Whetstone Magazine Volume 5

WHETS TO NE H O N G KO N G / M O R O CCO / B O L I V I A / PA R AG UAY / N I G E R I A / P U E R TO R I CO / TA I WA N / I N D I A

A J O U R N A L O N F O O D O R I G I N S A N D C U LT U R E

ED.

05

ORIGIN FORAGING

WINTER 2019

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Hello Whetstone family!

It’s with excitement that we write our first ever joint founders letter! Some of you may recognize Stephen (Satterfield) from penning this letter in prior iterations of Whetstone, the two of us, Melissa Shi and Stephen, came together late last year with a singular goal in mind — to fully dedicate ourselves to building Whetstone as a platform to elevate the most compelling food stories from the most diverse narrators in the world of food.

We remain committed to championing food as a means to expanding human empathy and the powerful implications of deepening our understanding of personal and collective identities.

In August we launched our very first podcast Point of Origin with an incredible partner in iHeartRadio. Aptly our show invokes our listeners… “We all gotta eat, right?” Bringing our stories alive in audio has inspired us to go even deeper in our storytelling. In Whetstone fashion, our first season traverses multiple continents and a range of subjects on food origins and culture.

But what we’ve loved the most is the opportunity to revisit friends from the magazine past and future. With these more expansive conversations and ruminitions in audio, we hope that Point of Origin will not only transport our listeners to a time and a place, but will provide another home for the stories that accelerate our knowledge and remind us that food connects us all and teaches us who we are.

Our team has always been the soul of Whetstone, and the magazine would not be possible without George McCalman and Ali Cameron at the creative helm. We also want to share a very special thank you to Layla Schlack, Kat Hong and Celine Glasier, who joined the Whetstone family this year and have been invaluable partners that have helped us launch this edition of the magazine, our online journal, and the podcast. Our interns Quentin Lebeau and Cameron Vega have also been crucial in growing our presence this year.

With excitement, we also share that our longtime friend David Alexander formally joined us as a Partner heading the charge on our video and film projects; we can’t wait to share what is in store for the next creative frontier... TV! Most importantly we are so appreciative to you, our readers, contributors, listeners and supporters. You’ve enabled us to realize our vision for a more equitable, diverse and inclusive world of food. As always, we’d love to hear from you! If you have a story to share, a question, a suggestion, or just want to say hi, please don’t hesitate to reach us.

Until the next edition!

Mel and Stephen Co-founders @ Whetstone

PHOTOGRAPH: Ray Christian

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CONTRIBUTORS

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Alicia Rudder

Andrea Swenson

Austin Bush

Dan Bransfield

Jessica Hernandez

Karolina Wiercigroch

Alicia Rudder is a writer, illustrator, and creative all-rounder from New York. A design graduate of Pratt Institute in NYC, she draws inspiration from all avenues of artistry, from the monumental works of visionary Renaissance masters, to the contemporary, dialogue-rich screenplay. Her daily carry includes watercolors, fountain pens, sketchbooks, and journals, and she works best with a bottomless cup of tea and Netflix on auto-play. See her work on Instagram: @friedpencils.

is a food-loving illustrator and pun enthusiast. Dan's clients include The New Yorker, Apple iTunes, Edible San Francisco Magazine, Tom Bihn, 826 Valencia, Applegate Farms, Cathay Pacific and Republic of Fritz Hansen among others. He is the author of Pizzapedia: An Illustrated Guide to Everyone’s Favorite Food.

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is a travel and food photographer who earnestly wants to share a sense of place and her eye for details that might otherwise be overlooked. A retired food stylist of over two decades, as well as cookbook author, she calls upon her extensive knowledge of food and food history to complement her photographs with edifying narratives.

Born and raised in the NYC area, she still wants to live here even after all the amazing places she’s visited.

You can view more of her work at: www.andreabswenson.com

is a freelance journalist documenting the intersections of food, culture and travel. She is currently based in Los Angeles, CA but is always dreaming of fresh buko pie and convenience store snacks in Southeast Asia.

is a writer and photographer based in Bangkok, Thailand. After graduating from the University of Oregon with a degree in linguistics, he received a scholarship to study Thai at Chiang Mai University, and has remained in Thailand ever since. His images have been published in magazines, newspapers, books and websites including www.bbc.com, Bon Appétit, CNN Travel, Lucky Peach, and the New York Times. The Food of Northern Thailand (Clarkson Potter), which he wrote and photographed, was a finalist for the 2019 James Beard Foundation Book Awards.

is a London based food & travel photographer and writer, specialising in culinary storytelling. She works with a range of editorial and commercial clients, translating the stories of food and its origins into visuals. Her work appeared in a variety of magazines, including National Geographic Traveller Food, The Sunday Times, British GQ and SUITCASE.

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Keia Mastrianni

Leah Bhabha

Linh Nguyen

Gloria Ferres, Christian Kent, Esteban Aguirre

is a writer, editor, author and baker based in western North Carolina. Her work focuses on regional foodways and agriculture at the intersection of social justice, racial justice, and gender justice.

She is the editor of Crop Stories, a food and farm 'zine that tells complex stories from the agricultural South.

Her work has been featured in digital and print publications including Eater, the Local Palate, Bon Appetit, Edible Communities and more. When she's not writing or baking pies, she lends a hand on her partner's farm.

(LinhNW) is a Vietnamese-born, Michigan-based artist and writer. In 2013, she left her hometown, Saigon, to pursue higher education in Fine Arts and Communication at Loyola University Chicago. Linh graduated with a BA in 2018 and moved to Grand Rapids, then Lansing to explore a smaller art scene and communities. She frequently travels back to Vietnam to visit her parents and keep herself up to date with the drastic changes in her hometown. Her writer’s portfolio is available at medium.com/@linhnw, and her art website at linhnartist.com/gallery

is a writer and editor based in New York City. She has written for publications like Vogue, New York Magazine, and Bon Appétit and is the lifestyle editor at Furthermore from Equinox. Her work explores the relationship between personal history and cuisine and she particularly enjoys soup dumplings, boquerones, and hard-to-eat sandwiches. Find more of her work at Leahbhabha.com.

Linda Farthing

is a journalist and researcher who is based mostly in Bolivia. The author of three books on the country, she has appreciated and shared great Bolivian food and cooking for decades. She has written for the Guardian, the Nation, Al Jazeera, and Ms. Magazine. Her latest book is Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change.

Gloria Ferres, photographer, Christian Kent, poet and editor and Esteban Aguirre, writer, all join forces to create Mandíbula in their hometown, a small city called Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, situated in the belly button of Latin America, a place that by location makes you think, breathe and live food. Mandíbula is an independent food publication that was born and lives with one purpose in life, to put Paraguay in minds of those who have plates in their hands. Those whose hunger exceeds their taste buds and wish to understand the world through the ingredients that makes us coexist in this small marble of the universe with recipes as future languages of humanity... or something like that. ¡Salú!

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Marcelo Pérez del Carpio

Nico Vera

George McCalman

was born in Bolivia in 1982, but he lived during his childhood and teenage years in Venezuela. In 2000, he went back to his birth country to study architecture.

Since the very beginning of his career, he realized about his passion for photography and then photojournalism.

His photographs have been published at The New York Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, Bloomberg, The Guardian, El País, Travel Telegraph, Stern, Society, OneWorld Magazine, among others.

is a writer, photographer, chef, and mixologist from Lima, Peru. He’s contributed stories and photography on his country’s food and drink culture for Whetstone, The Bold Italic, New Worlder, Imbibe, and Eaten. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Nico and his girlfriend Alec enjoy exploring mountain trails, dancing to Latin music, growing vegetables in their garden, cooking vegan meals for friends and family, and playing world rhythms on guitar and drums. Find him at piscotrail.com and @piscotrail.

RS Whipple

Tunde Wey

Aliena Cameron

is a gifted painter, author, and illustrator working in San Francisco, she has exhibited her paintings, sculptures and animations both in the US and internationally. Her debut picture book, When I was Big and You Were Little was released in Fall 2018.

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is Nigerian born-and-raised, New Orleans-based artist, cook and writer who uses nigerian food and dining spaces to interrogate systems of power.

He has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, GQ, The Washington Post, VOGUE, Black Enterprise, Food and Wine, and his writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle. After almost a decade of undocumented living, he recently received U.S. permanent resident status.

is an artist and creative director based in San Francisco. He runs a creative studio McCalman.co which produces projects across analog and digital platforms. Additional to designing Whetstone magazine, he has a monthly illustrated culture column called ‘Observed’ in the San Francisco Chronicle.

His first book Illustrated Black History will be published by Harper Collins in Fall 2020. His studio's exploits can be followed at @McCalmanCo on Instagram and Twitter.

is a designer and illustrator living in Oakland, CA. She graduated from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2017 with a BFA in Graphic Design.

