crowd, sighs at her notes. She seems to be disappointed in each and every one of us. “Food is nourishment, fuel, nutrient. Do not let yourselves become confused. It’s time to get un-confused.” She waves her diet book in the air. “Food is a tool. It can make you sick or keep you healthy, according to the choices you make—and those are entirely up to you.”

  Her talk is meant to be inspiring and uplifting. Afterward, though, after the rousing applause and the chatter, the screech of folding metal chairs pushed aside, the audience rushing out to snatch her book and spread the word, I’m feeling dispirited. On the drive home, I think about stopping at the market but can’t imagine a thing to eat.

  When I open the door, though I’d left only a few hours earlier, my daughter flies at my knees, crying, “MAMA!” as if I’d been away at sea. Every welcome-home is a moment of glory. I pick her up: She’s solid in my arms, filled with surprising, sprightly strength. “What’s for eat?” She holds my face with the palms of her hands, assuring that I’m looking directly at her.

  It’s weird to change houses soon after losing a parent—all shelter is gone, you feel turned out into the elements, a metaphysical homelessness. Oh, how I want to retreat into old comforts; I think of sweet ginger waffles, a bowl of butterscotch pudding. I nuzzle the warm crook below Gracie’s right ear, and she chortles and shouts, “No!” Face in hands: Focus, woman. “For eat?”

  Her gaze is pure and intent. It has the effect of an X on the map: You are here. I recognize this; the rest of life comes in such moments. The awareness that things are about to change. Gracie has an elemental and uncomplicated understanding of food, a sacred trust in her food-bringers. Like Bud moving between the table and the Qur’an, my grandmother going from church to oven—we tend to the body, but the spirit prevails. An old mote from Rumi comes back to me: “There are people moving back and forth across the door/ Don’t go back to sleep.”

  Awaken or roll over, these are the choices. It’s my turn, not only to make dinner but also to lead a child into the kitchen, to guide her through her appetites—both at and beyond the table. Bud had trouble sharing the kitchen, though he searched for and encouraged any traces of his culture in his children—through music and language and religion and temperament—he didn’t like to give up that one power, as if it might compromise some essence of his spirit, his gift to us. But if you insist on always taking care of someone, it makes the moment when she must begin to take care of herself so much harder.

  “I know a secret snack. Something the unicorns like to eat,” I tell my daughter. Yes, she is interested.

  On her step stool, Gracie watches me bring out the contents of the refrigerated drawers—a little romaine lettuce, some watermelon slices. Half a goat cheese. A cucumber. She wants to assist, messes be damned. Everything tastes better when you help to make it. We pluck some mint from the garden and check the tomato on the counter to see if it’s gone mealy. She tears up the leaves, tosses the chopped pieces into a bowl, sprinkles on some pumpkin seeds we find in the back of the cupboard. In a jelly jar, I shake a deep-purple balsamic into olive oil, give it lots of salt and pepper, a bit of crushed garlic and honey and mustard, then drizzle it around. She samples some on a fingertip. We sit outside at the round iron table with two forks and Gracie eats only the cucumber and watermelon. I eat the rest of the salad with slow pleasure. We listen to the susurrus of the coconut and imperial palms, the fronds lowered, murmuring, full of secrets, like hair or fingers sweeping the air, speaking to us in forgotten languages.

  You like what you like. Tastes are powerful, primal, intimate, uniquely your own. And the power to choose, to say, No, thank you, not this, is one of the most important powers—at the center of agency and pleasure. You are what you crave and fear and what you want. In a little while, I will snap a small, dark piece of chocolate in two: half for me and half for her. She tastes and hands it back: too bitter. Next week, I will pull out the jar of grape leaves, unscrew the tight lid, inhale their delicate brine, place a mixture of rice, lamb, and garlic at the center of each leaf’s outspread “palm,” and, slowly and with real care, begin rolling them up.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Art and Sugar

  The trick, I’m told, is to see past the pleasure of the moment, which is transitory and deceptive. Sugar is a quick gratification, all about the instant. There is, I gather, a steadiness, a kind of sanity, to good nutrition.

