Devi Lockwood
I was born to a white American mother and a
Syrian-Armenian father. His family is Armenian, but lived in Kessab, Syria,
before immigrating to Massachusetts. But growing up, I had little contact with
his family and culture, including its rich Syrian and Armenian food traditions.
His own presence in my life is limited and distorted by his history of violence
towards my mother.
My biological father's aggression was explosive. Some of
my earliest memories are of him making death threats to my mom and throwing a
lamp at her. I remember watching from the hallway, too afraid to intervene.
Sometimes, I would cover my ears and run to my room, putting a pillow over my
head to muffle his yelling. I took refuge in the pictures in fairytale books.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses was my favorite.
Much of this violence happened in the kitchen. For years
I had a fear of knives, though I couldn't remember them ever having been held
in anger. I blamed myself for being powerless to protect my mother from his
outrage – his fists, his hands, his threats.
When I was four years old, my mom had the courage to walk
out of this abusive marriage. She drove me across the country from Oregon to
Connecticut and started a new life with my very white, very suburban
grandparents. Far from the Armenian foodways of my early years, I grew to
become familiar with roasted potatoes, boiled peas, meatloaf with ketchup, and
vanilla pudding from a tub.
Much to my mother's surprise, when I was in middle school
I developed a love for Armenian food. One day at the grocery store I asked if
we could buy a jar of olives. My mother can't stand olives, but she let me have
some. After this mini-revelation about the difference in our palettes, my
mother started bringing home different things that she thought I might like –
flatbread dipped in hummus with lots of garlic, labneh (strained yogurt) served
with mint, rice pudding sprinkled with cinnamon, and dolmades, a dish made of
grape leaves stuffed with spiced rice. Even though I hadn't eaten any of this
since I was little, I couldn't get enough of them. And I loved eating these
savory dishes with my hands – it was finger-licking good.
These early Middle Eastern cravings were sated by our
local grocery store's deli section, where I found olives sold by the pound and
grape leaf wraps stuffed tightly into cans or plastic containers. But that
wasn't enough for me. I wanted to learn to make my own.
The opportunity came a few years later when I was in high
school in New Hampshire. An Armenian cousin I hadn't heard from for fifteen
years contacted me over Facebook. "I'm not sure if this is the right
Devi," she wrote, "but I figure it's worth a shot because your name's
not that common! I'm getting married in Boston this spring and would love for
you to be a bridesmaid in my wedding."
I stared at the screen, shocked that she had reached out
after all these years. This cousin had been my favorite when I was younger. She
was the older one who gave me sheets of sparkly stickers and painted my nails.
Would it be worth it to reconnect? Curiosity drove me to type out a tentative
yes. I wanted to know if I would have anything in common with her and the rest
of this family. What did my taste buds know that the rest of me hadn't found
out yet?
I saw my cousin and my grandmother for the first time a
few weeks later, on my way home from an ice hockey game. I stopped in at my
aunt's house, waiting in a living room that I remembered from one Christmas
when I was two or three years old. I was worried that I hadn't showered and
smelled like sweat. I tried to pull my hair back in a way that looked
presentable.
Even after 40 years of living in the USA, my grandmother
doesn't speak much English. And I don't know a word of Armenian. When Nana
walked into the room, she hugged me, held my hands in hers, and wouldn't let
go. She cried sitting next to me on the couch. She had more wrinkles around her
eyes than I remembered. The skin on her hands was dotted with freckles. I
stared at her hands, trying hard not to break down. We relied on my bilingual
cousin to translate.
My grandmother sent me back to school with a doggie bag
full of foods she had made: salty cheese and tabouleh and mohamarra (a red dip
with walnuts as the base), plus twisted sugar cookies and a handful of
cucumbers and tomatoes from her backyard garden. Food became her way of
expressing her affection for me, and I expressed my gratitude by devouring all
that she offered. I wanted to eat my way back into my heritage. We began
communicating through food.
The author learns to fold the leaves with her grandmother
in Boston in 2010. Courtesy of Devi Lockwood
Back in my dorm room, I closed my eyes as I ate Nana's
dishes alone. I felt full in a way that I didn't know I had been craving for
years. I wanted to feel connected to my Armenian family, but I didn't know how
to disentangle those connections from the memory of my biological father's
violence. Could I miss a kind of togetherness I had never known?
After the first reunion, I was welcomed back into an
Armenian community I barely remembered, with my grandmother's kitchen in
Watertown, Massachusetts at the center of it. Cousins and aunts and uncles filtered
in and out all day, stopping for a thick cup of black coffee paired with one of
my grandmother's shortbread cookies twisted like a braid. No one left the house
hungry, and leftovers were always available from the fridge.
