Life From Scratch

by Sasha Martin

  That night I ask Mom what she thinks.

  “When I don’t know what to do about something,” she tells me, “I just leave the idea alone for a while. A good idea will feed itself and grow. A bad one will disappear—as it should.”

  She laughs. “What’s that expression? Set it free. If it’s meant to be, it’ll come to you. Things will start happening. Two years later you’re still thinking about it. That’s a good sign.”

  So I keep talking about the idea to anyone who will listen. Where I expect to be met with cynicism, again and again I find excitement and affirmation.

  When I bump into Griffin, a social media visionary at the local art museum, things really start moving. “You must do it at Philbrook,” he says of the Tulsan landmark. The diverse art collection is curated within a 72-room mansion built in the 1920s. It costs thousands of dollars to rent even a corner of their immaculate grounds for a brief wedding reception. I study his unblinking face. He’s serious.

  Three months later, he sends me an email. “We’re a go. Pick your date.”

  The museum will donate the space on one condition: I keep the entire event free and open to the public. I couldn’t have asked for a better condition, and add that if people want to “pay,” they can provide a donation to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.

  Now that I have a location, there are no excuses. I write out a list of things that need to be done. Beyond the food, I need a volunteer sign-up form for each of the 195 recipes so I can track who’s making what. I need a website to promote it; a brochure; recipe identification cards, so people know what they are eating; decor; people to set up, serve, and clean up.

  Keith tells me I simply have to ask. I don’t know how, so I just keep talking about the idea wherever I go until the right people hear me.

  Over the next month, the Tulsa community throws itself into the idea so forcefully that I nearly get whiplash. One company wants to donate rentals; another wants to donate flowers. One woman offers event-planning services, while another offers to help with PR. My friend Josie helps me find chefs, and after two hours of emails and cold calls, we have about 50 countries claimed.

  “Not bad,” Josie says.

  “I’ll be happy if we can get 90,” I say.

  “That’s not even half,” she says. “We can do better than that. We’re going to get them all.”

  Josie won’t let the idea rest until we fill all the slots. We keep calling, asking. Chefs sign up, taking ten or more countries. The Culinary Institute of Platt College takes 20. Chefs for local nonprofits get involved. We get up to 120, then 140, then 160 countries claimed—85 percent of the world.

  A women’s recovery group joins the list, making it 175 countries claimed, about 90 percent of the world. We only need to find two more chefs to cook 21 more recipes, and we’ll have everything covered.

  There’s just one problem: Turns out that food from every country in the world requires a tremendous amount of space—200 feet of table to be precise. If we can hold the event outside, Philbrook’s immaculate gardens will provide the perfect backdrop, with ample room. But if it rains, we’ll have to fit the entire world in one tight hall, precariously poised between a Rodin statue and the temporary exhibit space.

  Months of planning go by in a blur of phone calls and meetings. All the while I continue cooking the world. But now it’s different. I cook fewer recipes and ratchet back the pace so I can enjoy the process more. In this marathon of food, I find the right stride, savoring the process, not the destination.

  We partake in South Sudan, the newest country in the world, with our most devoted reader, Brian. After spending six years traveling across Asia and Africa, he now resides a mile from my house. We tuck into a feast of peanut-laced tomato salad, sorghum crepes called kisra, and a spinach peanut butter stew called combo. This deep-voiced, bespectacled man has contributed so many comments to the blog, as lengthy as they are historical. I am honored to have him share our table.

  Through the summer we mop up Syrian lentils—a bossy blast of garlic and pomegranate syrup—with pita bread. Then there’s Swedish princess cake, and meatballs. Each jockeys for attention, the meatballs winning ultimate favor for their simplicity and ability to dance between caramelized crust and lingonberry cream.

  When I cook Togo, my old friend Annie from Luxembourg visits with her two children, ages six and eight. Her husband is on tour in Afghanistan. I haven’t seen Annie in at least a decade.

  “Can you believe we’re all grown up with our own families?” I ask her. She nods, and then shakes her head.

  “Can I tell you something?” I lean forward.

  “Sure!”

