Over the next several years, I shuttled between Paris and New York City, with an occasional boyfriend-visit to Washington, DC—I was in Paris when the fashion industry needed runway models, in the fall and spring, and would head to New York for its season to live with friends whenever my three-month visa ran out. Wherever I was, I cooked. I bought and read cookbooks. I read every food magazine I could get my hands on. But, remembering my canned tomato-paste soup fiasco, I didn’t dare venture off the path each recipe set forth. I didn’t trust that I would find my way back should I so much as inch a toe off the road.
I eventually left the small hotel and moved in with a friend, Patrice, who shared a flat with her French boyfriend. I slept on the couch. And I decided I would pay my way by cooking. I was excited, and eager to recreate and share the warmth that I had been experiencing at the Sunday brunches. I would make chicken pot pie.
I grew up loving chicken pot pie in its frozen form. And just once, to impress my boyfriend back in Washington DC, I’d made a pretty good version mostly from scratch, filling a store-bought pie crust with chicken and vegetables in a white roux, following the recipe instructions to the letter.
So off I went to the market, a small neighborhood store, recipe in hand. I needed chicken, onions, carrots, celery, mushrooms, flour, butter, stock, herbs and heavy cream. I found everything but the celery, which, comb the aisles as I may, was nowhere to be found. Instead, I puzzled over a vegetable labeled poireau, which I later learned was a leek. At the time, I had no idea what it was. Only a crazy person would confuse it with celery but the colors were somewhat similar—the light green part of it, anyway—and its shape was similarly long and spear-like. And since celery itself was nowhere to be found, I grabbed a poireau and called it good.
Back at the flat and still filled with excitement, I started to get my ingredients together. I was acutely aware of the leek’s wildcard nature. I stared at it from different angles. I smelled it. I twirled it like a baton. Finally, I tasted a small, raw piece of it. It tasted like an onion, but milder, with onion-like layers. Ah! I thought. Could it be an overgrown scallion? I decided to treat it as such. I cut the root end off, cut the leek in half crosswise, and put it into the pot.
When it was finished, the pot pie filling was not what I expected. It was sweeter than usual. The dark green parts of the leek that I’d used were tough and slightly bitter. It was missing a tang, a zip. Was this the taste that the celery would have given it? Who knew? Celery was such an ordinary vegetable. One that didn’t usually stand up and shout, ‘I’m here’. But its absence was so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else. The symphony of flavors that I had wanted to share was nowhere to be found. My friends loved it, but I knew it could have been better. I was profoundly disappointed.
But that failed pot pie transformed the way I thought about cooking. I had always loved puzzles as a child, and now I started to see recipes in a new light—not as rigid steps to be followed, but as collections of separate pieces that could be combined in different ways to make different, delicious wholes. Eating out also became sort of a game of recreation, and I would try to figure out the ingredients and amounts in a dish, whether at a restaurant or someone’s house.
This new awareness of the elements of cooking changed everything. Suddenly I was seeing the city in all of its culinary richness—it was like going from black and white to color when Dorothy leaves Kansas and touches down in Oz. I was living on a budget, but each meal was a revelation. The first time I ate a frisee salad with lardons and egg, I loved how the frisee tickled my mouth, and marveled over the savory nuggets of pork belly and the silken warmth of the poached egg. I rhapsodized over a piece of pan-seared fish in beurre blanc, so different from the fried catfish I was used to. And I still vividly recall the blackberry pie with a perfect crust served at a bookstore café. The simplest things stood out in greater relief: the floral whiff of a grind of cracked black pepper on a perfectly cooked steak (always shared, of course, because I never had any money); the citric zing a squeeze of lemon brought to a simple salad of mixed greens.
This awareness, and interest, stayed with me. I carried it from Paris to London (where I also modeled, and made my first quiche, zucchini bread, and coronation chicken—curry chicken salad with grapes and almonds—for my appreciative roommates), and eventually back home to the US, where I opened a catering business, and attended culinary school, which has morphed into a career in food media, cookbook writing, and more. Cooking is now my life, in ways I could have never anticipated or imagined.
