A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  Invariably my current or former partners talk of the dishes their mothers or fathers, who cooked for them on a regular basis, made for them. Invariably I visit their homes, where I witness this in action, and where I, in turn, cook for their parents.

  Very few of my memories involve parental figures cooking for me. Because for so long my mother needed caretaking, and because I’m estranged from my father—who cooks very little, although he began cooking for my mother in the later stages of her illness—I’m accustomed to thinking of my partners as where I find home.

  I think of home as something I build with those whom I love, and as something I find reflected within them. I remember rolling out homemade pizza dough, sautéing onions and mushrooms, dicing jalapeños, squeezing tomato paste, and grating cheese with my ex-boyfriend. I remember slicing purple cabbage, beets, and jicama with my ex-girlfriend, dousing the salad in MCT oil and apple cider vinegar, and sprinkling it with pink salt. These dishes are part of me now, part of my repertoire.

  * * *

  My mother’s food consumption was as varied as most of ours would be, if pressed to describe. Her story is not simple. I’ve seen many cultural influences in the food she craves, and how she craves it. I’ve seen her relationship to food change over time, in step with her illness.

  When I was a teenager, when her decline was well underway, she subsisted mainly on Mr. Goodbar and other Hershey’s bars, bought by the boxful. She loved their cheapness—33 cents each, on sale. She loved the sugar. This sweet tooth was both part of her personality, and, as I later discovered, a symptom of mid-stage Alzheimer’s.

  I vaguely remember, once long ago, that she made homemade doughnuts. I remember her plopping bits of dough into a cast-iron skillet full of cheap vegetable oil, pulling them out with chopsticks, draining them on paper towels. This memory stands out because it happened only once, but it reminds me of how differently she engaged with food before her decline began. These memories are so far afield from the mother who, with all her inconsistency, I mostly knew. I’ve heard from my older sisters that my mother once enjoyed cooking things like doughnuts.

  I don’t think of my mother as having cooked Korean food, until smaller memories come back, when I stumble upon a dish she used to make or eat. I remember she did make homemade kimchi on a few occasions—stuffing salted cabbage into large glass jars with plastic lids, squatting on the kitchen floor as she did so, leaving them out to ferment. One batch of cucumber kimchi stored in the basement made me horribly sick—I lost my enthusiasm for eating such things after that.

  Then, too, there are a few good memories of foods we shared, when I was very young, almost young enough to forget. These are memories I have to seek out—they are the exception. I remember when I see chestnuts in grocery stores and grab them fondly. I learned that instinct from her. She used to bake them, forgetting to score a few so that they would explode and rattle in the oven. We’d sit together, working patiently, the chestnuts in a metal bowl, another metal bowl waiting. We’d squeeze the chestnuts in dirtied oven mitts, try to separate the inner husk and the harder outer shell from the sweet meat inside. My thumb would get tiny cuts from rubbing against the sharpness of the inner husks, which often stuck unrelentingly to the sweet meat.

  I learned, too, how to roast leaves of seaweed from her, though as an adult I rarely use this skill. She’d brush them over the electric coils of our old stovetop, massage the crumbly sheaths in her hands with sesame oil, stack them, fold them into halves and then halves again, quartering them with a serrated knife. As a child I sat next to her, helping her by doing the same.

  There are other Korean foods with which I’m familiar, too, ones I was ashamed to eat as a child for the ways they provoked remarks on their perceived oddity from the children around me, including my childhood friends, back before I saw mainstream American culture making gestures toward welcoming diversity. These are foods that are still not commonly associated with Korean culture, because they’re the things that are eaten privately, without fanfare. Their textures and specificities are different from what others assume. These foods occupy only a small portion of my cravings, but they’re there, nonetheless. They’re remarkable only because so few share similar cravings.

  My mother was not simply Korean—she was also someone who resisted Korean culture and left it behind as much as she could. We each chafe against aspects of the culture we’ve inherited, to varying degrees. She wasn’t particularly good at cooking Asian dishes—she made a handful of recipes. She was just as passionate about picking up Wendy’s chili and Chinese takeout as anything else.