  “Sometimes I feel like a fraud as a mother—like I’m playing dress up. Do you ever feel that way?”

  “All the time.”

  We laugh, and I relax. Maybe some of this motherly anxiety has nothing to do with my past. Maybe it’s simply … normal.

  The month before the big feast, I cook the Vatican City, the celebrated walled enclave inside Rome, Italy. The Vatican City is 0.17 square mile of gilded glory—0.53 mile by 0.65 mile. To walk across the country is like taking two laps around a standard jogging track—that’s why there’s no country smaller.

  I decide to make a gallon of Cousin Alfred’s Meat Sauce. There is plenty. I think of the Mongolians.

  We pop over to the Beards.

  “We were just planning a front lawn brunch!” van Gogh proclaims. “Why don’t you bring it over?”

  A few minutes later, sun hot on our necks, we sit on the overgrown lawn around two plastic tables strung together and covered with mismatched tablecloths. In the center are two pounds of spaghetti, topped with twice as much sauce. There are no walls. No fences. Finally.

  The Beards raise their forks, and we begin, twirling the pasta in our spoons. I glance over at Ava and see noodles hanging off her arm. “But the question is, how do you keep the pasta out of your beards?”

  “Magic,” they laugh.

  Mom arrives the week before the big event to help with Ava. On the radio, the weatherman predicts thunderstorms. The decision no one wants to make must be made: The food will have to be set up indoors.

  As the weekend approaches, erratic weather patterns increase and interfere with flights. Tim gets in without incident, but my friend Katya’s flight is delayed. Grace’s flight, set to land the night before the event, is canceled. She won’t arrive in Tulsa until midday on Saturday, just before the buffet opens.

  I try to keep track of all the missed connections, but there’s too much out of my control. I expand my anxiety to include the people who won’t be able to make it: my brother Connor, Toni—even Michael crosses my mind. On Friday night, Mom eyes me as I pour my second glass of port.

  “You can’t fix it, Sash, any of it. You just have to let this thing happen however it’s going to happen.”

  She pulls out two outfits, one from Pakistan and one from India, and asks me what she should wear.

  But I can’t decide. I can’t even decide what Ava should wear. I fall asleep to the crack of thunder and the sound of rain pummeling the roof.

  In the morning the clouds are gone. In their place: blue skies, 65 degrees in the shade. Still, the ground is wet and shows no signs of drying. When I get to Philbrook, the team of volunteers is already helping the 16 chefs and their assistants bring food into the museum. There’s a colossal amount of bowls, platters, and chafers, but no one falters. The line of chefs moves in and out smoothly, building a world of food.

  The dozens of tables stretch on and on, like chatty postcards, flavor memories smiling back at me from the years of our cooking adventure. Even the tablecloths glow like jewels: ruby for South America, turquoise for Oceania, peridot for Europe, lapis for Africa, amethyst for Asia, fire opal for North America. The floral arrangements correspond with the continents, from the North American wildflower to the red puff of the African protea, Europe’s roses, South America’s large-stemmed anthurium, Asia’s lili
es, and Oceania’s enormous sea sponges and birds of paradise.

  And the food, so much of it: a chafer of kabeli palau, a platter of beef-filled empanadas, a bowl of chilled cherry soup, and then the German Tree Cake beyond a dispenser of rosewater lemonade. With 90 percent of the world on display, each platter with a recipe card that reads like an encyclopedia, there’s hardly room for all the globes. It’s hard to believe we’ve cooked and eaten all this food over the last four years—so much of it foreign to us, but so much dug up from my past as well.

  Even with all this, I wonder if anyone will come. There are, after all, no tickets. I look at my watch: It’s already 10:30, but Grace’s flight has yet to land. Katya soothes, “She’s going to come—they’re all going to come.”

  Until noon the hall is empty save a few curious onlookers. Then, beyond the stanchions, they start to arrive in flurries: a few, then a few more. Soon they pile up, hundreds at a time, filling every inch of the museum. And still more are arriving.