As for leeks, after the pot pie, I avoided them for years, but they kept putting themselves in my hands. At my very first restaurant job, my task was to julienne leeks for sauces or rough chop them for stocks. At culinary school, we used them every which way. Today, I cherish them. I’ll flour and fry them for a garnish for steaks. In the spring, when they are young, I braise them. They go into all of my sauces and all of my stews. I put them in tarts with mushrooms. I make a leek confit, cooking them slow and low until they turn into jam. And every time I go to look for them—looking for ones with a larger ratio of white to dark green, so I get my money’s worth—it reminds me of how they set me on this path, which, like the leek itself, was so unexpected, so unlikely, and so very rewarding.
MA THANEGI is in her sixties and has lived in Yangon, Myanmar, since she was eight months old. She writes only on topics related to Myanmar, especially its people, because it annoys her no end that they were once ignored by the international media and are still largely misunderstood.
GUNS AND GLUTTONY ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Ma Thanegi
When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of our hero of independence General Aung San, emerged in August 1988 as the popular leader of the uprising for democracy, about thirty of us volunteered as her personal assistants and bodyguards. Most were students still in their teens with no training but acted as bodyguards in the literal sense because they only had their bodies to protect Ma Suu should she come under attack. The few adults were writers, poets, lawyers and artists, like me, who had set aside what we were doing to support her.
We were worried sick for the safety of Ma Suu (elder sister), or Aunty Suu as the students called her. In the state newspapers we often saw the ruling generals’ speeches calling for the democratic opposition’s ‘annihilation’.
The student bodyguards felt they should be well prepared for any encounter with the annihilation process … not to gather arms for protection but, like all good Buddhists, to gather merits for the next life and to ensure they departed with all requisite rituals completed. For that they joined the Buddhist order of monks and nuns for a week and had monks preside over the tharanagone ritual usually reserved for the dead. They cheerfully explained that they needed all the merits they could get. As they could not know for sure if their parents would be able to retrieve their bodies if they were shot down, they said they needed the death ritual, even if they were jumping the gun, so to speak.
After her party, the National League for Democracy, was formed on 24 September 1988, with Ma Suu as General Secretary, we travelled all over the country with her on the campaign trails. She gave speeches to the thousands who turned up in support in every town or village we passed through and met with party members when we stopped overnight or at least for an hour or so. Sometimes we encountered soldiers pointing their rifles at us but all of us, including the local supporters, simply looked at them with scornful expressions on our faces.
As the campaign wore on, day after day, all of us began to look dirtier and scragglier, tanned almost to the colour of tar and hollowed-eyed from exhaustion. While Ma Suu spoke to the crowds and the township supporters took over from us, we would scurry to find a space for a catnap. When the boys spotted something like a mat, however dirty or small, they would drop on it like a tangle of puppies and be snoring within seconds and I’d be curled up on my coat spread on the floor. But the meals lovingly prepared by Ma Suu’s supporters made up for the exhau
stion.
In the Buddhist culture of Myanmar, food is not only offered but thrust upon you. We’d often eat three lunches a day on the campaign trail, because in every town or village that Ma Suu visited, her supporters had already laid out a feast. After the second lunch Ma Suu, who ate like a dieting bird, would plead that she really couldn’t accept anything more, but the villagers would pout and make muttered threats of war against the other towns that had fed us. So she would eat, just a little bit more.
We got so used to being fed at every place we stopped that once, at a whistle stop, a few of the boys marched into a yard set out with tables and plates of snacks, which they devoured. We found out only after we reached the next town that it was a private celebration being hosted by a member of the state-sponsored party, our biggest enemy. They had been furious but our supporters outnumbered theirs by thousands so they had said nothing. It was one of the many jokes our crowd shared.