  By virtue of being first-generation, perhaps my true inheritance is one of multiplicity. Or perhaps not inheriting a solid food culture simply makes me truly American.

  Food inheritance doesn’t seem that distant a concept from class, or any of the other abstract concepts we use to arbitrarily classify. We so often press for categorization, but if compelled to honesty, most of us would admit to fluctuations in lifestyle. Who of us hasn’t subsisted on ramen and sardines, in hard times? Who hasn’t also splurged on relatively fancy meals, in moments of celebration? Who hasn’t sought out new flavors or stumbled upon ones by accident, which become ones we then seek out with regularity?

  * * *

  I used to eat at a Yemeni restaurant with a Swedish-Eritrean colleague, with fresh flatbread, foul madammas (fava beans cooked in garlic, tomatoes, and oil, then mashed), hunks of lamb to eat with one’s fingers. I hadn’t grown up eating such food, but it still felt homey, more honest and real, in a way, than the food that surrounded me in youth—heavily processed, heavily advertised by America’s food conglomerates, nostalgic in the way of junk food, but not substantial or healthy—ever has. Good food seems to have more in common than otherwise.

  Then, too, I spent a weekend with Russian oligarchs in the Hamptons once. They’d taken a helicopter in from Manhattan. The rock on her finger was massive. My sister was recovering from rounds of chemo, her boyfriend at the time was courting clients, and her boyfriend’s friends were visiting. As a houseguest with a tenuous link and little else to contribute, I spent much of my time cooking fancy food, on the fancy professional-grade stove. Lobster, sea scallops, clams from the beach.

  As I kept cooking, to my surprise, one of the oligarchs joined in. She corrected me when I nearly threw in the gills along with the exoskeletons, when I made lobster stock for risotto. She took over the kitchen entirely for an evening, made a pot of meat-stuffed cabbage rolls, and another dish, as well, something hearty and meaty, mentioning her experience in restaurants. We never talked of anything weighty, never saw each other again, but food served as the ultimate connector, the ultimate leveler.

  These are the sorts of memories that have changed me. The act of cooking is a rare one in which being technically proficient can provide both the basics of human survival—sustenance—and also something equally valuable but intangible. We bring all our past life experience to bear when we cook a meal for someone, when we share. We bring, more importantly, the truth of ourselves forward.

  * * *

  Food can be an opportunity for both novelty in unexpected discoveries and nostalgia. It can be both necessity and indulgence. Wealth doesn’t always translate to advantage—in so many other countries, those who are poor can still afford to eat well.

  In cooking and in writing, I derive real pleasure and comfort from converting raw material into something finished, something realized. Sustaining oneself might be drudgery—just another example of the many small tasks we must perform. But as with any other task, we can also find joy in executing it well.

  Friends used to mock me for being “domestic,” in that I like to cook. I’m proud of being able to take care of myself, as well as loved ones, in this way. Food and culture and identity and family and love are tangled together, inseparable.

  Generally the skills we teach ourselves are pointless accumulations of knowledge, but for the pleasure we derive from them. Cooking is an act
scientific, technical, controlled, and also, in its final surrender to mystery, artistic. Its complexity translates to reward in how there’s endless challenge to be found, endless comfort to be taken.

  * * *

  My taste in food has always been for diversity, for variety. I can chart my shifts in diet against the backdrop of my current versus former partners’ tastes. My index of recipes is tied to the people and places I’ve loved. I see this now as a positive—that my food vocabulary is more expansive, for its lack of groundedness in one cultural inheritance.

  My ex-boyfriend was influenced by his proudly Sicilian heritage—it was with him that I became accustomed to cooking with pork and wine. My ex-girlfriend was influenced by growing up in Chicago’s diversity, by time spent working in Southeast Asia, by her Turkish and Polish heritage. I saw these influences unfold gradually over time, as memories and associations emerged, as stories were told—not by making assumptions or prodding for a particular story. Taking individuals as such often requires asking questions that render us vulnerable and listening without expectation, rather than dictating the terms of conversation.