  And there, finally, is Grace, suitcase in hand, her goldenrod hair shining. We hug and I realize, as I always do, how much I miss her. “I hope you’re hungry,” I smile. She hugs me tight and swoops Ava into her arms. Tim leads the girls back to where the rest of the family has gathered.

  I step out into the rotunda and the waiting crowd. Beside me, a drummer dressed in traditional West African garb pounds out a heartbeat. Children dance around him. When I lock eyes with him, he smiles as he plays, his shoulders dipping up and down in waves.

  “I can’t believe all these people,” I say.

  He smiles bigger. “You’re the one who did this?” he asks. Even as he speaks, he fills the room with his music, never pausing, never stopping. The beat feels like a lifeline.

  I look behind me at the teams of volunteers, the 16 chefs, and the food bank, now buried in canned food donations. In the mix I see the Beards, friends from my motorcycle days, old co-workers, and other mothers—all helping, helping. Behind them, silently waiting in the wings, I see my family and Keith’s, too. I can just catch the top of Mom’s hair in the farthest corner. I notice that she opted for the black-and-red dress from Pakistan. She has a list of foods to try—on a stack of oversized paper, and I can see her writing, circling, crossing out, erasing. Her brows are knit, every once in a while she exclaims, “Oh! That’s going to be so good.”

  I look back at the drummer from Africa.

  “It was just an idea, a little dream,” I tell him. “All these people, they did this. They made it happen.”

  He nods, and I notice the rhythm of his drum change, the sound softening like the first drop of water melting from a frozen roof.

  The farther into the crowd I go, the smaller I feel. I call Keith to my side. “I can’t do this alone,” I say. “I need you.”

  We welcome families of all kinds. I hear accents: a woman from Australia, a man from Nigeria. We meet children from Ethiopia, China, France, and the United States. Old faces, new faces: I open my arms to all of them.

  Finally the line stirs, and the people move inside the stanchions. Families pile food on their plates, moving slowly, reading the signs, learning about the dishes and their country of origin. Many sample something from every continent. Children show their parents what they’ve found.

  Keith and I help Ava build her plate. After all these tastings, she chooses pasta salad and cookies. But even these aren’t ordinary: The buckwheat noodles from Montenegro are tossed with feta and cracked black pepper. The Maltese cookies are filled with marzipan.

  Tim, a video camera strapped to his forehead, has piled mounds of food from as many countries as he can manage. “I’m going to catch every moment!” he calls, weaving around the professional film crew.

  I look over at Mom, and see she’s made a plate, too, with saag paneer, the famous spinach and cheese dish from India. I realize that she’s changed out of the Pakistani dress into a beryl-and-gold silk skirt from India.

  She tests a spoonful. “Oh WOW, this is so good.” The exclamation turns a few heads, but I laugh. This is my mother. Like her, I burst out enthusiastically when I bite into something delicious.

  “I’m proud of you,” Keith says, squeezing my shoulder as he looks over the tables. “You must be so happy.”

  Even as I nod, I know it’s not that simple. Happiness is not a destination: Being happy takes constant weeding, a tending of emotions and circumstances as they arise. There’s no happily ever after, or any one person or place that can bring happiness. It takes work to be calm in the midst of turmoil. But releasing the need to control it—well, that’s a start.

  “Let’s just say I feel a … settling,” I say as I lean on Keith’s shoulder.

  My thoughts drift to Michael. I wonder what he’d think about this feast. I picture him running through the crowd, grabbing his fill. So many years after his death, my mind plays tricks on me. He’s now my little brother—my lost, little 14-year-old brother, awkward with braces and bursting with too-big feelings. I cannot quite see his eyes or face anymore. The details have faded. And yet, like a shooting star, he seems brighter somehow, more memorable than the billion others that blink at me from the sky night after night.

  This is his gift, this feast. Unexpected as it was, his bequest led me to question what I wanted from life. But this place, this moment, is unlike Babette’s Feast. There are no chairs, no formal plates, no quail or turtle. Instead—a thawing of a crowd, mountains of simple, easy food, from a world of people.

  This feast is alive.

  One woman has scavenged a lunch tray—from where, I don’t know. She’s balanced three heaped plates, two bowls, and a few cups onto it. Her small children surround her, also carrying plates. How hungry they seem. It’s against the rules, taking so much. I wonder what their story is.