  What I CAN eat. It’s a list, started on the advice of a nutritionist friend. The idea is, instead of staring at the things you shouldn’t eat—chocolate, cookies, ice cream—think about all the good things you could. I keep it in the kitchen and, when I remember, add to it in a haphazard way: fruit salad, hummus, chicken soup, shish kabobs, Caprese salad, roast cauliflower. Everything but sugar goes on the list. Never-ending and never quite satisfying.

  “You don’t have to be quite that strict, do you?” my mother asks in a small voice. “No sweets at all?” She too inherited the sugar-fiend gene; she takes medication for her blood pressure.

  “Well. . . .” My whole body feels like a sigh. “I don’t know.”

  When I’m not baking, I dream of baking. I wake up with my jaw moving, chewing lovely invisible banana pancakes, edges caramelized and crisp, dripping with syrup. I try to distract myself. The main compartments of the refrigerator are crammed with lettuces and avocados and apples and berries and cucumbers and carrots. I own a yoga mat. I break down and buy big bricks of dark chocolate, store them in the freezer; it’s a lot of work to carve off a few pieces, but every night I go after it with a butcher knife, trying to keep panic at bay.

  Sugar and memory: I try to look at this squarely, tell myself that less of one doesn’t have to mean less of the other. But memory runs out at the edges of the forest. And at the heart of my forest is a gingerbread house, enticing and mysterious and dark.

  Sometimes I think the older you get, the more memories there are, and the deeper the forest becomes. A child thinks their life has one smooth shape—always moving straight ahead. Eventually, though, you start to see how crooked the path is, how the trees move closer, how birds have eaten your trail of bread crumbs. Even if you don’t look, the past is right there, just behind your shoulder, and sometimes you lose track and can’t tell what was a memory and what was a dream. You wake with the last notes of birdsong in your ears. Memories become sweeter and more persistent: Once again, I return to my childhood post at the stove after dinner, stirring and waiting for the scrim of foam to appear, pouring so carefully, taking Bud his ahweh, two teaspoons of sugar, barely stirred—don’t break the foam. I recollect a night not long ago when I’d insisted Bud let me make the coffee, the way I did as a child. I said I would bring it to him.

  I was stirring and waiting, and Gracie was leaning against her jiddo’s leg, eating his cake. “It’s okaaaay,” Bud said, sneaking pieces for her with his fingers. “I don’t mind. I never eat white food. Never. Nothing with sugar.” He took another bite of cake, snuck another bite to Gracie. “She knows where to go—she knows go to Jiddo.”

  “Bud. Not
the whole cake.” I said this reflexively; he wouldn’t listen.

  His hand went to the top of his head, he had his apology-smile that wasn’t an apology. “I can’t help it.” This is what he said when Gracie demanded a toy or to be carried, or she hid behind him from a scolding, or ate everything on his plate. He ran his hand over her head. “We know each other.” Bud repeated the story again, how his own father knocked on his head and said, What’s in there? You got rocks for your brains? One of the cold memories we tried to protest and protect him from. But he didn’t mind; he suspected, in his deepest self, that he was still a demanding wild child. That he connected with our three-year-old better than almost any adult could.

  “Look at this one! My baby. How did you do this, Ya Bah?” He touched his face. “My grandbaby—same curly head, same big eye, same curly nose. How did you bring me this baby? It’s an us’meh.” His eyes were dark. “She’s an us’meh, from Allah, straight to me. Right out of the sky.”

  I stared at the black round of coffee, stirring.

  “You know who you named after?” he asked her.

  “No!” She tipped her head sideways, sagged, hung on his knees. She knew.

  “Your sitto Grace. She tried to feed me. Your grandma right here, she takes me home to meet her mom. You should see what your sitto tries to feed me. . . .”