I continued my visits to my grandmother when I started
university in Boston. Some Saturdays, I cycled the five miles from campus to
her home in the suburbs. She insisted that I wear one of her shirts so that the
sweat on my back wouldn't give me a chill. She sat me down to eat more than I
could manage and she always gave me food to take back with me. As I cycled back
to campus, I wondered how I could ever make sense of my messy family situation
– my heritage, my tongue, its cravings. I ate alone, too ashamed of my family's
past to explain the excess of food to my friends.
One fall afternoon, I decided to take a cooking lesson
from her. I rode my bicycle from university to visit Nana and she spent a few
hours teaching me to make the stuffed grape leaves.
Nana didn't measure anything. She wrapped her dolmades
with leaves preserved from the grape vine that shades the porch of her duplex
home, the seeds of which arrived with her on the boat from Syria in the early
1970s. My recently-married cousin, who speaks fluent Armenian, stood by to
translate and transcribe and make a guess of measurements. She sent me the
recipe in an email a few weeks later. I carry it with me wherever I go. When I
make dolmades, I make do with leaves pre-preserved in brine in a jar at the
grocery, but one day, I hope to have a grape vine and a garden of my own.
I have since made dolmades in far-flung kitchens in New
Zealand, Australia, and across the USA. Every time I do, it feels like building
a temporary home, or the kind of home I wish that side of the family had been
able to provide when I was younger – a place of warmth, love, and kindness, all
expressed by making and sharing food. No violence in the kitchen. I love the
communal nature of preparing and eating a dish that I can claim as my own, as
part of my origin story.
My biological father was released from prison a few years
ago for similar domestic violence charges to what he did against my mom. He has
since moved back in with his parents. It felt too painful and complicated to
reconnect with him. My memories of his violence are too vivid. To avoid him, I
gave up my regular visits to Nana. I didn't tell her I was leaving. I couldn't.
I had my mom call one of my aunts to explain that I couldn't maintain contact.
I miss her and our time together, but I have held onto
the tradition of making dolmades. I can't choose my family situation, but I can
choose how I honor its culinary traditions.
Every time I fold a grape leaf around a small pile of
spiced rice, I reclaim some aspect of my Syrian-Armenian-ness as my own. By
making dolmades, I transform the kitchen from a space of violence into a space
of refuge.
A batch of dolmades the author made in Dunedin, New
Zealand. The leaves were from a vine in her friend's backyard.
Devi Lockwood for NPR
Recipe for Stuffed Grape Leaves (Dolmades)
Serves: 5
Preparation time: 45 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes
INGREDIENTS:
Stack of grape leaves
Garlic
Water
Salt
Tomato juice
Lemon juice
(For Mixture)
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1½ cups rice, uncooked, washed
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup Crushed Tomatoes (or 2 medium tomatoes, cut in half
and grated)
2 tablespoon tomato paste
1 bunch fresh parsley, chopped
2 tablespoon dried mint
1 tablespoon dried basil (optional)
1 teaspoon Allspice
1½ teaspoon black pepper
1.- Line a large pot with grape leaves.
2.- On a plate, place one grape leaf face down. Remove
the stem. Place a small amount of mixture in the middle (finger length and
width). Fold the sides in, bottom up, then, roll up tightly. Repeat with more
grape leaves until all mixture is gone.
3.- Add the wrapped grape leaves into the pot. Add in
eight cloves of peeled garlic on top. Add three butter slices.
4.- Swish water in the mixture bowl and pour into pot.
Add more grape leaves to the top. Place a small plate upside-down on top. Add a
flat, clean rock as a weight.
5.- Create a broth of 3 cups water, lemon juice, tomato
sauce, salt and crushed garlic. Pour the broth on top of filled pot, so that it
fills the spaces between the tightly packed dolmades. The broth will drain
through and cook the rice.
6.- Put the pot on a burner on high until it boils. Then
reduce heat to low and cover. Let it cook for one hour.
7.- In a mortar & pestle, crush garlic, died mint,
and salt. Add this into the pot and swish around to get into the broth for
flavor.
8.- Drain the dolmades. Then find a serving plate and
place on the top of the pot. Flip the pot upside down to transfer the dolmades
to the serving plate. Garnish with lemon slices and serve hot or cold.
Devi Lockwood is a poet, touring cyclist and storyteller.
She has traveled the world by boat and by bicycle to collect people's stories
about water and climate change.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder
Not: Yalnızca bu blogun üyesi yorum gönderebilir.