  I grew up hearing only certain kinds of food stories. Writers like Ligaya Mishan, Tejal Rao, Pete Wells, Samin Nosrat are changing those stories—shining spotlights on the places and cuisines that were once ignored in mainstream media, or writing explicitly about their own tangled food inheritances. It’s exciting—to see change in the knowledge disseminated.

  The more recipes we own, the more we can play when we’re in the kitchen. By borrowing bits of vocabulary, we can slowly develop our own points of view, arriving at newness in how we combine flavors.

  * * *

  When my girlfriend and I first started dating, we recognized our lack of a common food vocabulary. My favorite food is Thai, with which she was unfamiliar. I knew close to nothing about Pakistani food, which she told me she’d eat every day, if she could.

  The first time I cooked for her, before I attempted nihari, I opted for hearty and healthy: lamb shanks braised in red wine, garlic yogurt sauce, butternut squash, and quinoa. Given her penchant for heavily spiced food, she admitted she found the food “bland.”

  The reaction surprised me. I’d grown to like simple flavors in sharp relief—the sourness of Greek yogurt, the earthiness of meat cooked with little seasoning, the taste of vegetables roasted for their own sake. Some of my favorite things to cook—mercimek çorbasi, a lentil soup I’d first tasted in Turkey—featured only one or two spices, with lots of acidity.

  Then, too, my ex-girlfriend had been allergic to nearly everything, including black pepper and spices. With her I’d gotten accustomed to seasoning with little more than pink salt.

  “I’m not like her,” she told me. “You can cook whatever you want for me and I’ll eat it. Just not pork.”

  She told me this because she knew of the ways my cooking had changed to accommodate my ex, who’d subscribed to a bulletproof-inspired and gluten-free diet, meaning my grocery bills expanded significantly in buying grass-fed butter and red meat, coconut oil, gluten-free bread, Himalayan salt, MCT oil, and other ingredients I didn’t fully understand. But in reality my ex-girlfriend had expressed similar sentiments to my girlfriend’s, with an accompanying litany of things she wouldn’t eat—things like sesame oil, or ideally no soy sauce, which essentially ruled out most Asian dishes.

  “Bacon isn’t pork, is it?” I asked. That same ex ate bacon religiously, and so I’d somehow fallen into the habit of eating a sizzling slice every morning, that iconic staple of American breakfast.

  In her case, the consumption of pork is explicitly irreligious. More than just religion, she scorns it. “Ugh, disgusting,” she says, whenever I mention the meat. She considers this scorn a Pakistani norm.

  I offered trying to make nihari because I wanted to make something she would actually enjoy, something she loved. And because, too, I wanted to meet her on her own territory, rather than expecting her to meet me on mine.

  She shrugged off my offer after I mentioned my difficulty in finding spices, telling me nihari was too much of a hassle to make. But I’d already offered, and the dish still seemed like any other—simple to execute, with a little practice. Shortly after I ate nihari for the first time, I cooked it as a surprise, on one of her weekend visits down from Chicago.

  The recipe was simple, on the surface. Making it was a surprisingly laborious adventure, for the sourcing of ingredients more than anything else. I visited the greenmarket farmer from whom I often bought lamb, to get beef shank and marrow bones. He sold me substitute cuts, the closest versions he had.

  Then I followed the five instructions on the box as closely as I could. I took out my largest stockpot, measured half a cup of oil, sautéed a kilo of meat along with the nihari masala, added eighteen cups of water and two kilos of marrow bones.

  The sheer proportions unsettled me—eighteen cups of water? Surely that couldn’t be right. But I had to trust the box, since it was my only guide. I waited six hours, after which I was meant to add one cup of flour, dissolved in two cups of water, and bring everything to a boil for fifteen minutes.

  I waited until the last minute to do this, until her train had nearly arrived. My stockpot was already full almost to brimming, so I used far less water to make the slurry. I had a feeling this would cause problems, but I didn’t know what difference it might make, exactly. I drove off to pick her up as the pot simmered, told her what I’d made, warned her it was going awry. I cooked for gatherings often; I went against what I already knew in cooking a new dish for a guest, rather than one I was confident in.