Of all the meals we had, the most memorable was a dinner served by Buddhist nuns in a town near the coast called Mawlamyaing. Nuns in Myanmar follow the same monastic code as monks, fasting between noon and dawn the next day. The dinner was laid out in the traditional way, on several low, round tables in a large hall inside the nunnery; we sat on the floor, our bare feet carefully tucked away out of sight.
The tabletops were so covered with dishes that there was hardly room for our own plates. I remember one of the boys whispering to me about how bad he felt for the nuns who were serving us as they could handle and smell but not even taste the food. However, that guilty thought did not slow us down in stuffing our faces: the food was just too good.
We ate hilsa fish, which has a lovely deep flavour, and the nuns must have started work at dawn because this dish must be cooked for at least eight hours to soften its gazillion bones. There was butterfish, too, a cousin of the giant Mekong catfish. Its succulent flesh was perfectly set off by a thick gravy of pounded onions, garlic, ginger and crushed tomatoes. Huge prawns probably hauled from the Andaman Sea that morning, and nearly as big as lobsters, were bathed in a sauce of soft, sweet tomatoes enriched by the tomalley that had seeped from the crustaceans’ heads.
To offset the creaminess there were plates of crisp-fried catfish and salted, dried snakehead fish that had been grilled, pounded until fluffy and drizzled with peanut oil.
There were sumptuous meats as well. I piled my plate with chunks of red-cooked pork, a dish from the central part of Myanmar. This, too, was a marvel of slow cooking: first the nuns had caramelised the sugar and quickly sautéed the large pieces of pork shoulder and finally simmered it for several hours until the rind was soft, the fat savoury, and the meat tender and flavourful. We were also served a curry of mutton and new potatoes laced with garam masala, and another curry of chicken. Beef is seldom served in Myanmar because the rice fields, source of sustenance for us, are tilled using cattle, and we owe a debt of gratitude to these benign creatures.
The richness of the meats and fishes was buoyed by the freshness of the salads, one made of blanched winged beans with tiny boiled shrimp, dressed with lime juice and pounded roasted peanuts. Another was raw prawn salad laced with lashings of kaffir lime juice and chopped green chillies. A third salad was a mixture of dried shrimp powder, fried onions, fish sauce and pennywort leaves, a plant recorded in our ancient medicinal texts as a cure for infections. There were vegetable dishes such as stir-fried water spinach with mushrooms, eggplant stewed with bits of pork belly, cauliflower fried with egg, and a thick vegetable stew with chickpeas, radish, okra, eggplant and squash made slightly tart with tamarind paste. Then, there was the dish never absent in Myanmar meals: a sour, spicy and salty relish to be eaten with chunks of blanched and raw vegetables. To cleanse our palates between mouthfuls there was a clear, piping hot fish soup seasoned with a sprinkling of tart roselle leaves. As is the custom in Myanmar, in lieu of dessert we ate lahpet, our national snack of pickled tea leaves served alongside fried beans, fried garlic, roasted sesame seeds, green chillies and nuts.
The meal lasted an hour and throughout it we remained silent, as Burmese etiquette demands, to show our respect for the food and for those who made it. This meal earned not only our respect, but our reverence.
None of us were annihilated but we landed in Insein Prison in July 1989 while Ma Suu was placed under house arrest for the first of many times. For the first six months I endured the torment of not knowing if or when I’d be released until I said to myself, the hell with it, and stopped thinking about it.
Living conditions were primitive but there were no guards who tortured us. Although prisoners were allowed food parcels from home, we missed fresh cooked food and treats like ice cream. Each of us passed the prison years dreaming about food, talking about food and most of all licking our lips and laughing in memory of the feasts and fun we had on the campaign trail, never mind the guns.
SIGRID NUNEZ has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
A TASTE OF COCONUT
Sigrid Nunez
I’ve eaten some of the best meals of my life in Paris, but when I think of that city the food that comes immediately to mind is a street vendor’s chunks of fresh chilled coconut.