Her work pulls inspiration from pop-culture, music, and narrative fiction, blending whimsical stories with bold graphics. She currently works with George McCalman on a variety of exciting publication and branding projects for specialty clients. To see more of her work visit: alienazoe.com.

Photo by Alora King.

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To Debby, With Love

On November 8, 2018, we lost a beloved friend, and editor of this magazine, Debby Zygielbaum. Debby edited three volumes of Whetstone, and before she passed, was in the process of working on our last volume. Debby was a witty and exuberant genius, a savant on all things farming, biology and shepherding.

For 15 years she worked as a pioneering biodynamic viticulturist at Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Napa, California where she raised sheep and grew pristine grapes with unparalleled fervor and dedication. She was righteous and funny with a bellowing and unencumbered laugh. We will be miss her beyond belief.

She is survived by her wife Kerrigan Valentine who she loved dearly.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sarah Deragon

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The Cha Chaan Teng

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Charisma personified in Hong Kong’s 1950s-style Canto-Western diners that have won the hearts of Hong Kongers cross-generation.

CONTRIBUTOR TRANSLATION

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Viola Gaskell Yating Wang and Kim Wan

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Luen Wah Cafe in Sai Wan, Hong Kong Island.

With myriad favorites like “Chinese-style spaghetti” and pineapple buns slathered in butter, cha chaan tengs (‘tea restaurant’ in Cantonese) are neither the healthiest choice nor the classiest, and with a multitude of chains that imitate their menus, they are nolonger the cheapest either, but the humble Canto-Western diners remain iconic of Hong Kong.

The historic Hong Kong-style diners are fusion by happenstance.

In the 1950s, local business owners sought to offer affordable versions of the cuisine of their new British colonial countrymen.

They added milk to strong Hong Kong-style tea and coffee, and fried toasts then slathered them in butter and sweetened condensed milk. The cha chaan teng had arrived.

The charm of crustless sandwiches, colorful tiled walls, miniature booths or square tables with bright plastic stools and old Ovaltine containers containing chopsticks and silverware atop every table make cha chaan tengs hard not to like. The cheap and cheerful attitude fuses with functionality, speed and the general nonfussiness appreciated by Hong Kongers. Businessmen, construction workers, grandmothers and tourists alike sit down to enjoy plates of noodles set down with such haste that the broth threatens to spill down the side of the bowl.

Local blue-collar reliance on the cheap Canto-Western cafes peaked during the 1997 financial crisis that coincided with Hong Kong’s return to China from British rule. Though the region’s financial stability has increased, the affection gained for cha chaan tengs has not been lost.

Thankfully, the waiter has likely been deftly serving noodles in haste for a decade—the sodium-rich broth peaking at the rim then returning to the center of the bowl, marrying with the macaroni, tomato sauce and chicken wings as it has for generations— irrespective of financial meltdowns and political handovers.

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In 2007, a Hong Kong lawmaker suggested that cha chaan tengs be added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. A poll by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong found that nearly 70 percent of respondents believed cha chaan tengs should be included in the UNESCO canon. The humble cafes, which would have been the first uniquely Hong Kong intangible on the list, were not added. However, a number of techniques typical to the cha chaan teng, including the pineapple bun and egg tart making techniques, were included in the official

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Rico Chow, owner of Cheung Heung. The cafe has been in Kennedy Town for 51 years.

“First Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory of Hong Kong” made public in 2013.

Local restaurateur Rico Chow says the tea restaurants are a vital part of Hong Kong culture. “If you ask any person on the street, they have definitely eaten a meal at a cha chaan teng or maybe do regularly.”

Chow is the third-generation owner of Cheung Hing, a wellloved cha chaan teng in Hong Kong Island’s Kennedy Town neighborhood. Cheung Hing is known for its egg tarts and lotus seed buns, which sell out by 2pm. In 51 years Cheung Hing has managed to rent the same storefront, but the rent has increased substantially since the opening of the Kennedy Town station in 2014.

“I’d like to pass it on to the next generation of my family,” says Chow, “but it is hard to say if we will be able to with the rent rising like this.”

As Cheung Hing serves its last tea and toasts of the day, Chow sits down next to an elderly customer and cracks a joke in

Cantonese. Kennedy Town is an old neighborhood, and Chow says many of Cheung Hing’s patrons are second- or third-generation customers who started coming in as children with their parents and grandparents.

“Many of our customers have been coming here on a daily basis for years so we all know each other around here” says Chow. “It isn’t just about serving food”.

Aside from their eclectic charm, cha chaan tengs have in large part remained popular because of their affordability. But now, as rents increase citywide, seemingly with no ceiling in sight, the modest cafes have raised prices to keep their doors open.

Mr. Chun, the owner of Xing Kee Coffee Room, a popular cha chaan teng in the gentrified Sheung Wan district, says that running a cha chaan teng now is nothing like what it when his father opened Xing Kee more than 50 years ago.

“We’ve had to increase the price of food here because the rent and business costs make running a cafe really difficult nowadays, so the dishes aren’t that cheap anymore” says Chun.

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Affordability has been a staple of cha chaan tengs, but rising rents have caused menu prices to do the same.

Xing Kee serves a dish called the rolling egg that became popular during financial downturns. “You crack an egg in boiling water,” explains Chun, “and it cooks the outside but leaves the inside a bit raw, and if you have a bit more to spend, maybe you’ll add some sugar.”

The rolling egg was an extremely cheap way to get protein and fat without having to spend money on oil or seasonings. It has been disappearing from menus in recent years as the standard of living increases in Hong Kong. Lin says some customers still order it, but he isn’t sure whether it is out of necessity or nostalgia.

In a city with the world’s costliest residential and retail real-estate per square foot, wealth disparity in Hong Kong has been increasing since the territory was returned to China in 1997. The minimum wage however, remains a paltry HK $34.5 (U.S. $4.41) per hour.

The five-year waitlist for public housing, in which 48 percent of Hong Kongers reside, often leaves the disabled and the elderly with nowhere to go but “coffin homes”—the caged-in bunk beds that have appeared in Western media in recent years.

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Chen Winjing has been working at Swiss Cafe, an 80-year-old cha chaan teng in Central, for over a decade since he moved to to Hong Kong from mainland China. Chen, who brings his own lunch to work despite free employee meals, says that affordable food is much more nutritious and varied on the mainland than in Hong Kong.

“People think that in Hong Kong there is such a high quality of life,” says Chen, “but there isn’t really. For most people it’s a hard life.”

Swiss Cafe sits behind a row of knock-off clothing stalls in an alleyway shaded by glistening skyscrapers. At midday the area is teeming with Hong Kongers on their lunch breaks.

“In this area, if you want to be able to sit down and eat something that will sustain you — a bit of veggies, some noodles or rice, and meat, there aren’t many places you can go that the average person can afford” says Chen.

Common lunches across cha chaan tengs include the ‘nutritious set,’ ‘constant set,’ ‘fast set’ and ‘special set’. The nutritious set is

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Cha chaan tengs meals range from midday pick-me-up snacks of warming teas and coffees with oversized toast, to filling dishes of noodles or rice with fragments of meat and vegetables.

characterized by a glass of milk and some vegetables with a starch like rice or noodles. The constant set—served all day—is usually an omelette of sorts, white bread with butter and a drink. The fast set comes out almost immediately—complete with rice, fried egg and sausage, spam or lunch meat. The special set means handing the decision to the chef.

The most sensational dishes at cha chaan tengs are generally not the most ordered. Macaroni tomato soup with a chicken wing on top and a red bean ice cream float would be fun to Instagram, but a pork chop with spring onion and an iced lemon tea are a more realistic order.

Classics like the milky silk stocking coffee and tea and Hong Kong-style French toast with condensed milk and an oversized slab of butter are favorites throughout the day. Tam, an employee at Luen Wah cafe in Sai Wan, says that the mid-afternoon snack has always been essential for cha chaan tengs.

“People come in around three or four when they need a quick tea and toast for a pick-me-up, then go back to work. Many other restaurants aren’t open at that time, so it is an important Hong Kong ritual for cha chaan tengs that is sort of British and sort of Chinese.”

As the comparative affordability of mom and pop style cha chaan tengs decreases with sky-high rents and the proliferation of chains like Tsui Wah and Cafe de Coral, these charming cafes rely more and more on other features, like ritual, nostalgia, and the warmth of familiarity in a city in flux—caught between its Sino-British past and its entrance into China’s panoply of prized Chinese megacities.

“I hope there will always be cha chaan tengs in Hong Kong,” says Chow of Cheung Hing, “but it is not something I can control, there has already been so much change here over the years.

