Lou is coming to stay. I think of her on the slow train from Palmerston North, with the karuparera potatoes in her bag, and the tiny feijoas from her nana’s garden, and the good sturdy sourdough loaf she has mastered the recipe for. The extra weight of carrying these things in her suitcase. She never comes to stay without bringing some kind of homegrown produce. The way she handles fruit as she puts it into our big fruit bowl tells you everything you need to know about Lou, who had planned, before studying poetry, to be a market gardener. That is to say, she knows how to grow things. She knows about their beginnings and ends, the intimacies of metamorphosis. When we are sitting under a tree on campus, she sees what is invisible to me, puts her fingers to a hole in the trunk and says this is a pūriri moth cocoon. When she surveys my flat’s overgrown backyard, she says you could put a lemon tree here, which makes it possible. I would like to tell her about my grandfather, who owned a fruit shop for most of his life and always knew which melon was ripest. The karuparera potatoes she brings are sweet and tender, with brilliant purple skin under the dirt. We eat them roasted, with plenty of salt.
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I ring 婆婆 | Por Por on the first cold day of the year and she tells me she has already made up the bed in the spare room for when I come and stay, a month away. What has she been up to? She has been playing mahjongg. Do I have enough money? I do. Is she keeping warm enough? She is. Then we get to the real question. What did I have for lunch? I try to describe the falafel pita pocket I had at the bakery where I work, its fistfuls of fresh coriander, its mint-spiked coconut yoghurt and lashings of tahini. I can tell by the quality of her ah that she does not know what I mean. 你呢 | Nei neh? I ask. Her answer is 鍋貼 | dumplings, from the freezer. What will I have for dinner? I tell her 炒飯 | fried rice, an untruth, because it is one of the only words I can pronounce without thought in Cantonese. When I get off the phone, I switch on the rice cooker. I cut up some leftover roast chicken and mix a dipping sauce of soy, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and a little sugar. I sizzle spring onions in oil, then add a beaten egg. Two heads of bok choy with garlic and oyster sauce. A bowl of clear broth. 婆婆 cooks like this: always more than one dish. Dinner as ceremony, daily as air.
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It is my workshop day at uni. I have prepared two snacks for the mid-way tea break: vegan chocolate tartlets and a gluten-free lemon and blueberry loaf. Both of these are recipes I have not tried before; both were chosen to cater to specific dietary requirements in my class. Yesterday I crushed two sleeves of Biscoff cookies with a rolling pin in a big plastic bag and grated orange zest into coconut cream while it warmed. This morning I pulled the lemon loaf from the oven and fanned it impatiently so it could be boxed without steaming up the Tupperware. All through the first half of class, I am thinking not of my writing but of my baking. Does this make me a bad student? When the break comes and Joe puts a tartlet in his mouth and says Maddie!, I think of how this feeling, pleasing my friends with careful sweetness, is one of my favourites, perhaps better even than finishing an essay. Through the second half of class, my peers are saying things like maybe you could take out some of the equivocations and I wasn’t quite sure what you meant here and I am thinking instead of the cake and tartlets on their laps, Ella dabbing the last crumbs off her plate, Lou putting her finger slowly into her mouth, Gráinne shyly taking a second piece. Joe says he would like to see more horniness in my writing – and, see, here you go, Joe, I am thinking about how I will write this essay and it will contain the line I would like to give other people pleasure.
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Seven-thirty, Saturday morning: I am at the market with the rest of the city’s earlybirds, picking over quinces in the rain. Here are the long Chinese eggplants in their silky lilac sleeves. Here are the feijoas on the turn, the first pale citrus, the potatoes cauled with dirt. I have never seen anything so beautiful as the radishes, which I buy to pepper a big salad I will make with the rain-speckled cos. The anticipation of the pleasure of salad-making: getting your hands in the bowl to dress everything, the whisper of leaves on your fingers. It’s autumn and the world is shifting incrementally into darkness, and the floods have decimated the onion crops, and still I can make salad, big heaping bowls of it, served with bread and butter.
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Jeff contends that the Kruangbin song “Maria También” sounds like somebody blowing on a hot pie. Every time the track plays during a shift, he comes around, tea towel tucked into his apron, flour in his hair, and starts blowing rhythmically in 4/4 time on a pretend pie, phh, phh, phh, phh, and sometimes on a real pie, one he is going to eat for lunch. I find this helplessly funny, although I am trying not to laugh because it only encourages Jeff, who could do with a bit less energy. It is extremely hard not to laugh at Jeff – whose delightful full name, can we appreciate for a minute, is Jefferson Lepper – because he loves to make other people laugh. He sings along to every second track in a rich baritone, sometimes accompanied by air drums. He comes looking for the blue spatula with a quizzical brow. He zigzags melted chocolate over the top of a cookies and cream doughnut with such focus that it invites comment. How else are we going to get that Michelin star, Maddie? he says. The blown-on pie, when he cuts it, steams theatrically in a way that would look good in a music video. He offers me a quarter. It is delicious.
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BOCK-bock-bock-bock-bock-bock. I cut the rhubarb into little nubbly lengths, then the apples, two Braeburn, two Royal Gala, two green, kind unknown, from Lou’s nana’s garden. They get a blessing of cinnamon and ground ginger, a scant half tablespoon of flour. Each time I do this, there is the memory of my mother, letting me sit on the bench beside her while she weighed the ingredients in American ounces. Sometimes, she let me make the crumbs, but mostly I peeled the apples. Her apple crumble is a purist’s: apples only, cinnamon only, no oats or brown sugar in the topping. She knows her recipe by heart, as I know mine. With hands still cinnamon-scented I cut butter into flour; I fling oats; I portion the sugars – some should be demerara, don’t you think? – and rub everything to crumbs. You want the recipe? 100 grams flour, 100 grams sugar, 75 grams butter, 50 grams oats. And a pinch, this is essential, of salt.
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Rose is cooking 麻婆豆腐 | mapo tofu, wildly, casually, without a recipe; concentrating in the steam while her glasses fog. She is being quiet, not a natural mode for Rose, while I am writing here at the table. I watch her slit open the packets of silken tofu. I watch her spoon in some 豆瓣醬 | bean paste, then, after professional assessment, a bit more. Her face is so bright above the wok as she tastes the sauce. I think I just add some water now, hey, she says out loud, maybe to herself – but this is an invitation for my involvement, which I have been waiting for, whether either of us knows it. I come round into the kitchen and pick up the recipe book, which is open to the wrong page, but on the right page says stock, not water, and later cornstarch slurry. Rose does not have any stock, so I find a stock cube on my shelf. Does the cube just dissolve on its own? she asks, prodding it with a chopstick, because she is not familiar with stock cubes. Rose is the kind of person who always makes her own proper stock by boiling the bones, who loves to eat well but never checks the recipe, who wants, she tells me today, to paint the house lurid turquoise with a hot pink trim. I don’t know where my cornstarch is, she’s saying, rushing a little now because it’s time and she’s not ready. Do you have any cornstarch? Rose, I do.
I loved the food scenes tying this piece together, your writing super inspires me <3 I have recently been trying to scrounge as many feijoas as I can from various connections and recently poached some, which was extremely delicious and I would recommend. Something about the creative process of cooking and the concrete results appeals to me a lot!
Just terrific 💘 Thank you for inviting us into your world, M. Love your taste in description and your cadence x