  “You made me nihari?” she asked, her face softening. “But it takes so long to cook.”

  I returned to find clots of what looked like fat rising to the surface. I skimmed these clots off, before realizing that the flour was puffing itself into dumpling bits, rather than thickening the stock into gravy, as it was meant to.

  “I don’t know if it’ll taste like nihari,” I warned her. “It may not turn out at all.”

  “It smells like nihari,” she said, despite having seen me battle the floating flour clots. The smells were right, but the textures of the dish were all wrong. The gravy never thickened, and so instead the dish became a soup of sorts, with a thinner, watery consistency.

  The last step was to fry a whole sliced onion in more oil in a separate pan until golden, and then top the stockpot. This at least I did successfully. Nearly everything else was wrong with my execution of the dish. The tendons in the beef shank become gelatinous, lending the meat a soft quality. The cut I’d gotten was drier, firmer. I served the meat with brown rice, when it’s typically eaten with naan.

  She said kindly, “The flavors are there.

  “It’s nihari,” she said happily, as she ate. “You made me nihari.”

  * * *

  Certain areas of culture are so primal to one’s place of birth: language, food. When she speaks in Urdu with family and friends, when she translates for me, I’m reminded of how inaccessible certain fundamental parts of ourselves are to those who don’t share places of origin.

  Language is harder to learn—I doubt I’ll ever learn fluency in languages I’d like to speak, even ones I’ve studied for decades, like Spanish. Food is a different story. Food is easily shared.

  * * *

  I’m glad for the effort of having made the dish, and I’m also glad to no longer make it. Now I happily join her in eating the nihari that someone else has more capably made. As she tried to warn me, it’s a dish well suited to families or restaurants—the proportions too large, the cooking time too long, the ingredients too difficult to buy. We eat often at her favorite Pakistani restaurant, where the surroundings are bare-bones, but the food announces itself. The men working there nearly always slide extra food onto her tray before beckoning her over.

  We tear off pieces of freshly made naan from rounds bigger than a plate, pinch bits of beef shank with the bread, drag the same bread through the dark gra
vy. The dish comes topped with slivers of ginger, with a red oil slick, with a side of raw onions and chopped carrots and jalapeños. These aren’t flavors for the timid. Nihari reminds me of Vietnamese beef stew, though with different spices—ones with which I’m not familiar and can’t identify, even after having cooked it. I see why she craves this dish—it’s fiery, hearty, substantial.

  * * *

  Since then the ways I taste food have changed. As I’ve embraced the complexity of Pakistani flavors, which once tasted overpowering, other foods often taste bland to me, too.

  “Most people I know who like to cook, like to cook for other people,” she told me once, and this resonated with my experience of cooking as an act of caretaking, of love. She echoes the sentiment now that she herself has begun cooking.

  “I never liked cooking before you,” she told me. I’ve never asked her to, definitely don’t expect it—there’s nothing like expectation to kill one’s desire to cook—but she makes her favorite recipes from childhood, and we share them together.

  “It has something to do with home, doesn’t it?” I ask, and she agrees. If she doesn’t make these dishes, the ones that she can’t find in restaurants, she has only the memory of those flavors. Certain dishes can transport us back to a place of childlike innocence.

  “It’s not just that,” she says. “I’ve never cooked for anyone else before. I like taking care of you.”

  There’s freedom in cooking with someone who has her own lexicon of food. As with most aspects, we’re stronger because of the separate narratives we share.

  It’s become joint discovery, as we introduce each other to ingredients or dishes or techniques. It’s flavor I crave, regardless of where it originates. We make odd fusions, adding freshly made pasta to keema (ground beef seasoned with ginger, cilantro, and peas). We substitute rice wine vinegar for tamarind in the quick okra sauté that she loves, talk about bhindi masala’s similarity to a South Sudanese okra recipe discussed in the Times.