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The Communal Ovens of Morocco WHETS TO NE

The heart of the neighborhood.

CONTRIBUTOR/PHOTOGRAPHY

Andrea B. Swenson

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In medina quarters throughout Morocco, tangled, cacophonous passageways show no indication, physical or visual, announcing the presence of a communal bakery—except, perhaps, a pile of wood stacked beside an unobtrusive doorway, waiting to be brought inside. If one observes carefully, they may see a woman, a child or a man in a hooded jalabiya weaving through the crowds, carrying a basket or tray covered with a colorful cloth. Follow one of them and enter into a time-honored establishment, unfailingly esteemed by the community.

Here, a mosque, a public fountain, a school, a hamman (or public bath) and a communal oven or ferrane comprise five beating hearts of community life. For centuries, homes had no means to bake the daily bread, but bread is considered to be life and subject to reverence. Drawn from the verbal teachings of the Prophet Muhammad of Islam is the directive "Ak ri'mul khubza" — “Handle the bread with respect.” No bread is ever wasted. Stale chunks are saved for the hungry or for animals. Scraps dropped accidentally on the street are rescued, kissed and put aside for a needy passerby. An entire meal in a household can consist of mint tea, fresh, warm bread and olive oil. When it is served with tagine stew, bread is not only an accompaniment, but it becomes an implement to scoop up the savory ingredients. So said, consider this a primer to the importance of the community bakers.

The bakers stand waist high in a pit that’s approximately three feet wide by five feet long, below a soot-streaked lintel, in front of an oven that burns at 400 degrees. From midmorning to early evening, seven days a week, bakers like Driss, Abul or Zaid position dense loaves of dough in the oven. The deep caverns glow bright orange emanating always from the left side, as fire is associated with hell ( just as the right side is associated with paradise).

Olive and palm logs, the choice woods to burn, are piled into the oven to stoke the fire. Armed with a long-handled paddle or peel made from durable cedar wood, a pointed pole and a medieval looking ax, they then shuffle, flip and rearrange the expanding loaves until bulging pita-like discs emerge steaming and golden.

The bread most often brought to the communal bakeries is khobz. It is the most basic bread, shaped into 10- to 11-inch rounds, slightly domed, taking only 15 minutes to bake. As the baker tends the oven, an assistant is continually arranging, on a shabby, sometimes mismatched tile floor, the incoming trays and baskets of dough, covered with kitchen towels of plain, striped or floral prints. Once out of the oven, the loaves are flipped over to cool and then returned to the corresponding basket or tray.

Covered with the correct owner’s towel, they are placed on a rack or lined along the wall to be picked up, usually in time for the important midday meal. Remarkably, every baker knows, from experience, all the different doughs by sight and shape (and the occasional marking or distinctive towel) and which ones go back to the corresponding family.

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The number of families in each baker’s community varies greatly. It can be as many as 70, and the ovens can handle hundreds of loaves a day. They can also manage small orders from women who sell the loaves on the street, or roast nuts for a neighborhood vendor. As the fire’s heat diminishes in the afternoon, delicate cookie and pastry orders go into the oven. On special occasions, mothers will proudly deliver their traditional pastilla or pigeon pie (now mostly chicken) to be baked.

But changing times have affected the communal ovens. Modern women are gaining purchase in the workplace and have little time to make dough. Cramped mini grocery-like stalls in the souks sell commercially made khobz and baguettes (the latter a remnant of French colonialism). So communal bakers have become flexible. Their payment, around .40dH (dirham) or about four cents U.S. per loaf, can come due when the bread is picked up, at the end of the month or it can be paid off in commodities like sugar or clothes. But there is one other asset the bakers offer that is not easily replaced: since the communal oven is centrally located and visited by a vast number of residents, they are hubs of local information and gossip. They are trusted, they can give directions for the twisted streets, and they know about community events. They are as respected as the goods they supply.

Deep below the streets of Marrakech, there exists an even more specialized community oven, or in this case, communal furnace.

Unlike entering the cavernous, above-ground rooms of the communal bakeries, descending the uneven, blackened steps behind the local hamman is to arrive in the Hades-like realm of the fireman, or fernatchi. This isn’t the type of fireman who suppresses a rampant blaze, but a custodian of the blistering flames for bathhouse hot water boilers. Aside from tending a demanding furnace, the firemen receive dozens of clay jug pots that are known as tanjia marrakshia, or affectionately, bachelor’s stew. Not to be confused with tagine, this stew acquired its name because a bachelor carries the pot, progressing from butcher to vegetable vendor to spice vendor, each adding to the it. With all the ingredients in place, the pot is covered with parchment and string or sometimes foil and a flour paste. Then, the easiest step: Give it to the fernatchi, who will pile hot ashes around the vessel. Hours later, falloff-the-bone, tender meat and vegetables infused with saffron, cumin and preserved lemon will be ready for pickup.

Hearth and home have always been the essence of comfort and security. For Moroccans, whose hearth and home have long been separated, around the corner from their home, a communal oven has served to bond together every man, woman and child not only of the neighborhood, but also throughout the country, with a shared sense of guaranteed sustenance and an ongoing tradition.

These ovens are the living definition of community.

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Freshly baked khobz are just some of the daily spoils from the communal oven.

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Graciela Martínez and the rise of Paraguayan cuisine

CONTRIBUTORS

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Gloria Ferres, Christian Kent, & Esteban Aguirre (@mandibula.py) P H O T O G R A P H Y Gloria Ferrés

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If we had to fathom Graciela Martínez in one sentence, it would be that she was baptized by the native people of the Ava Guarani: Kuña Takua Ryapu. It means “Woman who summons the sound of the crackle of the bamboo (takuara) to awaken the gods.” To understand this meaning is to understand her true reason to exist. In every step, there is a desire for people to consider, discuss and understand traditional Paraguayan cuisine.

Martinez’s first encounter with the Guaraní gastronomy was with her young indigenous classmates at Puerto Casado’s Public School.

She discovered recipes and flavors that were new to her eyes and mouth, and the way these children treated their food as poytáva (livelihood), would inspire Martinez’s every move in her ongoing quest to make Guaraní cuisine world renowned.

Many years later, those curious taste buds would lead Martinez far from her birthplace, to the city of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.

There, she would hone her cooking skills with the legendary Paraguayan cook Josefina Velilla de Aquino, author of the most popular recipe book of traditional Paraguayan cooking, Tembi'u Paraguay.

As her mentor’s assistant, she truly came to understand Paraguayan dishes through sweat, sacrifice and long hours behind the tatakua (traditional clay oven).

In the ‘70s, Martinez started her own catering business under the name of Tembi'u Paraguay as a tribute to her teacher. The most lavish parties of Asuncion’s society were the backdrop against which Martinez would show for the first time the pajagua máhkada (meat and yuca sliders), pastel mandi’o (yuca empanadas), chicharo huiti (pork rinds with toasted corn flower) and other typical dishes as newborn stars of a sophisticated Paraguayan menu.

Apart from her unquestionable skills as a cook, Martinez is a celebrated poet and an authority on the Guaraní language. In the late ’90s, Martinez published her first poems under the title of Yvoty Rope (The Flower’s Petals), to great public acclaim. This book contains a collection of ancient recipes narrated in the form of poems, written in Guaraní; they use the oral technique of tangara, a particular rhythmic way of reciting that emulates the tribal drumming. Ñapu'ãke mitã ñamoĩ ykatu, tai'imimói avati morotĩvakena.

Topupu sapy'a, jaisu'u jaikua'a, aníke ichipa.

During that time, Martinez began to attend the Ethnic Culinary Courses directed by Dr. Carlos Villagra Marsal in collaboration with Oscar Ferreiro and the anthropologist Miguel Chase-Sardi, all renowned Paraguayan academics. That’s when Martinez decided to invest all of her time and energy in her studies and began gathering and organizing more than 30 years of research, documenting her visits to and interaction with eight local indigenous communities, recovering in the process over 300 hundred recipes.

Poytáva is an ancient Guaraní word that means, at its core, sustenance. Literally, that which gives support, that keeps us standing straight, that allows us to exist. Poytáva takes form in this name, because it is not just a cookbook, but one that describes the relationship between the people, the food and the land of an entire nation.

“The idea behind this book is to present a lifelong body of work, digging deep in time in search of our roots, in what traditional Guarani cooking rituals have to do, and, over all, getting the word out that gastronomy is a cultural value that represents us as a nation, as paraguayans," writes Martínez in the opening lines of the book.

This book emerges just in time to make its acquaintance with the big intrigue that Paraguayan gastronomy has to answer: Where do we come from? Where are we going? Who are we? And what’s cooking?

