Unfussy food from a fun-loving kitchen

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THE POMEGRANATE KING

September 27, 2011

Pomegranates are indigenous to the middle world, that strait of land we now call Iran, reaching its shoulder up into the Mediterranean and bumping its back side into Pakistan.  From this Fertile Crescent the fruit traveled, through either accidental or purposeful means of cultivation, both east and west, dropping its fine seed into the dry, deep soil of Turkey, Afghanistan, and India.  One thinks of camels, brightly colored silks, young, dark slaves and bundles of curled cinnamon.

It is not difficult to understand why some ancient soul would dare to smash and chance the first pomegranate.  Unlike, say, the artichoke or the durian, the pomegranate advertises itself well in its natural state.  Green, waxy leaves about the length of a man’s hand, handsome orange-red flowers shaped like junior hibiscus blossoms—all say Come, climb me, pluck my leathery fruit.  Some have even suggested that it was no apple which tempted Eve in that proverbial garden, but rather the glittering, jewel-bright seeds of a pomegranate.

Like many things with seductive powers, the pomegranate requires a bit of work once in-hand.  You cannot simply bite into it, or slice it at will.  First, you must split the outer skin carefully—you will discover, as many pleasure-seekers have before you, that pomegranate juice stains hands and shirts with an unbleachable fuchsia.  Second, collect your promised reward using gently prying fingers and patience.  Each fruit contains hundreds of seeds, honey-combed in chamber after chamber, nestled into so many grooves and protected by a film of bitter white pith.  Once you have loosened the seeds from their home and discarded both peel and pith, these tiny fruits from the tree of knowledge are yours to enjoy.

In Northwestern India, where my father was born, wild pomegranate bushes grow alongside the tall, slender trunks of cultivated pomegranate trees.  This state, Punjab, shares a border with Pakistan and is home to hundreds of farmers, men and women who give this place its title, “Breadbasket of India.”  For miles as the crow flies outside of my father’s hometown the horizon is dominated by orderly rows of crops, broken only occasionally by the brick burner’s smoke.  Here, pomegranates are considered the gods’ fruit, phal bhavan, left before Shiva’s stone lingham or at Durga’s marble feet, given as an offering back to the very ones who blessed its budding and growth.  If the fruit is sacred, or dangerous (as Persephone, goddess from another land, would attest) that may account for why it tastes so good.

For years my father peeled me pomegranates.  It was the only time I saw him wear an apron, seemingly wine-stained and spattered, tied delicately around his waist.  He would buy the fruit by the case and shuck them, like pearl-laden oysters, by the half-dozen.  Every fall a Tupperware container full of seeds kept constant in the refrigerator, rid of their pith and ready for my consumption. Now I find it is my turn to pick him out, seed by seed, one by one, nooks and crannies.  A different kind of harvest.

~

Most anyone who loves food the way I do owes that love to an enabling relative or family friend: a grandmother who passed down treasured family recipes, a housekeeper who taught young fingers how to measure and pour, a great-aunt who insisted on caviar and tawny port.  My own culinary lineage comes from my father, the consummate epicure, and by extension then my mother, who made my father’s epicurianism possible with her impeccable cooking.  My father is the reason I go to sleep thinking about what I will eat in the morning when I get up; my mother is the reason I read cookbooks for fun.

My father loved food; rather, he was in love with it. His unabashed joy in the pleasures of the appetite impacted nearly every choice, built a thousand little rituals, couldn’t help but show.  This passion he passed on to me—not deliberately, the way he taught me my multiplication tables or that I could do anything I set my mind to—but simply by example, without even trying.  Because I idolized him when I was young, “monkey see, monkey do” had me training my palate at an early age.  I still remember the pride on his face when I agreed to try, and promptly loved, escargot, around age nine.  He bragged about this to other dads as if it were a spot on the honor roll.  And when it came to my actual school grades, he rewarded all As with a trip out for the pulled-pork barbecue my hometown, Memphis, is famous for.  Want to create a foodie child?  That’s how you do it.

To understand the origins of my own appetite, I have to first understand the origins of my father’s.  This was something it took me a long while to figure out; how preposterously convinced I was in my youth that I was a being of my own creation.  But when I became an adult myself, my thoughts finally turned to that blisteringly simple and almost embarrassing revelation—my parents were people long before we ever came along.  And so I started to ask questions about where the man I had known my whole life had come from.

