HOME STATE OF MIND
CHRONICLE: ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO 2023 & BALTIMORE, MARYLAND 2023
HI! I’m so glad you’re keeping up with the Lonely Kitchen Chronicles, where every Wednesday we explore how food and cooking helps define us, nourishes us, connects us to our surroundings. I’m a former chef and caterer, but mostly, I’m a believer in living a food forward life.
This week, on Thanksgiving Eve, instead of sharing a recipe, (I’m up to HERE with recipes) I’m sharing thoughts on how food is a link to our past and a force with which we forge our futures.
Part of my morning routine includes listening to NPR while I prepare and eat breakfast. Breakfast always includes a piece of toast. My favorite is sourdough drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with Za’atar, but I digress.
Yesterday, Tuesday morning, I heard NPR host Jen White interview Kevin Pang and Fuchsia Dunlop on an episode of her 1A show entitled The Joys of Chinese Cuisine. Both Pang, (Editorial Director for Digital at America’s Test Kitchen and co-author of A Very Chinese Cookbook) and Dunlop, (a British writer and cook specializing in Chinese cuisine) spoke eloquently about how food, in this case Chinese food, helps us forge, build, and bridge relationships with people and place.
Here’s an excerpt:
Pang says, “I came to America when I was 11 years old. I desperately tried to fit in as an American…My parents were proudly, stoically conservatively Chinese. They wanted us to maintain that tradition at home. They wanted us to speak Chinese at home. When you have those two cultures living under the same roof it can become combustible. That really was the reason there was acrimony and arguments at home.
As an immigrant trying to fit in to America, and having arguments with my parents about this and later finding out that food was the lingua franca that we were able to speak… and it really became this bridge to be able to start communicating with them again and it was through this idea of food.”
White asks Dunlop, “As someone who researches food, what do you think about it as its own language and a way to create bridges between family members and people from other cultures”?
Dunlop says, “Well, I think many of our first experiences of cultures that are foreign to us is through food…In China food is central to Chinese culture and civilization. Food is seen as the absolute basis of good health. People talk about food all the time in China, so I think it’s a fantastic way for building bridges.”
Here’s a link so you can listen to the entire episode:
https://the1a.org/segments/the-joys-of-chinese-cuisine/
Listening to Pang and Dunlop’s interview reminded me of a recent visit I took to Baltimore, where I grew up. Their conversation reinforced for me that food is the lens through which many of us, me included, experience the world. Yes, food is sustenance, food provides calories, gives us energy. But on that Baltimore trip food provided me a gateway, albeit small, to reconnection, to a semblance of the hometown I remembered, even though that hometown looked and felt very different through my very grown-up eyes.
It was late June 2023, when I returned to Albuquerque, New Mexico from Baltimore. A friend asked how it felt being there, after forty years of living elsewhere, eight moves under my belt. I answered with a question of my own. “Is there an English word meaning; to be in a familiar place that feels almost completely foreign”? I reached for my phone. Google spouted about the advantages and disadvantages of using an online language translator, led me to message boards about nostalgia and déjà vu, listed ways to familiarize myself with local culture while traveling to foreign countries.
Thanks Google.
It has taken me a while, but I’ve invented a word of my own. It’s slightly cumbersome but I like it. The word is…drum roll please…not quite-ness. The dictionary editor living in my head defines not quite-ness as follows:
NOT QUITE-NESS (1 of 1)
noun
1. The quality or state of feeling foreign in a familiar place, alien.
2. Experiencing disorientation despite knowing your way around.
3. Familiar but lacking closeness.
4. Just not right, not belonging.
One of the best parts about visiting Baltimore during the summer was that crabs are usually in season. Childhood memories of our backyard crab feasts surfaced. I pictured that we carried a long folding table outside to the stone paved patio, covered the table in newspaper, placed wooden mallets down the length for cracking the claws, a roll of paper towels at each end. The grown-ups drank beer, probably National Bohemian, from sweaty glass bottles. We kids got to drink red Hawaiian Punch–without pleading for it–to diminish the spicy tingle from Old Bay seasoning coating the crabs. The crabs, Chesapeake Bay Blues, were steamed in a bit of water and beer, doused in Old Bay as they were layered into the large blue enamel steamer. “Hurry, hurry! Get the lid on before they decide to crawl back out,” my younger brother and I shouted as our mom commanded the crab pot.
These days, due to pollution, climate change, predation by blue catfish and red drum fish, Chesapeake Bay crabs are scarcer and more expensive than ever. The crabs sold at the fish mongers are more than likely to come from the Carolinas or Louisiana. They’re still blue crabs, just not locals from the Chesapeake.
I couldn’t help but think that I was not quite a local either. This sense of being out of place in the place I’m from, of not fitting in, compounded the not quite-ness of my visit.
But like Pang and Dunlop, I too know the comfort, the bridge building power food literally brings to the table.
Live local crabs weren’t available in late June when I was in Baltimore. So, I did the next best thing. I made Maryland style crab cakes with lump crab meat bought at a seafood market. I seasoned the crab meat with Old Bay before I coated it, gently, almost caressing it with an egg and mayonnaise mixture, a hint of crushed Saltine crackers to help bind everything together before sautéing. With the first bite, I knew Baltimore. And Baltimore knew me. And for that I was, I am thankful.
Yes, exactly. A great way to put it. One foot in and one foot out.
As an expat, I very much relate to this feeling of not-quite-ness. It's hard to know where "home" is anymore, when you have a foot in two (or more) worlds.