  Not this story again.

  “What?” Gracie cried. “What Sitto feed you?”

  “Oh, I’ve told you this one before, I know I have!” Bud said, waiting to be begged before he began. “First, on the table—these shrimps, I never seen anything like. Huge like soursour. . . .” Cockroaches.

  Oh, that wonderful old memory! Bud shook his head. His half-frowning, sorrowful smile. “I miss her. She was a good fighter. Grace loved to fight. To this day I miss her.”

  The cravings go away, people tell me. I slather apple slices with peanut butter, construct the biggest fruit salads in the world. At my desk, I open books about health and wellness, then all at once I’m on the floor in the dining room, rereading sections of Edith Wharton; I don’t remember how I got there. I try to rehabilitate myself. Most of the nutrition books have helpful mottoes about moderation and inspiration and can-do. Each day, I try to learn the tiniest lessons, and then right away I forget them. I may be beyond hope.

  Testing or torturing myself, I offer to make salted chocolate brownies for Gracie’s preschool class. When they’re done baking and cut into squares, I offer her a few test pieces. She eats two and leaves the last one. “Didn’t you like them?” I ask.

  “I loved them,” she says, surprised.

  “But?” I hold up the last piece.

  She shrugs. “I’m done.”

  She is, I realize, the most uncomplicated eater I’ve ever met, her appetite squared neatly, ingeniously with her body. There is something here for me to pay attention to: learn to answer the body, not the mind.

  I come up with my own mantra to tape to the fridge: Bake your own dessert. Don’t eat the whole thing.

  “You learn food by feel, not on a paper.” Aunt Aya’s smile was strong and bright, though her lipstick bled into a million cracks around her mouth. In her seventies, my aunt still wore the same makeup. “Why would you write down how to cook?”

  “You mean. . . .” I hesitated, forty years old, beginning my third marriage, yet around her, eternally seven. I’d just made the mistake of requesting one of her “recipes.” “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head and settled back against her divan, arms folded. “It’s like learning to speak French. You don’t do it in a classroom. You do it running around Montmartre, calling for cabs, drinking Pernod.”

  I frowned, considering this analogy, and she stood and seized my wrist, narrow fingers digging into the bone. “Come on, then. Come, come, come. I’ll show you everything.”

  It was late in the day and the long shadows made her stone-floored kitchen cool and dim. She hustled around, requiring an enormous, flat tray that her sixty-nine-year-old housekeeper, Mrs. Mahmoudy, had just finished drying. There was a bit of a tug of war, which my aunt won, waving Mrs. Mahmoudy out of the room with one hand.

  “Now this—this is a true Palestinian dish,” she said. “Your grandmother Aniseh—her knafeh? The Arabs have an expression: You’re so beautiful you make me go insane. That was her knafeh. Like a vision. The Palestinians love it because knafeh is like a home—which is something everyone longs for.”

  Aya sat in a carved wooden chair and gave directions while I scurried, stirring and chopping. Occasionally she would break in to show me the correct manner of mixing together the semolina and the flour, then she’d go back to her chair. Unlike my grandmother, who’d loved the actual baking, for Aya baking was an excuse to hold forth. “Some people, I’m told, find it acceptable to color the butter with some sort of dye.” She touched thumb and forefinger to her forehead, as if the very thought of this brought on physical pain.

  “No dye,” I echoed.

  “Saffron only. There’s no point to being pretty without poetry.”

  We brushed the tray with a poetic saffron-yellow clarified butter then covered this with toasted shredded dough. “The story of knafeh is that the base is like a nest—these shreds are like the twigs. And the nest holds—what do you think it holds?”

  “An egg?”

  She gave me a long, pleased no: “It holds a marriage.” Aya brought the tips of her fingers together.