The most recent generations of Paraguay are threatened by the possibility of absolute cultural loss, in particular in regard to language and food traditions, ultimately the extinction of local ingredients and techniques.

Poytáva awakened in the current chef and local food scene the desire and commitment of knowing and promoting the typical Paraguayan food. In a matter so to speak, Graciela's curiosity luckily turned out to be contagious. Many of these chefs, with the book in hand, started to present some of Poytáva's dishes in their restaurants, either in the original form or with new and modern interpretations.

The greatest gift Graciela has given to Paraguay, to Paraguayan gastronomy and any cook that feels the lightest intrigue about the Guaraní original cuisine, through her hard work, perpetual research and love for the land and the ingredients, is the energy boost to inscribe its unique cuisine in the long awaited pages of the world-renowned gastronomy history.

Today, at a moment in history where people are finally awakening to the fact that it is crucial to find a fairer way of living and relating amongst human beings, Martínez, or as the world should know her, Kuña Takua Ryapu, is striking her takua stick with great might, awakening the gods with her rumble, so they can spread the Guaraní seed of knowledge over the land of our ancestors.

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In Bolivia, Peanuts are at Home

Fortuitous hybridization and colonial sprawl are only just part of the legume’s history in its native home.

CONTRIBUTOR

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Linda Farthing

Marcelo Pérez del Carpio

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Freshly harvested peanuts must be gathered in the full-sun, which prevents moisture from infiltrating and destroying these unshelled legumes.

Half a block from La Paz, Bolivia’s, main plaza, Don Alberto, who has been blind since birth, sells prepaid phone cards all day. But if you ask, he will pull out a jar of peanut butter from beneath the striped colored cloth keeping his feet warm in the cold highland air. “I learned how to make peanut butter from a group of American evangelicals when I was a kid,” he explains. “I have a great love for peanuts. They gave me money when I most needed it.”

That affection for peanuts has a long history in Bolivia. In 2016, scientists from the University of Georgia discovered that the legume, related to beans and peas, originally comes from the country’s southeastern valleys. Ten thousand years ago, ancient people moved one wild plant, Arachis ipaensis, into the range of a second, Arachis duranensis, permitting the hybridization that led to the peanut we eat today. Scientists deduced the role of human agency by combining knowledge from botanical collections with studies of the ancient human migration and molecular clock calculations.

“Bolivia is the only place where two A and B genomes have ever been found growing nearby to each other,” explains University of Georgia plant geneticist David Bertioli. “It is where cultivated

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peanuts are most similar to the original plant.” Sixty-two varieties of peanuts are still cultivated all over the country, more than anywhere else in the world.

From Bolivia, in pre-Columbian times, the peanut spread as far north as Mexico. As it traveled, its uses diversified to include alcoholic beverages as well as medicine. It also made its way into South American art forms, particularly ceramics.

Europeans first ate peanuts in Brazil and quickly realized that their hard outer shell protected them from spoilage, making them an ideal food on lengthy sea voyages. They also pack a significant nutritional punch as a calorie dense combination of protein, fiber, vitamins and fat.

From Europe, peanuts traveled to Africa, Asia and then to North America via the slave trade. They served as an important part of African American diets, and through African Americans’ work as cooks, peanuts were introduced to the population at large. The U.S.’s first peanut vendors were African Americans. Since then they have become the most popular nut in the United States, with peanut butter found in three quarters of home kitchens.

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Bolivian Peanut Soup Sopa de mani, or peanut soup, has recently been declared Bolivia’s most representative dish by the Ministry of Culture, as it is found everywhere from the steamy jungles in the northeast to the barren windswept highlands. This is a soup that tastes surprisingly little like peanuts, as it uses raw, not roasted, peanuts. Hundreds of versions exist, and people from the cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz both claim it as their own.

It can be topped by French fries or simply by parsley.

Here’s one of my favorite versions: 6 servings

Vegetable oil 1 /2 pound raw peanuts, soaked for an hour 1 /2 onion finely diced 1 carrot cut lengthwise into small pieces 1 diced celery stalk 1 clove of minced garlic (optional) 4 cups beef or vegetable stock, or water 2 medium chopped potatoes, turnip or a handful of macaroni (optional) 1 tsp oregano Chopped parsley, French fries Grind peanuts in a blender in a little water and add a drizzle of vegetable oil. Traditionally a stone batán (a flat grinding stone) was used to crush the peanuts, and if you want to replicate this, a mortar and pestle will work, but a blender is far less work.

In a thick-bottomed pan, sauté onion, diced celery stalk and optional garlic. Add the peanut mixture and 4 cups of beef, vegetable stock or water. Cook for 1 hour, adding carrots after 45 minutes. You can also add potatoes or a turnip after 40 minutes or noodles after 4550. Add a couple of pinches of oregano at the end, and top with chopped parsley and/or French fries.

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Just outside the small valley town of Alcala in southeastern Bolivia, Salome Saavedra’s family has been growing peanuts on 10 acres of land just outside for as long as anyone can remember. “We roast them and turn them into soup as well as into peanut bars — peanuts mixed with unrefined cane sugar syrup (called chancaca) and then cooled.”

Doña Salo, as everyone calls her, blows through a pipe to get her small fire going, and then brings out a blackened ceramic pot that she tosses her recently harvested peanuts into. Chatting and laughing while she stirs, suddenly smoky roasted peanuts appear in a gourd. They are small and quite sweet.

“As a girl, every morning we would roast peanuts and take them to school as a snack,” she explained. “They’re difficult to harvest. If you don’t do it during a very hot sun, they get moisture in them and turn black.”

If you are one of a growing number of tourists exploring Bolivia, an excellent traditional meat-based version of peanut soup is on offer at Luciernagas on Calle Illimani. A delicious vegetarian interpretation is available at the Higher Ground Cafe in the heart of La Paz’s tourist zone on Calle Tarija.

Peanuts also find their way into a sauce smeared on grilled beef hearts known as anticuchos that are a popular street food throughout the country. A sauce of roasted peanuts coats the Bolivian version of the Peruvian Papas a la Huancaína: This vegetarian dish consists of lettuce, tomatoes, boiled potatoes (Bolivians peel them, but you don’t have to), solid farmers’ cheese, black olives and hard-boiled eggs.

Doña Salo is an indigenous farmer whose family has grown peanuts for generations.

Photograph by her daughter Erlinda Baptista Saavedra.

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by Dan Bransfield

PEANUT ETYMOLOGY

TRACING HISTORY IN THE BESKIDS WHETS TO NE

This Polish region’s cuisine tells the stories of the people who settled the rugged terrain.

CONTRIBUTOR

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Karolina Wiercigroch

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My grandmother lifts a pile of dry sticks with her small, wrinkled hands and starts a fire in the old tile stove. Her kitchen is equipped with an electric stove and oven, but most of the cooking is still done the traditional way: on a hot griddle of the wood fired stove.

“It’s a simple soup,” she explains. “You boil the potatoes in one pot and make a stock with pork and root vegetables in the other. You can use pork shoulder, ribs or shank, but we do not add smoked meat!” she is referring to that one time when my dad wanted to impress his guests and modified the family recipe.

We’re making kwaśnica, a tangy sauerkraut soup, typical to Beskid Mountains. In all fairness to my dad, some traditional recipes do call for smoked ribs or legs, but grandma knows best. On this visit, I’m learning about her food ways in a harsh climate, where grocery store convenience is affecting swift changes.

“Once the stock is ready, you add sauerkraut with its juice. Not too much, not too little. Spróbuj. Taste it.” She hands me a spoon and I take a sip of the hot liquid. It’s delicious: pleasantly sour, warming and bursting with umami. “Now you add black pepper— a lot of it—and garlic. And this is it—no onion!” Even my dad knows better than to put onion in his kwaśnica. The soup is a perfect example of biedna kuchnia, a Polish equivalent of Italian cucina povera: a modest way of cooking and eating, making use of simple ingredients that happen to be at hand.

My grandparents live in a tiny village called Rycerka Dolna, which is a part of the Żywiec Beskids, one of the Beskids moun-

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tain ranges in the Outer Western Carpathians in southern Poland.

Half an hour drive east takes you to the Silesian Beskids. Another 15 minutes up a twisting road leads to a tripoint where borders of Poland, Czechia and Slovakia meet. Mountainous terrain and barren soil never made it easy for the people who made this land their home. The Gorals—literally “highlanders,” an ethnographic group found in the mountains of Poland, Slovakia and Czechia— are up for the challenge.

For early inhabitants, growing grains proved to be difficult, and harvest failures were not uncommon. Only the most fertile land in the north of the region is suited for wheat and barley. Other fields were sown with rye and oat, both regarded as inferior. White wheat flour was scarce and high-priced, so white bread and cakes were considered a delicacy and saved for special occasions, like Christmas or weddings. For centuries, bread, in general, but especially white bread, held a special place in people’s hearts and minds. This was both due to its paucity and its religious meaning. In the Catholic culture, bread represents new life and brings good fortune.