My father was born poor, poor even by Indian standards, and his family lived crowded together with several branches of relatives in a crumbling second-story apartment in the city of Amritsar, very close to the country’s northwest border with Pakistan.  He was one of five children, smack dab in the middle between two older sisters and two younger brothers.  Though his family lacked materially, they were a loving, affectionate, and pious group—regular trips to the temple, regular treats from my grandfather who would spend his last rupee on sweets for his children.

My own father inherited the same generous attitude, but more luck.  Utilizing his considerable intelligence, he worked his way up the well-organized school system the British had left behind, earning top grades and scholarships until he was well past the dirty alleyways he had grown up in.  He married my mom, came to America, and the two of them worked their asses off to build a the comfortable, upper-middle class life that, ironically, would shelter me from any knowledge that my father’s childhood had been so radically different from my own.

~

Mango season may very well have been my father’s favorite time of year.  He relished the thrill of the catch with the zeal of a mad scientist on the verge of a major discovery: coming home with boxes full of heavy, green-orange fruit, tucking them carefully away into the proper ripening atmosphere of the pantry.  Every day, he would harvest the most promising few, upgrading them to a towel-lined basket on the kitchen counter.  Then, after dinner, with the sweat beading on his forehead from my mother’s spicy cauliflower, carrot, and jalapeno achar (pickle), the mango monologue began.

“Look at this mango!” he’d exclaim, “Have you ever seen a mango more beautiful than this one?”  Holding it in his hand, palm upright, fingering the rich, golden skin, with patches of deep red on either end, smelling it, squeezing it—this was liable to go on for several minutes before he actually cut the thing.  But to say that he “cut” is really an injustice.  My father could unpack a mango with his eyes closed, knife somehow finding exactly the right spot, working his way deftly around the seed, producing bright, juicy slices of even thickness which I still cannot manage to duplicate.

Once the mango was cut and tasted, it was, of course, time for more speech-making.  The flavor, the texture, the perfect ripeness of the fruit.  Sometimes he threw in a bit about the bargain price for which he purchased the mango, just for added dramatic effect.  Papa was a showman, make no mistake about it.  And, for the longest time, I was his favorite audience.

Throughout my elementary school years, I was one of the few kids who were shuttled to the cafeteria for after-school care when the 3:00 bell rang.  Even in the early nineties, at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee, only a small number of us had two parents working outside of the home.  But on Fridays, I got to sit outside on the sidewalk and wait in the carpool line with all of the “normal” girls, because my dad would leave work early to come pick me up.  I remember the anticipation of those afternoons, the white metal column with “M-S” painted on it in black letters, indicating that it was the right place for those of us with corresponding last names, Nishta Mehra, Laura Reddick, Jenny Maddux, Ashley Steinberg, to sit and wait for the on-duty teacher to call our names into a megaphone.  My father always arrived in his burgundy Mercedes with the offer of something to eat: hot, buttery movie-theatre popcorn, a stop at Baskin Robbins for Rainbow Sherbet, or, my favorite, a trip to Café Expresso.

Café Expresso was a bakery-restaurant inside the lobby of the relatively upscale Ridgeway Hotel.  With black-and-white tiled floors, beautiful wicker chairs, and fresh flowers on the table, it was exactly the kind of place that made a little girl feel totally sophisticated.  I don’t think their food was ever much to speak of, but I wouldn’t really know, because it was for dessert that we always made the trip.  For years, their rounded glass pastry case was my personal shrine, cold to the touch.  I would stand, gazing with awe at the cakes and tortes while my father paid our bill at the nearby register.  Silk pie, fruit Bavarian, black forest cake, white chocolate raspberry mousse, all perfectly crafted and adorned with glazes and creams and chocolate shavings.  Ideally, a slice or two would be missing from each one, so I could see into the bellies of my favorite confections.  Layer upon rich, decadent layer—just my kind of archaeological dig.  My father loved to delight me, to surprise me, and the best way he knew how was with food.

~

Appetite I may have inherited from my father, but any culinary skill I can claim came from my mother.  She, self-taught, is a formidable presence in the kitchen with a repertoire that ranges from complex, five-course Indian meals to the Southern classics she learned how to make as the vegetable cook in a University of Oklahoma cafeteria, where my father was an MBA student.  Spend ten minutes in my mom’s kitchen, and you will quickly discover that she is opinionated, independent, and blazingly competent.  And anyone who has spent ten minutes with me in my kitchen knows that I inherited her sharp-eyed, territorial attitude about cooking.

