I had expected to have a little bit more time. I wanted to experiment with some corn butter recipes I’ve been putting off since last summer. I hardly had my fill of summer ripe tomatoes. I’ve half a mind to stuff my mouth full of nothing but basil before it all withers and dies. Yes… summer is over, at least for me. In New York, they’ll get a few more weeks, but here in Paris, it is undeniably fall.
Yes… I have finally made the move. I have my own tiny kitchen in my tiny apartment in a tiny building on a tiny street. And all of this is in the huge metropolis that is Paris. My new home. I broke it in (finally) today, by making my ceremonial “new home” tomato sauce. The recipe is secret, but it’s very labor intensive, so I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to know it anyway. I’ll be making a few more batches before the fresh tomatoes are off the produce stands.
Fall is bringing in yet another exciting new thing: my new (and first) food book of the month: The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. I cheated a little by picking a book that I’ve already read… it’s a memoir of an immigrant’s journey between upstate New York and Jordan throughout her life, and her relationship with the two places. The story is punctuated with recipes, mostly from Abu-Jaber’s food-obsessed father, Bud.
In the book, while making baklava, Diana and her aunt have a discussion about food as a way to remember: to Bud, it is the only way he can remember his homeland of Jordan. Her aunt’s theory, however, negates this concept: she thinks that food is a way to forget. By cooking the same things he ate at home, Bud is forgetting how they were originally. Now, he can never truly go back to the way things were.
I only recently understood this concept. I have tried again and again to replicate my mother’s tomato sauce, putting hers on a pedestal and knowing that mine can never equal it. The more I try, the farther I get from the original, until I can’t even remember what was right. Luckily, I still have Christmas to taste my mother’s and to remember why it is so special. For Bud, though, this is impossible.
Luckily, these recipes don’t hold any history for me, so I am free to enjoy them. It seems strange to start my life in France by experimenting with Jordanian cooking, but I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you all are excited about baklava, shish kebab, lebneh, hummus….