The daily bread was baked with wholemeal rye flour. When that was scant, Goral homemakers densed the dough with potatoes, peas or broad beans. Roasted rye meal was combined with water and cooked to a porridge-like consistency. The mash was spooned on plates and topped with melted lard and pork scratchings for prażuchy, one of my dad’s favorites.

With the short growing season, vegetable choices were limited.

Rutabagas and turnips, easy to grow and store through winter, were local staples up until the 19th century, when they were replaced by potatoes. Butter beans, broad beans, split peas and lentils were dried for winter soups and stews. Carrots and parsnips, along with garlic and onions, served as flavor boosters. Cabbage could be found in almost every backyard garden. In the form of sauerkraut, it provided the main source of vitamin C in cold winter months. Each fall after the harvest, large quantities of cabbaged were chopped and prepared for pickling in big oak barrels.

I can tell that my grandfather quite misses the fun of pressing cabbage with his bare feet.

My grandparents can now buy fresh fruit and vegetables all year round, but they still fill the pantry shelves with jars of all sizes, colors and contents. Foraging still is Goral’s favorite pastime; good mushroom hunting spots are locals’ best kept secrets. Penny buns, also known as porcini and called borowiki in Polish, are the most valued find. Cleaned, dried and stored in brown paper bags, they’re taken out throughout the year to flavor soups and sauces.

Fiercely orange red pine mushrooms are enjoyed immediately: fried in a pool of glossy melted butter and served with a thick slice of bread. Juicy wild berries are made into jam or used for baking.

Blueberries make an excellent filling for sweet dumplings or wafer-thin crepes, known as naleśniki in Poland. Apples, pears and gooseberries from my grandparents’ back garden are preserved in a form of kompot, a sweet drink made with fruit and sugar. The larder is never short on sweet raspberry syrup.

Gorals tried to live off the unfriendly land until, in the end of the 15th century, the Vlachs came along. The nomadic shepherds brought a different way of living, somewhat better suited for the mountainous terrain: sheep farming. Sheep provided meat, milk and wool, very useful for freezing winters. Fresh sheep cheeses bundz and bryndza are only available during the grazing season in mountainous pastures, from May till September. So is żętyca, a refreshing fermented drink made of sheep's milk whey that’s a byproduct of making cheese. Vlach nomads used to carry it to quench thirst instead of water and numerous baca (professional Goral shepherds) still swear by its healing properties. Shepherds spend most of the season in bacówki (small wooden cabins built for shelter in the mountain pastures). This is where fresh milk is turned into cheese and then smoked to preserve it for longer.

Oscypek, a salty, spindle-shaped smoked mountain cheese, is famous all over Poland and on the market all year round.

The way of eating is changing, but regional restaurants that dot the countryside are keeping traditions alive. At Karczma po Zbóju, a rustic tavern in Istebna, Marysia Niesłanik welcomes me before filling a solid wooden table with bowls and plates: a steaming bowl of kwaśnica as good as my grandmother’s, a serving of żurek fermented rye soup with sausage and hard-boiled eggs, and czosnkula, another local soup made with garlic, butter and rye bread.

Soups were an important part of Beskid highlanders’ menu, considered a meal in themselves.

It’s Marysia’s mother, Anna, who rules the kitchen. She serves

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me kubuś (finely grated potatoes baked in the oven with a layer of sweet, sugar-sprinkled cream). It looks like creme brûlée, and once you get used to the peculiar combination of potatoes and sugar, it’s comforting and moreish. She follows that up with a heaping plate of placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes) served with pork scratchings and sour cream or butter.

“We used to have placki ziemniaczane for breakfast every day.

Everyone did. Potatoes were the only thing at hand after the war,” says Anna. “We’d peel and grate some potatoes in the evening and make placki in the morning. I’d pile two pancakes with some szpyrki and eat that on my way to school,” Anna skied to school.

Ever since they made it to the Beskids in the 19th century, potatoes took the region by storm. At first, they would be roasted in warm ashes of a bonfire or boiled, sprinkled with chopped dill.

Leftovers were added to soups or thinly sliced and fried in lard until crisp and golden. Anna tells me how to prepare bachora, a delicious potato “sausage” made with grated potatoes mixed with crispy pork scratchings, nutmeg and ginger, encased in intestines and slowly roasted until golden. Other potato specialities include poleśniki—cabbage leaves stuffed with grated potatoes and baked in a bread oven—and żebroczka, a casserole similar originating from Wisła. The name derives from the Polish word for “beggar” (żebrak) and the legend has it the dish was invented by a vagabond who went from house to house asking for leftovers. He then created a hearty concoction with bits of grated potatoes, cooked millet, diced onion, a few thick slices of sausages, all roasted over a bonfire.

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Gorals’ menu was simple, local and seasonal, and individual villages were often self-sufficient. Eating with the seasons was inevitable — people had to prepare for cold months, stocking their pantries with pickles, dried pulses and root vegetables. A plantbased diet was a necessity, meat and animal products being expensive and sparse. Cows, goats and sheep were kept for milk and dairy, hens and ducks for eggs. Milk, butter, cheese and eggs were primarily sold at local markets to help the family budgets. Some people, including my grandparents, had rabbits, which were considered easy to breed and delicious, especially as a pâté, but pork was the most popular meat. Świniobicie, or pig slaughter, usually took place early December or right before Christmas, when low temperatures assured good conditions for butchering. Because meat was so scarce, all parts of the animal were treated with respect and made use of. The best cuts were rubbed with a mixture of salt, garlic and herbs and either smoked or made into sausages. The offals, skin and fat were used to make kaszanka or krupniok, a traditional blood sausage filled with buckwheat pig’s blood and onions, flavored with marjoram and black pepper. My grandmother used to make a similar speciality called bułczanka or żymlok, using soaked bread instead of buckwheat. One part of the fat was cut into small pieces and fried to produce scratchings, the rest was rendered for lard.

“Everyone was so excited for świniobicie,” my grandmother reminisces with a dreamy smile. “A lot of people had to help with butchering and cooking, it was a big event. In the evening, when

the work was done, there was a big feast. I would make tons of potato pancakes with melted lard and scratchings and we’d try some of the sausages, usually kaszanka or bułczanka.” The blood sausages were slowly cooked over low heat, but that didn’t always prevent the intestines from cracking. A few would unfailingly break, releasing meat and buckwheat to the cooking water. It was seasoned with salt and pepper and served as a soup with boiled potatoes.

My grandparents don’t raise their own meat anymore, so I traveled to meet someone who does: Leszek Szymczak, the owner of Kamratówka, a charming B&B in Wisła. Together with his wife, Alina, they rent out a few rooms in their large, wooden mountainstyle house. The place is famous for great home cooking, with homemade hams, sausages, pâté, smoked cheese, jams and pickled gherkins. Leszek has a manner of a natural-born host and he smiles with pride as he shows me around the smokehouse.

“A smokehouse was a must to preserve hams and sausages after the pig slaughter,” he explains and opens his own, with large pieces of ham hanging from metal bars. “The meat first sits in a brine with salt and spices. I took it out last night and hanged here to dry, now it’s ready for smoke,” Leszek starts a fire, adding some cherry wood chips to enrich the flavor. The door of the smokehouse will remain closed for the next 24 hours. After that, Leszek and his colleague will transport smoked, cherry-tree colored meat back to the kitchen. They will submerge it in boiling water seasoned with allspice and bay leaves to finish the cooking process.

“It takes a while, but good things come to those who wait.”

Meanwhile, we taste some other delicacies. “The entire process of ham and sausage making here is done by hand. I only make small batches for our guests to enjoy at breakfast or take home,” he says, while we sit in a warmly lit dining room, wooden walls dotted with folk art.

“Kminkula is my favorite sausage,” Leszek asks me to taste it.

It’s delectable, with a smoky, wooden aroma and a distinct taste of caraway seeds, called kminek in Polish. “It came about by accident, almost 40 years ago, in 1980. My wife came to the kitchen when I was seasoning the meat. She started telling a really fascinating story. I don’t remember the story now, but I was so absorbed by it that I accidentally added a whole bowl of caraway seeds to the sausage filling. I did try to take some out, but it was impossible.

When I took the sausage out of the smokehouse, it turned out delicious: strong flavor of smoke and caraway. Our guests love it too, it’s the most popular one.”