For me it is a source of pride to spend an entire day cooking from eight to eight, managing to do it all by myself.  Though I like to think I am a little bit better than her about allowing folks to help me out, I know that my friends would scoff at the notion that I let them do anything but watch.  It’s the only space in my life where I am conscious of being the alpha.

My kitchen habits are about control and love.  Here is a little corner of the world where I can make things go right, where my mistakes can simply be thrown in the trash, and my best work delights and literally feeds the people in my life.  From my mom, I learned that you do not have to say “I love you” or “You are special to me” if you manage to perfect someone’s favorite dish and show up with it at the right time.  My mother is uncomfortable telling people flat-out how she feels; I actually believe a part of her finds it uncouth to constantly declare one’s emotions.  I, on the other hand, have always been a hug-giving, “I love you” dropping, open book, known for my proclivity toward emotive talk.

As I get older, though, I appreciate more and more the subtlety of expression that food can bring.  While I may feel perfectly comfortable saying out loud how I feel, not everyone feels comfortable hearing it.  And the deeper and more nuanced relationships get, the more difficult it can be to truly articulate the layers of feeling within them.  Perhaps a blueberry coffee cake seems like the least articulate object in the world, but it helped me communicate to a colleague with a newly dead father so much that in words would have come out inelegant.  I have flirted with people I dare not flirt with outright by dishing out bowls full of spaghetti carbonara, nests of pasta dotted with salty pancetta, the unguent combination of egg and Italian cheese standing in for bodily proximity, sexy, tempting.  I compromised only one time on my “no-boxed-mix” rule to recreate the strawberry birthday cake my graduate school colleague remembered her mother baking for her as a little girl.  I’ll bring you lunch because I know you’re too busy to pack your own; I’ll send you out the door with leftovers of a dish I noticed you especially liked.  I’ve become one of those women: slightly nutty, just a tinge loud and insistent, who take it personally if you say “no” to dessert.

If people are often like puzzles—and I studied religion and sociology in college, trying to figure them out—all it took was a backwards glance through the story of my own life to realize that the way to unlock most everyone is with an edible key.

~

 My father was a fussy man.  Well, “particular” may be a better term.  He liked things precisely the way he liked them: no cold sandwiches (he would have dug the recent Panini craze), tea brewed properly and served in a mug (no Styrofoam), and non-chocolate desserts (preferably with almonds or pecans).  His favorite pickle, made in batches by my mom, was a triumvirate of cauliflower, carrot, & jalapeno, bathed in a vinegary mix of spices, yellowed like most Indian food by the addition of haldi, or turmeric.  Orange juice, fresh-squeezed only.  Salsa with enough heat, chips with enough heft.  My mother and I called him “Your Highness” for a reason.

Though he sometimes inconvenienced others with his culinary demands, he was also willing to go to some trouble of his own to satisfy them.  We have one especially hilarious photograph of him, bundled up in some ridiculous outfit (replete with 80s-dad Cosby sweater), hovering protectively over a kitchen counter teeming with the jalapeno peppers he had rescued from an impending frost.  Each morning, he took the time to practice his very precise method of cooking eggs—scrambled hard, with small wedge of diced red onion, plus salt and lots of freshly ground pepper—which I still crave and make for myself about once a month.   But more than anything, dad was willing to go the distance for his cucumbers.

Each weekend, he would get up early to drive to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings to snag the best cucumbers before they were taken.  This was long before buying local produce was hip, of course, so my father easily made friends with the farmers and vendors, chatting them up as he did everyone.  You could give my father fifteen minutes with a person—any person—and he could get down to the bottom of what was going on with him or her, their concerns, their ambitions.  After he died, I had to go to the Saturday market to let the farmers know he wouldn’t be coming anymore; they had bags of their best cucumbers waiting for him to pick up.
My father was superstitious about his cucumbers—I don’t know how else to say it, really.  During their Southern summer season, he sliced up one or two with every dinner and also for weekend lunch, laid onto the same half-dinner plate with the blue curling pattern on the edge.  Somehow he concocted an elaborate ritual, to be performed every time a cucumber was cut and peeled, and he believed that if this ritual were not executed properly and thoroughly, the cucumber in question would be sour and inedible.  And seeing as how I never saw my father reject a cucumber after tasting it, nor was I ever served by him a bitter slice, he might have been onto something.  Here’s the secret:

