Food Memories
Rain. A respite from daily rounds of watering that have kept the gardens hydrated this past dry August. A slow morning with the screened door to the deck open, listening to rain—a sound I’d almost forgotten. Books piled on the long coffee table before me. A rare moment with Peekay—our exuberant golden Tabby/Bengal kitten—napping next to me with an outstretched paw firmly resting on his toy companion Peekaboo. A cup of steaming black tea with a pinch of garam masala and a dollop of milk.
Rain. The permission I have wished for, allowing me to linger inside as September rain falls for the first time in months, away from the noise of the world and the demands that await me each day. With this as the setting, a food journey begins. Before sipping my tea, I raise the cup to my nose and breathe in. Eyes closed, a list of spices—pods, seeds, powders, and pastes—spills forth. I mouth each as it appears. Fenugreek, turmeric, cardamom, ginger, cumin, black mustard, coriander, red chilies, green mango, curry leaves, cilantro, and tamarind.
Most immediate is the fragrance of garam masala in my tea, connecting me to Madhur Jaffrey’s 1975 cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and her garam masala recipe reprinted in a special September/October 2014 India issue of Saveur magazine that traveled with me when we moved to northern CA in 2021. In a spice grinder, combine and grind together 1/4 cup cardamom seeds and 1 1/2 teaspoons each of black cumin seeds, whole black peppercorns, whole cloves, 4 sticks cinnamon, and one whole nutmeg cracked into pieces.
This I’ve now done, relegating a former coffee bean grinder to a new purpose. Now my food journey continues, and I am back at Boomerang Creek when the Saveur issue dedicated to regional cooking in India arrived. I’d just finished two books—my friend Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, and Richard C. Morais’s The Hundred-Foot Journey. Reading back and forth from each, they became bookends between which I then added food memories of my own. Like jars filled with spices, food memories are stored but not forgotten. Reopened, they connect me to journeys taken and remembered, just as they connected these two gifted writers to family and home.
From Thailand 1967-70, my food memories are of cilantro and kaffir limes. Pots of spicy sauces and curries bought in backstreet Thai food markets, carried home in plastic bags dangling by rubber bands from the fingers on one hand while the other hand grips an overhead bar on a crowded bus speeding across Bangkok. Reheated and enhanced with fish, squid, or chicken, they were eaten with jasmine rice cooked on an electric hot plate in the kitchen I shared with two students, Chomsri and Siripon, over half a century ago.
Nina was born in Bangkok when her Hindu Bengali parents moved there because of her father’s job as an engineer. Coincidentally, I traveled to India and Nepal in 1975 and added new food memories from that experience—dal with cauliflower and potatoes and chocolate cake prepared in a cast iron pot by a Sherpa cook while trekking in the Himalayas—my first indelible immersion into the flavors of the Indian subcontinent.
Reading The Hundred-Foot Journey, I recall being transported to Mumbai where Hassan Haji first tastes sea urchin, then breathes in and identifies for his mother the intoxicating mix of spices in her fiery fish curry. With his family, readers journey to Lumière, France, where destiny introduces the young chef to classical French cuisine in the kitchen of Madame Mallory—preparation for the culinary journey that awaits Hassan in Paris.
Finally my thoughts return to our home in the Sierra Foothills, and I open Nina’s memoir to the final chapter. There I find her family’s Rainy-Day Khicuri (Rice and Lentils with potato and cauliflower) and Indian Vindaloo. First, six spices must be ground into a powder. Then oil is heated in a large copper stockpot until a bay leaf, cinnamon stick, whole cloves and cardamom pods come to a sizzle and pop.
I’m suddenly aware that the rain has stopped. At that moment, I recall the first time I peeled a mango and cooked with curry leaves. It is then that I release a prayer of thanks for a quiet September rain from whence sprang these deeply rooted food memories—rich, spicy, and indelibly delicious.