It’s time for a sweet treat—a platter of sugar dusted krepliki, round doughnuts filled with Alina’s homemade plum jam and deep fried in lard. Called pączki in other parts of Poland, fried doughnuts are popular in the entire country and traditionally made for Fat Thursday. I’m grateful for Alina’s herbal tea to wash them down. She makes it with dried zieliny, a mixture of local herbs traditionally picked up around the house or foraged in the forest. Alina’s tea is highly addictive, very aromatic and lightly sweetened with homemade raspberry syrup. For years, it was an everyday drink of Beskidian Gorals, who would brew it with fresh

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herbs in the summer and use dried supplies in the winter. Black tea from China or India was very costly and reserved for special occasions or served as a remedy for an upset stomach. This explains my grandparents’ bewilderment at drinking black tea with no sweetener.

A couple of days later, I’m offered a similar tea, sweet-scented with birch and linden, Renata Bielasz’s farm, where she and her family run an agrotourism inn, Agroturystyka Na Połomiu. Breakfast is served in a bright, airy dining room full of fresh flowers, traditional handiwork of local craftsmen, religious paintings by contemporary artists, landscape watercolors, woven baskets and antique furniture. A long wooden table is filled with platters: charcuterie, pâté, cheese, eggs, vegetables, blueberry pudding, bread and cake. Everything is homemade. There are five different kinds of cheese and Renata casually mentions that she started cooking at 5 a.m. to finish the cheesemaking. She looks well-rested, serene and happy.

“I always start by making twaróg,” a Polish quark cheese. “It’s my base for the other ones. Here, I mix it with salt, caraway seeds and a bit of baking soda, and then steam it with a tiny bit of butter. It’s delicious both warm and cold, try it!” It really is delicious: fresh, moist, a little salty, with a pleasant caraway aroma. “Then I dice the twaróg and marinade it in rapeseed oil, paprika powder, salt and herbs—usually basil and tarragon. I collect the herbs myself, the meadows around my house are full of fragrant leaves all summer long. There always are always leftovers from dicing, uneven pieces and crumbs, so I whip them up with a bit of cream, salt and chopped chives. I also make bundz. It’s a full-fat cheese, naturally very sweet, so I let it mature for a week to intensify the flavor.

From bundz I make bryndza, by whipping it with butter.” As in all the other places I visited in The Beskids, I notice how much attention is given to respecting food and avoiding waste.

After breakfast, Renata takes me to her kitchen. She’s making pesto with wild garlic, picked from the forest near the house. We spread it on slices of sourdough rye bread, baked that morning in an outdoor stone oven. “I like foraging. Plants are so powerful.”

Renata dries herbs, makes wild salads and collects birch sap from the trees in her garden. She believes in nature’s ability to feed us, much like the people of Beskid Mountains had believed for centuries. I feel like they could teach us a lesson or two.

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Mae Hong Son's Glorious Gloop From split peas to noodle soup CONTRIBUTOR

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Austin Bush

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Mae Hong Son, a tiny town tucked into Thailand’s northwestern corner, is home to one of the most colorful and intriguing morning markets in the country. The majority of the city’s inhabitants are Shan, an ethnic group related to the Thais, and the market holds an assortment of ingredients not seen elsewhere in Thailand, a virtual showcase of Shan cuisine: stacks of edible ferns, old whiskey bottles filled with bright orange turmeric powder, disks of fermented soybeans, bottles of virgin sesame oil, packets of a masala-like spice mixture, mysterious dried goods from neighboring Myanmar and piles of glowing red stubby dried chiles that are among the spiciest in the country.

For 20 years now, Khwan has been a vendor at this market. She’s Shan, born across the border in Myanmar, speaks four different languages and serves what just might be the market’s most colorful and intriguing dish: a bowl of noodles topped with what I can only describe as a resplendently golden gloop. Garnished with garlic oil, black soy sauce, crushed peanuts, sesame seeds and MSG, it’s a dish that’s both eye-catching and unheard of elsewhere in Thailand. Visitors from Bangkok inevitably point at the bowls and ask, “What is that?”, to which Khwan invariably replies “Tofu.”

It’s not tofu.

After more than a decade of eating the yellow gloop, I had arrived at the conclusion that it was made from garbanzo (also

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known as chickpea) flour, an ingredient also sold in Mae Hong Son’s market. I even made it at home, using gram flour or besan, as garbanzo flour is known in Indian groceries, supplemented with turmeric powder and salt. It was surprisingly easy to put together, and was pretty close to what I’d eaten in Mae Hong Son. I thought I’d figured it out. I was feeling pretty smug.

“Yes, there is a mix for the dish, but it’s no good,” Khwan says, when I tell her about my home cooking adventures. “It has an ‘off ’ taste,” she adds, dismissively. Instead, Khwan and other vendors in Mae Hong Son opt to make the stuff from scratch, from dried yellow split peas, not garbanzo flour.

“The split peas come from Myanmar,” explains Khwan, when I ask for more detail. She goes on to explain that, after soaking, grinding, straining, seasoning and simmering the split peas, she arrives at an admittedly gloopy, yet deliciously savory yellow liquid known in Shan as thua phuu un. The lengthy process has a lot in common with how soybeans are made into tofu (indeed, in Shan, thua phuu means “risen beans” and is a cognate with the word tofu).

“It’s a Shan dish,” explains Khwan. “I saw my parents make it when I was a kid.” Indeed, the stuff is ubiquitous next door in Myanmar’s Shan State, where, as in Mae Hong Son, vendors pour the warm liquid into trays and let it set overnight. The result is thua

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phuu lueang, sometimes known in English as “Burmese tofu,” a sunny, savory, gelatinous cake that can be sliced and mixed with seasonings in the form of a salad.

But arguably, the most delicious incarnation of the yellow gloop is when the so-called Burmese tofu is sliced into triangles and deep-fried in oil until crispy: thua phuu kho. Imagine the platonic ideal of a McDonald’s French fry, expand it to a triangle half the size of a credit card, add to it a savory flavor and a touch of turmeric, serve it with a dipping sauce that blends tart, sweet and salty flavors, and you have a rough idea of thua phuu kho. It’s one of the tastiest snacks in Thailand, and is sold both from markets and roadside stalls in Mae Hong Son. “They should be crispy on the outside and soft inside,” explains Wilaporn, a vendor in Khun Yuam, a Shan village a few hours south of Mae Hong Son, of the snack. She and her mother, Saibua, have been preparing thua phuu kho together for years, and they were kind enough to show me how the dish is made, from start to finish.

Making thua phuu kho spans several steps and as many as three days.

1) Dried yellow split peas are soaked in water for 8 to 12 hours.

2) The split peas are strained, rinsed and ground with an industrial food processor to a very fine paste.

3) The paste is combined with several times its volume of water, mixed thoroughly, and strained through a cheesecloth. The solids are discarded and the strained liquid is set aside.

4) After approximately five hours, the liquid has separated into three levels: a relatively clear liquid at the top, a cloudy liquid in the middle, and a thin layer of fine sediment at the bottom. The top layer is poured off, and the cloudy liquid and the sediment are separated.

5) The sediment and some of the cloudy liquid are combined in a stockpot, seasoned with turmeric powder, salt and MSG and simmered and stirred for approximately 20 minutes until smooth and thick; this viscous yellow broth is known as thua phuu un, and is served over noodles.

6) Alternatively, after being reduced slightly more, the mixture can be poured into trays and allowed to set until firm; this is thua phuu lueang, known in English as Burmese tofu.

7) Finally, if desired, the Burmese tofu can be sliced into triangles and deep-fried: thua phuu kho.

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Tunde Wey On Nigerian Food, Identity ILLUSTRATION

Nigerian food is a misnomer, an unfortunate if helpful characterization of a melange of cuisines. Nigeria, a colonial construct only five decades removed from pale faced administration, has managed a national identity despite holding 500 smaller nation states—a warmly contested womb with a half century children, each kicking mostly in chorus.

The diversity of Nigerian cuisine reveals a desperate commonality present in all the different uses. We need to be together unless things fall apart, and our food gums. Our food rejects colonial imposition, stubbornly refusing taxonomy while also nodding in the direction of nationhood. There is indeed a Nigerian food recognizable as ours despite the different us~es. Just as our skins are each Black and our features stout, and yet that melanin and anatomical architecture are distributed differently across each group of us~es, each playing with their ingredients in interesting ways.

The nomadic herding Hausa and Fulani of the North are lean in most things, angular ascetics with narrow noses, skin dark like old smooth black leather. They are lean like Suya, the thinly sliced, spicy, skewered, open flame grilled meats they conjure.

This is what Suya does to you: it hurts you. Literally. Your jaw aches from the smell of ginger and peanut, taught a lesson by fire, which coats the sizzling meat. It sizzles fat right into the necromantic fire which offers it back to the meat, a closed loop of sacrifice. The taste of suya is not describable but if it was the body then maybe char grilled oysters is its umbra. No, even that isn’t right.