Before peeling the cucumber, slice ½ inch off of the end.  Using your knife, make a cross-hatch design into both the exposed edge of the whole cucumber and into the flat side of the cucumber piece.  Put the knife down.  Pick up both the whole cucumber and the cucumber piece, placing the latter up against its mother cucumber, as if returning it to its original home.  Rub the slice against the scored green of the whole cucumber in a back-and-forth motion.  Persist until you see white foam forming along the edges where checkerboard flesh meets checkerboard flesh.  Only then can you be certain that you have drawn the bitterness out of the cucumber.  Discard the end piece, and be sure to slice off another piece at the end, this time only as thick enough as need be to discard of the foamy checkerboard.  Peel and enjoy your now-guaranteed sweet summer cucumber.

My father liked his slices dipped into black salt, a slightly sulfurous-smelling mineral salt used almost exclusively in Indian cooking (though there may be some trendy restaurants now also taking part).  Kal namak does something similar to the Southern-style treatment of watermelon with salt-and-pepper, both enhancing and foiling the sweetness of whatever it accompanies.

My response as a kid was always, “Yuck!” whenever dad accompanied sweet fruit or cucumber with the stinking stuff.  Black salt seemed to me to be embarrassingly blatant evidence that we were different, that my life was just an extended version of the “one of these things is not like the other!” game they played on Sesame Street.  Other people’s dads did not sing Hindi songs while running the bath, did not emerge from said bath dressed in gauzy, white kurta pajamas, did not curse at idiot politicians on TV in another language, and did not insist on dipping cucumber slices in a substance that reeked of hard-boiled egg yolks and looked just like volcanic ash.

~

Before he died, my parents and I took a trip to India.  We did not know he was going to die; it just worked out that way.  We arrived late, or rather early, in the wee hours of the morning, and my first taste upon settling in the family apartment was mango. Cool, creamy cubes sliced up for us at three in the morning, Mumbai time, and brought to me on a little tray by my younger, and therefore very deferential, cousins.  The mango’s orange was smooth and bright, the color of a marigold with rounded and slippery edges.  These, the coveted Alphonso mangoes, king of all fruit, are very, very difficult to come by in America; I had never eaten one before.  Fruit touched my lips and completely obliterated what I had heretofore defined as the taste, “mango.”  My brain puzzled—I was twenty-three years old, had eaten plenty of mangos in mind (and listened to my dad rave rapturously about them for years), but there was no match in my food file for the taste I was experiencing.  I reached for another bite: sweet, sorbet-smooth, perfect.  Conversation hummed around me, gentle, late-night, long anticipated.  The velvety feeling in my mouth was joy, food joy becoming family joy, here I am in India, this place that I am somehow from, and the mangoes taste like magic and I have three weeks of this ahead of me, three weeks of discovering all the things that I never knew I never knew.

“Now this,” I said to my father as I pointed down into my bowl, “This is a mango worth making a speech over, Dad.”  My parents and I laughed at our inside joke.

The next morning, my father and I walked a few busy streets over to Mumbai’s Five Gardens, where paths are reserved for pedestrians and where I am surprised to see men and women walking with headphones and tennis shoes on.  The gardens are really more like well-shaded parks gated off from traffic.  Of course, everywhere you turn in Mumbai is a veritable garden; given the hothouse climate, all manner of flowers and greenery grow.

Each of the five gardens contained a different buzz of activity—a rousing game of cricket underway on one dusty circle, some quiet games of chess between old men under the shade of palm trees.  We stopped to watch the cricket match and I realized I was more rabidly American than I ever imagined, since I know and love everything about baseball but have no idea how to even follow this game, the game that the British gave to my people and which we continue to out-do them with.  One of the sharp-edged ironies of colonialism is this: that the colonized often long to be like their colonizers.  They learn to emulate the imperialists’ tastes in dress, accent, mannerism, and drink at the same time that they struggle to be free of them.  We’ll take what’s yours, only we’ll do it one better.  Want to appropriate us?  By golly, we’ll appropriate you.

My father exhibited this tendency in his own small and bizarre ways, refusing to buy gas from “British Petroleum,” stocking the bar with all kinds of whisky, and cursing the United Kingdom at every opportunity.  Of course, though the criticism for Britain came freely, he still took his tea British-style, steeped in hot water, as opposed to the Indian way, steeped with spices in hot milk and observed the Queen’s teatime in our house for years.