  I glance over at Mom, head bowed over her plate. I know what she’d say if she saw them: “Good for them!” And if I protested, she’d say, “There’ll be enough. One way or another, there’s always enough. They wouldn’t be taking it if they didn’t need it.”

  And perhaps that’s been Mom’s secret all along: her brutal common sense that slices through any and all notions of what “should” be. From our living room kitchen back in Jamaica Plain to this global table, it’s been about getting our fill. Not just of food, but of the intangible things we all need: acceptance, love, and understanding.

  This is not the time to turn people away, but to pile them in, in greater heaps than ever—the way we did in Mom’s living room kitchen. Perhaps this feast is my own living room kitchen, where everyone lives and breathes in one jumbled space. Where we bump elbows as we cook, laugh even as we chew, track the dirt in and clean it up later. Where there is enough room, enough space.

  Even without enough chairs, we can stand, all of us—even those who might come later. We’ll make room. Take our fill. Though I’d always be wandering, I can always create a living room kitchen, wherever I am.

  I smile, hoping they get their fill.

  After the feast, the adventure staggers on for another month and then ends quietly with just Keith, Ava, and me around our small table with the oven door open, blowing warmth into the kitchen. On the wall, the stirring pot gleams with a dull luster.

  My global table adventure ends with roasted squash three ways, and mini Zimbabwe candy cakes called chikenduza, found in big-city bakeries. The dense, yeast-risen balls of dough balloon in the oven to become equal parts cake, muffin, and bread. One fills my palm perfectly.

  The texture is chewy and tight, but my Zimbabwean readers assure me that this is correct. Ava, now four, helps me drape the craggy domes with the traditional bubblegum-pink icing. Mouths watering, we relinquish the perky chikenduza to the spot by our plates where our water glasses might go.

  I’d mistakenly thought we ought to have someone over when we cooked our last meal for Zimbabwe. From the beginning of the blog, I’d imagined a crowd for this meal, to celebrate with us. But we’d already had the big feast. As important as it
is to free-fall into the jumble and chaos of community, there must be quiet moments, too, in the intimacy of family.

  The blushing tops of our chikenduza dry to a matte luster, tempting us even as we eat our squash. A whole meal of squash seems a curious thing, but there’s winter in the air, and their sugared warmth promises comfort.

  We start with pumpkin dusted with cinnamon—a twist of my mother’s, too. Then there’s “gem,” squash stuffed with corn and cheese then roasted until crackling brown. I use more readily available acorn squash, split and seeded. After the flesh roasts for the better part of an hour, it takes on the flavor of roasted chestnuts—striking when paired with the sweet corn and salt of cheese.

  Finally, we spoon butternut squash smashed with peanut butter, called nhopi: a salty-sweet side dish, the peanut more whisper than shout, especially if coaxed smooth with an immersion blender—then it is velvet.

  When the last of the too-sweet icing is licked from our fingers, I hold Ava on my hip and we look at the world map, now covered with gemstones. They twinkle like 200 jeweled bindis, the South Asian mark of the sixth chakra, seat of concealed wisdom, balance.

  “Can we start cooking the world all over again, Mama?” Ava asks.

  She knows no time before this adventure, no feast before eating the world. A rush of sentimentality overcomes me. I blink and when I open my eyes, I half-expect to find a seven-month-old baby nestled in my arms again.

  But time waits for no one. I look at her face and see the unrecognizable future—hers and mine, too. Even as I cooked my way around this uncharted world, there were constant bridges to the past, beginning with the apricots of Afghanistan and ending with Mom’s beloved cinnamon on pumpkin. Now I know my food is inextricably tied to the past. It always will be.

  Though I may not have secured a new future, I’d secured something much better by filling those empty spice jars nearly four years ago. Cooking the world has opened my eyes to other ways of being, loving, and mothering. Most importantly, it has taught me to savor the present moment, sinking into the ephemeral like the ripe fruit that it is. There’s an ease about not knowing what will come next—an ease I never could have felt before.