The Offline Mind

Daily writing prompt

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

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I’m often asked what my “background” is, being somewhat dark and ambiguous looking, and the short answer to that is “my father is Persian and my mother is Portuguese”. Sometimes I chuckle and say “THAT didn’t work out” hoping that the person listening had already quietly assumed so, given the difference in cultures, and with that I could end the interaction.

But the long answer to that question is that my mother was a simple island girl, from Ponta Delgada in Sao Miguel, one of many small and subtropical islands in The Azores archipelago. She came to Canada in her late teens with her mother Natalia, and her younger brother, Carlos Junior. Carlos Senior was a crooner and a lady’s man on the island, and stayed back to pursue himself (or, simply put, Natalia left him and thank goodness for that). Natalia herself would’ve been in her thirties when they immigrated and she was said to be a great beauty. Unusually short, buxom, and with vibrant cat eyes that she accentuated with a navy pencil. She had a sharp wit and a fiery temper, two traits that so often are found together in beautiful women who have been scorned. Carlos Junior was just like his father, handsome and a talented singer ,with a fierce head of shining black hair, a womanizer in the making, and he was the apple of his mother’s eye, much to my own mother’s lifelong discomfort.

My mother was called Suzette and she was lovely, absolutely lovely. We had a framed photograph of her as a youth on top of our piano my whole childhood. The frame was a delicate beige coated wood with little painted flowers that had been carved so thin they would crackle against your palm when you would take the frame down– it was different than the other black and gold frames up there, and inside was her high school senior year portrait. Long brown hair, olive skin, deep dark eyes, hopeful eyebrows raised slightly, a fine jaw and full lips. The expression on her face seemed to say “who am I? who are you?” She wore light blue eyeshadow, which was the fashion of the time, smeared over each eye lid, was the only thing that kept the photo from feeling as though it was a portrait from long before, of any number of beautifully ambiguous maidens devoured by time. Without fail, guests of our home would ask about the photo and my mother would say “that’s me when I first came to Canada!” and if I was very lucky, some of them would turn to me and say “you look just like your mother.”

Now Suzy had married a Persian man, and we’ll get to him another time in detail, but what’s important now is that they had four children together, six mouths in total to feed (if you don’t count the German Sheppard and the cats) and there were many Persian relatives stopping by at all hours seeing as my father had seven siblings, and so there was the subject of food to be considered. How would this family be fed? Suzy went to work learning how to cook Persian food. And she didn’t just run with it, she flew. She became the best cook in the entire clan and mastered every dish. Her mother-in-law lived with her for a short time before passing and I’m sure she was no small help, but her dedication to learning this other cuisine was singular and unusual. She was proving her worth. She was quietly competitive like that, and it was one of the things I liked about her. She wanted to be the best, because most of the time with just a little effort, she could be. The best at cooking, at baking, crocheting, knitting, entertaining, at singing. She was accomplished. She was a lady.

Now to answer the question: what food takes me back to childhood? Basmati rice. If you’ve ever had Persian food, you know that most dishes are essentially rice and sauce. A large plate of rice was the foundation of all our meals, sometimes dotted with currents or yellowed with saffron. Sometimes an egg was cracked right in the centre when it was steaming hot. It was delicious and always perfectly prepared but in truth? I tired of rice. As an adult, I avoid it. It makes me feel small and cornered. It makes me feel like the youngest child sitting around a round table wondering my place in the world. It was hard to get on my fork back then. It dropped in my lap. The cats would gather at my feet. Some of the sauces had dark squishy things inside them I couldn’t trust and the rice was always present, always offering me new dark and squishy things. It was a food aimed at my father, that trickled down to us.

When asked why I can’t cook Persian food I typically answer that my mother cooked enough of it for the lot of us, and did it great justice. Given the opportunity to learn I may one day try, but for now I prefer to continue making her carrot cake, her bean salad, her chilli and her spaghetti. These were the foods she made for us four, that were too low to serve during gatherings but would never last longer than a day in our home.