~

India taught my why my father loved a buffet.  I ought to have figured it out much sooner, but it took visiting his hometown, seeing where he quite literally came from, to realize that it was his younger self, little Subhash, who had once scraped coins together for a single hot jalebi from the man who fried them in a giant wok of oil down the street from my father’s childhood home, who drew adult Subhash, and his family with him, to buffet after buffet.  After all, a buffet is the ultimate demonstration of choice and infinite possibility.  What could be more American than that?  The buffet says—“Come eat at our communal table; you made it, you are one of us.”  Each visit was a victory for little Subhash, who could finally have as much as he wanted, and without being rushed.

My mother tells stories about epic, three-hour Pizza Hut visits with my dad, before I was born; he would wait for new pizzas to come out, taking one or two slices from the fresh, hot pie and then wait for another.  I experienced firsthand my father’s proclivity towards long stays at the buffet table.  Back when Shoney’s still dotted the landscape below the Mason-Dixon line, family trips there for the breakfast buffet were a fairly regular occurrence.  There my father had two women waiting on him to finish, but he still never bothered to rush.  My mother and I played a lot of games of tic-tac-toe in crayon on the back of my kids’ menu as a result.  As a teenager, I even spent one New Year’s Eve at Memphis’ last Shoney’s, dancing in the empty aisles with my mother and friends to Marvin Gaye while my father waited for fresh biscuits to come out of the restaurant oven.

~

For most of my young life, my father’s employer was a local chain of restaurants called Pancho’s—arguably the best option for Tex-Mex food in Memphis, at least while I was growing up.  Looking back, it’s hard to know whether it was the kind of place that I would go now myself, as a grownup.  I can’t accurately assess what kind of clientele it served, or how much anything cost.  Not to mention, I’ll admit to having become something of a food snob these last few years, and having lived these last ten years in Texas, I wonder if I would turn my nose up at all kinds of things I enjoyed as a kid.  Sometimes the things we try to revisit don’t hold water anymore.

Back then, though, to me Pancho’s was the coolest.  We went to dinner there about once a week, and because my father was a “big boss,” it was something of a big deal when we would show up to dinner.  Dad was the Vice-President of Manufacturing and Shipping, which meant that he managed the plant which produced the restaurant’s chips, dips, tamales, and sauces.  I remember memorizing his title off of his business card that I could say it, impressively, because even then I was conscious that he worked in a plant in a not-very-glamorous part of town, near the airport, where all of the packing and shipping and manufacturing tends to happen.

I went to work with him on several occasions—he had a fancy office with a big green chair and all kinds of fun things on his desk.  He would give me a big, print-out calculator and old invoices or a legal pad & pen so I could conjure up an imaginary business and busy myself making calculations, drawing up figures, printing out receipts.  Employees would come in and out of his office during the day, always pausing to greet or tease me.  A polite child who heard again and again, “You’re so mature for your age!,” I remember feeling shy but wanting to do my father proud and earn him credit in their eyes.

Though I idolized my dad like nearly all young kids do, I believe I read correctly the respect and general affection with which his employees treated him.  Many of the older black women who worked in the plant sent Dad home at Christmas with greens and ham, homemade pies for the freezer.  For about two months in elementary school, I shared a shower with my parents, because my shower (which doubled as the guest-bedroom shower) and the bedroom to which it was attached were occupied by an employee of my father’s.  He was recently divorced and had no place to go.  He lived like a kind of ghost in our house—occasionally appearing at the kitchen table, or on the staircase.  I felt that his presence made my mother uncomfortable, but if there had been an argument, my father had won.  Whatever I thought about it back then, the occurrence stuck with me.  And in the way that most of us come to examine our childhoods with ever-distant lenses, at some point I realized just what my father had done, that this had been an extraordinary act.  That it was, in fact, something that most people wouldn’t be willing to do, an idea that would never even occur to them.

~

When I was a freshman in high school, a stress test led to the discovery of serious blockage in my father’s three major arteries.  Epicureanism, never tempered by exercise, comes with a high price.  The second time I ever saw him cry was in a hospital room, as he was being prepped for triple-bypass surgery.  His was a long hospital stay; I became accustomed to winding through corridors and keeping phone numbers in my purse at all times, sitting in the cafeteria with my journal and trying not to be scared.  He came out of recovery much skinnier, with a Frankenstein scar running down his left leg.  Unblocking his arteries unblocked something else; he became a far more emotional man from then on, crying easily, an unexpected change.  For my part, I never forgot the units of blood he had received in the hospital; they wouldn’t allow me to bank for him, I was too young.  Barring a few dozen months off for tattoos and travel, I have donated whole blood or platelets regularly since the day I turned seventeen.