It was my first visit to Paris. I was twenty-one, just out of college, and traveling with a boyfriend. We’d taken the train from Frankfurt, which was where my sister then lived with her new husband, who was in the US Army and whom she’d married shortly before he was stationed in Germany. My mother was already visiting them when Stephan and I arrived, and for the next three weeks we tootled through parts of southern Germany, Austria and northern Italy, the five of us packed into my brother-in-law’s Volkswagen Beetle. I confess this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
We stopped for several days in my mother’s hometown of Schwäbisch Gmünd, where her brother lived, and stayed with him in the same house where they’d both grown up and where I’d visited only once before, at the age of two. My sole memory of that first visit is of my grandmother locking me in a dark closet for calling her a witch. Whatever she may have thought, it wasn’t name-calling; that severe woman terrified me. A wealth of family stories would later confirm that I was not far off the mark, and I can’t say I entirely regretted not having had a second chance to meet Oma, who’d died suddenly the year before.
It was autumn. Without planning to, we hit Munich in the middle of Oktoberfest, where it seemed half the revellers were exuberantly sloshed Australians contending to drown out ‘Bier hier! Bier hier!’ with ‘More piss! More piss!’ I’ve never been much of a beer-drinker, but I relished the traditional snacks, in particular my first taste of the large white German beer radishes, carved concertina-style and heavily salted—as I would relish my first ever gelato, made with real pistachio nuts and nothing like the artificially flavored psychedelic green ice cream back home, which was waiting for me in Bolzano. (So addictive was the flavor that, much later, living in Rome, I would eat pistachio gelato almost every day for a year.)
After we all returned to Frankfurt, Stephan and I continued on our way alone. Boarding the train for Paris, we neglected to bring any food. The train had no café car, we’d had nothing but coffee for breakfast, and as the hours passed we grew increasingly dismal. We kept lighting up in the vain hope that nicotine would take the edge off our hunger. To make matters more torturous, we were joined in our compartment by another American couple, who unpacked a picnic. ‘You didn’t bring food? Everyone knows you always bring food on European trains,’ the woman informed us. (And I can still see the brown bread with its gleaming smear of butter topped by disks of pink sausage in her hand; I can smell the bittersweet chocolate bars that they broke out for dessert and ate with such infuriating slowness.) They had been smart enough to bring lots of food—none of which, however, they showed any inclination to share, no matter how shamelessly I stared.
&n
bsp; Lunch over, the woman settled back and made herself more hateful by telling us what a miserable time lay in store for anyone foolish enough to visit Paris without speaking good French, which of course she did (allow her to demonstrate), and we of course did not.
And so we arrived at the Gare de l’Est, famished and cranky and tense with anxiety. In those days it was not uncommon for American tourists to travel through Europe, even to major cities, without bothering to book accommodations. You simply headed for whatever quarter of Paris you wished to stay in, equipped with a list of hotel names and the phrase Avez-vous une chambre pour la nuit. This had worked flawlessly for any number of people we knew, and we took the Métro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés fully expecting it would work for us too. (Having lived on a commune sometime earlier, Stephan and I had had our fill of hippies and group lodging and were determined on this trip to avoid youth hostels.)
Almost immediately we encountered two middle-aged couples from Chicago who’d arrived an hour or so ahead of us and who’d been running hither and thither in search of rooms. They were having a tough time, one of the men said, because ‘the girls’ would not do without private baths.
Though we ourselves had no such requirement (in fact, we thought it absurd), our luck was no better. There were no vacancies at the hotels we tried. We stood helplessly with our bags in the Rue Bonaparte, feeling more like refugees than like a young couple on vacation. It was near sunset now and growing chilly, and I began to despair. The possibility of spending our first night in Paris without a roof over our heads seemed dismayingly real.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 17