  She pointed out sparse places on the tray; I leaned over and tufted it with more dough. She produced a bowl filled with tiny cheese curds, which were then scattered over the dough. “The cheese is mild—like the heart of a good husband. Next comes the syrup, sweet as a bride. Not too much! Nothing worse than too sweet.” She monitored as I poured a thin stream of attar over the pastry. “Nobody expects cheese and sweet to get along, but you arrange their marriage, and see? They are crazy in love.”

  It was well past midnight and a slim silver moon hung in the windows when the knafeh was pulled from the oven. Aunt Aya placed two plates on the table and used a flat spatula to cut large helpings of the pastry. I apologized to my aunt for keeping her up so late. Half an hour earlier, Mrs. Mahmoudy had come into the kitchen to ask rather pointedly who we thought was going to clean up. She departed without waiting for an answer. “Oh, this isn’t late,” my aunt scoffed. “Things are just starting. In a few hours, the man in the tower will be calling for prayers. Knafeh is for breakfast time.”

  I closed my eyes, drifting on the buttery scent. Back in the States, when I’ve made knafeh for friends, they sometimes don’t like it, uncertain about the mixture of melting cheese and crisp, sweet dough, a dish in between dinner and dessert. “Gram should’ve tried this,” I said, half to myself. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  Aya smiled thinly. She’d visited America several times, yet she seemed always to be humoring me when I mentioned aspects of my life at home—as if it were all my little fantasy. Then her eyes lit up and she clapped her hands. “Oh! The one named Grace? Who made the Catholic cookies?”

  I’d forgotten. Twenty-five years ago, Grace had tasted some baklava that Aya had made during a visit to see Bud and his family, The Americans. As soon as she returned to New Jersey, my grandmother swathed a tin of Wurstcakes in tissue paper and bubble wrap and mailed it overseas to my aunt. A few months after that, I opened Gram’s cupboard to find rows of little cellophane bags filled with brightly colored, unlabeled spices, her whole pantry smelling of Jordan. “Where did these come from?” I asked, agape. I picked up a bag and sniffed something I was pretty sure was zataar.

  “I have my sources,” Grace said smugly.

  In this far-off kitchen, ten years after Grace’s death, it seemed as though she might stroll back in at any moment. Memory persists in present tense, immortal. I felt the closeness of things, the moon shining on Jordan and New Jersey. I felt how time collapses and things draw together in unexpected ways. Grace and Aya never met each other, yet they recognized eac
h other, their solitary, unconventional lives. In a few months’ time, I would begin the process of contemplating parenthood. If there was a way to inscribe such things, I would have asked Aya for her advice, to describe the steps she’d taken toward attaining courage—learning how to know what you want, learning how to be brave enough to pursue it. But, by that point, I was already beginning to suspect you couldn’t write it down: You had to do it by feel.

  “Your grandmother Grace,” Aunt Aya said, “would have loved the knafeh.”

  The advice-givers are the ones who can make you afraid, but they’re also the ones who offer courage. Both things. They do it by showing you the ways they grew stronger and the things that gave them joy. The art is in what you choose to pay attention to.

  Scowling, Mrs. Mahmoudy came back into the kitchen, plump hands propped on her hips. “I’m not cleaning this.” She groaned herself into a chair and looked at the knafeh as if it had just insulted her. “Where is the coffee? You don’t expect normal people to eat this without coffee?”

  I started to get up, but my aunt was already at the stove. At one a.m., there were thimbles of black coffee and three plates of knafeh. We were on some different sort of clock where stars and planets swam past the windows; inside, we were impervious to all but the pastry. It was lustrous and supple, its ingredients held in equipoise. If deliciousness is a kind of grace, this was it. Beside my aunt, at her kitchen table, I ate knafeh and drank in moonlight, and, brave or not, I knew I was about to begin something.

  I told my aunt’s story about the mild husband and sweet wife to Mrs. Mahmoudy, who appeared bewildered by it. Then, sitting straight, she waved a bite of knafeh on the fork and asked my aunt, “You said the mild and the sweet, but who is the crunchy, Aya? Where does the crisp dough fit into that perfect marriage?”