Once recuperated, my father found himself laid off from his executive-level job at Pancho’s.  Though even I knew at the time that he had been unfairly, not to mention illegally treated by his employer, I believe that the shame of being without a job was more than enough to quell any desire on my parents’ part to seek retribution.  “That’s an American thing,” they would say.  Apparently the Indian way is to suffer in silence.

My father spent a year-and-a-half in unemployment.  Unemployment, as if it were a place, with geographic features and a landscape.  It was a domain for him alone; he was forced there, on exile.  My mother, now the sole bread-winner in our household, was working harder than ever, busy with work and busy replacing things in our refrigerator where butter substitute and two-percent-milk cheese became the norm.  She was the one who had broken the news to me, and her telling of it communicated implicitly that my parents didn’t want me to act like anything was wrong.  My duty in all of this was to not make a fuss, not ask for a lot of things, work hard in school—school where I had, thank goodness, received a half-tuition scholarship to help keep us afloat.

My parents did an incredible job of rocking the boat so minimally that I almost didn’t notice the severely wounding impact these changes were having.  I do remember seeing my father dressed in the mornings, readying his briefcase with papers for job interviews from which he always came back unsuccessful.  Mom told me later that he kept hearing one of two lines: You’re overqualified, or, said without saying it, Too old.  Watching him was so hard, like the first inklings of a parent-child reversal, where all of a sudden you are the one who can’t fix it, can’t make it go away.  Here is your father, vulnerable, humiliated, and you want to say everything to him, tell him that you are sorry, but you are so afraid that you’ll only make it worse.

~

In what turned out to be the last picture ever taken of my father, he is sitting in my uncle’s marble-floored apartment in Mumbai, smiling from his seat on the plush, gold-ish couch.  On the table in front of him is a plate with a malpura, a sweet pancake traditionally eaten in India during the rainy monsoon season.  Three days before we left Mumbai, the rain began falling in sheets, and my father had to commemorate the occasion, like he commemorated everything else, by eating.

It’s not an overstatement to say that the picture represents almost everything you need to know about him.  He’s smiling, a sweet, easy, generous smile which came naturally to him.  My father looks out at me holding a phone in one hand, as he’s in the middle of calling everyone we’re related to in Bombay and saying goodbye.  His shirt is short-sleeved and collared, American style, pale yellow with horizontal bands of white flocked with light blue.  For pants he’s wearing the traditional Indian kurta pajama bottoms, thin, gauzy, loose and drawstring.  His reading glasses sit on the table in front of him.

~

It took me years, but I finally learned to like, and then love the taste of scotch.  The whole endeavor was a deliberate project resulting from the whisky collection my father left behind.  I took the drink as a filial obligation, another one of those daughter-as-son moments that happen to us who are only children.  With no one else to fill the role, we inherit the neckties and the funeral decisions, the taking care of mom, the eulogy writing, the necessary phone calls.  I’m not sure what he would think, now that I’m working my way through his old collection, and adding to it with favorites of my own.  Probably equal parts delighted and mortified, the way he was when I smuggled him a Cuban cigar from my college trip to Amsterdam, the single, deliberately law-breaking act of my life.

~

When someone dies, they take things with them: the restaurant you cannot bear to go to without him, the ability for your child to ever know her grandfather, the singing voice you wish you had hours of recorded.  But at the same time, the dead leave ties behind.  My father left his favorite foods, his meticulous eating habits and quirky preferences.  I imagine him visiting my kitchen from wherever he has gone and daring me, cajoling me to cook a feast worthy of him.  He will never show up to eat it, so I feed other mouths in his stead.

Biscuits he would drool over?  I can make them, and with lard I rendered myself.  The authentic Indian dishes he craved?  I grind my own spices to go in them.   You name it, I can make it, or if I can’t, I will teach myself how.  In the whipping of a meringue or pressing of a crust for a tart, I build my own rituals, enact the missing of him in edible form, over and over and over.  The kitchen is where I am happiest, most creative, free.  I ache for my father and I honor my parents.  I cook.