Yaji, the dry spice rub which marinates the raw meat and is later sprinkled on the finished and grilled product, is a secret to everyone. So there are as many variations of it as there are Mallams, who make it. Yet Suya is Suya everywhere, no matter who holds the secret. Because it is at least ginger, dehydrated peanut brittle, fermented locust bean discs and a teaching fire.

The Igbos, Ijaws, Efiks, Ibibios in the South and Delta areas of Nigeria are many things but it must be the verdant water that makes them robust in body and sparkling in mind. Like them their food is lubricious and sensual. There is much sucking and slurping because delicious things plucked from their waters and pinched from their dirt beg to be sucked, slurped and swallowed noisily.

Mucilaginous and unctuous foods are what make their skin glow, smooth and bright. Their patience, tempered by unhurried time at sea or farming cycles, is the rationale behind their cooking style: things stew. Otherwise how else do people prepare Isi Ewu, goat head stew, if not with stamina. You cook that head until the bones break like soft biscuits but the brains are protected, steamed into a

R.S. Whipple

fluffy scramble. That takes a while. You painstakingly pick the tender flesh off the face, and you appreciate the good time’s passing does to all things, event tough tongues. They are tough no more, what a tender breakdown. Ngo, is the yellow sauce that makes Isi Ewu possible, ironically it takes seconds to prepare. A lengthy foreplay and a short consummation, that seems practical in these dewy parts. Ngo is palm oil and kaun, edible potash, mixed. Of course you need your fresh hot peppers, ehuru, calabash nutmeg, which is neither of the two things mentioned in its name, added to the Ngo. Salt and pepper, and sensibly some chiffonade Utazi, bitter leaves, to bring some calm to the lustful devouring. Add ogiri—fermented seeds made into paste.

The Yorubas of the South are practical, conniving, with awesome appetites. Their bodies morph with the circumstance. Their muscles can be molded taut by exertion but they are also happy to lay atrophied from luxury. They are made ready for either, toil or recumbency. And their foods either give you strength or put you to sleep. They are adaptable, so adaptable that they spread far and in each new territory modified their ancient language into more nasal dialects and engineered even more pungent iterations of their starch based staples. Amala, Lafun, Iyan, Semo, Eba, are some of the different dialects of starches. Made from African yams, cassava and other root vegetables, they are processed to be stored dry and powdered, for later revival with hot water and a deft paddle. The Yorubas serve these thick dough in attractive balls with stewed soups of all sorts. At the meal, they break small pieces of the starch, dimple them with hungry thumbs to scoop the stew, making sure to carry with it pieces of the various animal flotsam: offal, seafood fresh and seafood fer mented. Each handful a heterodoxy. Back and forth between the starch and the stew hands go, pausing only to lick sticky debris off fingers are inured to the heat from both steadily diminishing sides.

Nigerian food is hearty all the time, even our thin soups stay long after they’ve had their say. Nigerian food is never subtle. But the brashness of the dish is a front, just a front. It is all complexity. It is one pot cooking, stewing and hard learnt mercies delivered at the right time so the textures are just perfect. The flavors, like uneven but compatible logs, are stacked, fermented atop smokey atop air dried, and what you have is us. This is true for all the different us~es that are from this place. As for me? I am a Nigerian food traditionalist, a cut-out paper man, linked to uncountable other cut-out paper people, similar and playing with similar ingredients in different ways, but it’s all Nigerian no matter how hard I play.

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The Legacy of DoĂąa Lula CONTRIBUTOR

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By Keia Mastrianni

I arrived at Doña Lula’s kitchen by virtue of dumb luck. In hindsight, it felt more like providence, a blessing. A morning at the farmers market in Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, with Natalia Vallejo, now the head chef of Cocina al Fondo in Santurce, led to an unplanned encounter. We had no plans that day, only to connect over our mutual love of food and agriculture after meeting a few days prior. A quick text exchange between Natalia and her friend Rafael “Rafi” Ruiz Mederos, and suddenly we were off to Loiza on a whim. She told me that Rafi was filming a woman named Lula for his gastronomic video series, “Eat, Drink, Share.” I knew nothing more.

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I drove blindly to Loiza, Natalia navigating me along Carretera 187, past Piñones, over the bridge and into the heat-hazy streets of Loiza, a community situated on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico. Loiza is a community with deep African influences, said to have been originally settled by Nigerian people of the Yoruba tribe, Africans once enslaved by the Spanish and later freed. The coastal town maintains one of the largest populations of Afro-Puerto Ricans per capita, and it’s also rich with Taino traditions. Since Spanish colonization in the 1500s, Africans found kinship with the surviving indigenous population, producing Caribbean traditions that reflect the melding of these two cultures. Doña María Dolores de Jesús, or Lula, is Loiceña, a native of Loiza, and I was to discover, one of the keepers of Puerto Rico’s food traditions.

We pulled up to El Burén de Lula, a simple restaurant space inside a wooden building with a corrugated metal roof. In a narrow breezeway, Lula was building a fire beneath a metal rack propped on two cinder blocks, her silver white hair tucked neatly into a hairnet. With newspaper scraps and small pieces of dry wood, she got the fire going and then added coconut shells kindling. Chickens clucked and scratched nearby.

Lula is in her eighties, but she moves with authority and a deftness made sharp from decades of practice. In the kitchen, atop a home stove, a large caldero bubbled with a dulce de coco, a sweet amber delicacy made from dried coconut, brown sugar and vanilla, a taste that touched me so deeply, it has stayed with me since. In the small breezeway, two iron pots filled with cazuela—a traditional confection made of sweet potato and pumpkin that is boiled, mashed, sweetened and then baked—awaited the fire. In his book, Eating Puerto Rico, historian Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra refers to cazuela as a “culinary museum piece,” a fading kitchen tradition. But here, inside Lula’s culinary universe, tradition is very much alive. She’s dedicated to preserving traditional recipes and culinary techniques and uses the restaurant’s eponymous burén, a large metal plancha heated by wood fire, a heat source that has nearly faded into obscurity.

Burén is an Arawak word that refers to a flat clay griddle used for cooking. The people of Loiza, for centuries, relied on the burén, which evolved from a clay surface to an iron flat top. The large iron surface remains Lula’s primary cooking tool. In Loiza a few days prior, I was fortunate to hear community members share fond memories of visits to Loiza, when buréns lined the roadside, operated always by women, and plumes of smoke signaled opportunity for a satisfying snack cooked in el fogón, a local bane for the burén.

Veronica Quiles, the chef of El Departamento de la Comida, spent her childhood along the beaches of Piñones and remembers vividly the smokiness imparted by the buren in dishes like empanadas de yuca and a tropical almond candy. “I spent a quarter of my life in Loiza,” says Quiles. “It was cool, music everywhere, people dancing

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in los chinchorros, everybody eating delicious food cooked fresh in the wood fire. So much happiness that makes your spirit feel free.”

Today, the burén is a rare sight, and cooking over open fire is mere novelty in most places. But this is all Lula knows. She is the third generation of indigenous women to prepare food using gastronomic traditions that have been overshadowed by the influences of colonization. To eat Lula’s food is to reach the unfettered heart of Puerto Rican cuisine; that is, decolonized dishes that offer a glimpse into true Puerto Rican identity.

On the burén, Lula toasts and dries handmade cassava flour for empanadas, a days-long process that requires grating the cassava, wringing it of all its moisture, then hand milling and drying the flour. She will make empanadas filled with land crab, or jueyes, wrapped in a banana or plantain leaf, the hoja, to be cooked on the burén.

For chef Natalia, Lula is sacred to her culinary journey. Back when she was a young cook searching for meaningful connection to her roots, her brother introduced her to Cocina Artesanal El Buren De Lula, Lula’s cookbook published in partnership with the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Intrigued by the book, Natalia and her family paid Lula a visit.

“I remember I was impressed because it was so simple,” says Vallejo. “She was cooking in the fire, with wood, and I was like ‘Wow, this is beautiful.’” Vallejo is enamored with Lula’s arroz con jueyes, a rice dish made with jueyes pulled fresh from the nearby river. More than that, Lula represents ideals that Natalia upholds in her own cooking practice, a commitment to native traditions and ingredients, and reverence for ancestral foodways.

“Lula is important because she represents the resistance,” says Vallejo. “She keeps the Taino tradition and the tradition of the coast. Lula expresses the simplicity of our food, and also the complexity of it. U.S. colonization and politics changed so many things with our food and Lula is clean of that. She doesn’t have the contamination of the colony.”

Puerto Rico’s long history of colonization, exploitation, and oppression by the Spanish and the Americans has fundamentally altered a food system that was once reliant on the abundant fertility of the land, and the agrarian lifestyle perpetuated by the indigenous population, and later, the Africans who were enslaved in service to sugar plantations.

For illyanna Maisonet, columnist of Cocina Boricua at the San Francisco Chronicle, and founder of the blog Eat Gorda Eat, Doña Lula is a living textbook.

“To me, Lula’s food is not even traditional, it’s like the cradle of

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To eat Lula’s food is to reach the unfettered heart of Puerto Rican cuisine; that is, decolonized dishes that offer a glimpse into true Puerto Rican identity.

Puerto Rican gastronomy,” she says. Maisonet, a member of the diaspora, has made the pilgrimage to Lula’s several times to learn about her people’s culinary traditions. In February 2018, she penned a loving tribute to Lula’s legacy, honoring the 82-yearold, highlighting the fragility of her tenure and its implications for Puerto Rican food history. It is uncertain how much longer Lula will cook now that she is experiencing the health complications that come with age.

“To see what real Puerto Rican food is, and to really understand the island, to really understand our people, all you gotta do is look at Lula’s food,” she says. “Because from there, you can see everything. You can see how we cooked, but you can also see what went wrong.”

Maisonet asserts that if you trace the greatest hits of Puerto Rican food—arroz con gandules, pernil, empanadas con jueyes— from modern day recipes back to Lula’s recipes, the ingredients list would remain largely the same. But many other dishes have been touched by the effects of colonial importation; she cites ketchup on pasteles as an example. In a place that relies heavily on imported food, a number that increased to nearly 100 percent after Hurricane Maria, the differences between Lula’s cooking and the majority population are startling.

In his work, Rafael “Rafi” Ruiz Mederos seeks to amplify the craft of Puerto Rico’s artisans, individuals who have kept tradition for 25 years or more, through film. As the director and producer of the video series, Eat, Drink, Share, he sought out the woman who conjured up fond memories for him as a child.

In Puerto Rico, it is custom to bring a gift when visiting the doctor. Visiting patients commonly bore gifts of alcapurrias, plantains and dulce de coco as a way of giving thanks. When Rafi was a kid, his father, a physician, would bring him an aluminum foil package filled with individual bars of dulce de coco whenever he returned from treating patients in Canovanas, a town just south of Loiza.

Young Rafi always looked forward to that.

Fast forward adulthood and Rafi learned that it was Lula who made those sweet treats embedded in his childhood memories.

He sought her out with the intention of recording her recipe for dulce de coco. But when he set Lula in front of the camera to film a one-minute video, he realized that he had much more to film.

“It was bigger than I thought. We’re talking years and years of culinary tradition that has been passed down,” says Ruiz Mederos.

Rafi refers to Lula’s book as a “cultural guide through food” and stresses Lula’s ingenuity and instinct, indigenous wisdom impressed upon her by the women in her family. Though she began with her mother’s recipes, Lula has changed, perfected, and evolved certain techniques to make them uniquely hers. And her fundamental kitchen is one of a kind, one that imparts the flavors of place that cannot be replicated.

“You see,” says Rafi, “Lula cooks with instinct, with the fire, with the heat, with the sound, the smell and the taste. It’s the environment, it’s the steel, it’s the fire, it is the intensity. Those are things that can’t be standardized. This may sound like I’m romanticizing, but it is magical. You can’t standardize Lula’s cooking.”

He’s right. Sit down in Lula’s restaurant at one of the scuffed tables and plastic chairs, and she will replicate the same flavor and quality every time without recipe or measuring cup.

On that providential day when I arrived in Lula’s kitchen, I watched her and her longtime helper, Melba, slowly and methodically move about the kitchen. From making salmorejo de jueyes, a crab stew, to transforming her handmade cassava flour with achiote and coconut milk for the empanadas de jueyes. I knew that I had entered a special place that day, there was no question. From Lula, one can peek into the past and taste ancient traditions born of resourcefulness and skill.

Doña Lula is a part of a living history that warrants preservation and praise. As the future of El Buren de Lula hangs in precarious balance, it is a new generation of Puerto Ricans that must carry the torch. Through the medium of film, Rafi seeks to memorialize Lula’s culinary process (in partnership with the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña) to share with future generations. Maisonet ensures, through her words, that Lula’s contributions are shared throughout the diaspora. And for chef Natalia, Lula’s legacy guides her culinary journey, like the ancestors that call to her when she cooks. Above all, Lula’s work serves as an important reminder.

“She [Lula] helps us remember what we are, and where we are from,” says Vallejo, “and not to forget that we are Puerto Ricans with our own identity and culture, that we are Taino and we have a lot of things to say for the Caribbean and for Puerto Rico.”

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THE ART OF OOLONG

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Preserving the traditions of Taiwanese oolong on an island crazed with bubble tea.

CONTRIBUTOR

Jess Hernandez

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Tea is ubiquitous in Taiwan, much like wine in France or crystalline tyrosine-laden jamón in Spain. The island nation’s steady showers and misty curtains embracing the mountainsides provide the perfect environment for Camellia sinensis, the mighty shrub whose leaves are the source of all tea.

Like a majority of people in the West, my introduction to tea came in the form of a dark powdery substance shrouded in an opaque bag, often left languishing in microwaved hot water.

The dark bitter liquid that resulted was enough to turn me away from tea for years. Ironically enough, my fascination with it and its complexities didn’t manifest until an encounter with an enthusiastic barista at a coffee shop. No stringed bags. No lukewarm water. Just a solid cup of carefully brewed loose-leaf oolong. I booked a ticket to Taipei to take a deep dive into the world of Taiwanese oolong shortly after.

At Taichung High Speed Rail station, an easy one-hour train ride south to central Taiwan from Taipei Main Station, Mr. Chen greets me and my companion, Alice, with a grin. After quick introductions and an exchange of cards, we lug our bags into the car and head deeper into Nantou, the heart of high-mountain oolong. Mr. Chen, full of excitement and radiating energy at 56 years old, is the master tea maker at Yoshan Tea, whose traditions with Taiwanese oolong originated in the Lugu Region of Nantou in the early 1880s.

After a series of winding roads, we make it to the first stop of our tea journey: Yoshan’s original tea production facility. Mr. Chen carries a bag half his size packed with tea buds up a narrow gravel road. A humble home greets us as we turn the corner and Benjamin, part of the Yoshan team, quickly beckons us to make ourselves comfortable inside. As Mr. Chen rolls up the shutters, light peaks in, revealing a room untouched by modern influences.

Portraits of the Chen family hang on wooden wall panels, overlooking a table at the center covered with an assortment of teaware. Benjamin takes a seat and prepares a brew of mild dong ding or “frozen summit,” a lightly roasted oolong from Nantou

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and the core of Yoshan Tea. The gentle rumble of boiling water and clinking cups alternate with conversations in Mandarin. As I sip on the clear golden liquid, the warmth of the delicate porcelain transfers to my fingertips. Another sip in, the heat radiates to my core. When I finish with my first cup, I notice the lingering sweet scent on its edges. My tongue tingles for more. I glance around the table at my companions. Silence saturates the room as the pot is refilled and steeped for a second, third and fourth time, a traditional way of brewing called gong fu cha. Broken down, “gong fu” means “right effort” and “cha” means “tea.” Originating in the Song Dynasty, the ceremony of gong fu cha emphasizes putting in time and effort to brew the best possible cup of tea.

Small clay pots are filled with a generous amount of tightly rolled leaves, which are steeped multiple times at short intervals. The high leaf-to-water ratio creates an espresso-like concentration of flavor. With each steep, the leaves further uncurl and bloom, showing subtle changes along the flavor spectrum of the leaves.

But even on the island of tea, this traditional style of brewing is a rarity, with the younger generations favoring convenience and milky layered bubble tea creations, exhibited by the snaking lines omnipresent in Taipei’s myriad of boba shops. But Mr. Chen, who has been making tea for more than half of his life, shows no concern for the nation’s shifting attitude towards tea.

“If we make tea that we know tastes good, people will continue to drink it,” he says.

I ponder on his words as I sip on consecutive infusions of the dong ding. The tea’s character develops with each steep, starting with subdued floral notes before evolving into a deeper, more satisfying nuttiness, hinting at the complexity of the mild roast.

The flavors gradually mellow after the sixth brew, but a pleasant sweet aftertaste radiates in my mouth long after the liquid seeps down my throat. I look at Mr. Chen. His grin is wider than ever.

He knows his words ring true.

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The journey to make oolong is arduous. In between grassy green Japanese sencha and robust Indian Assam black lies the extensive spectrum of oolong. Oolong undergoes partial oxidation, a chemical reaction involving the introduction of oxygen to form the flavorful and aromatic compounds enjoyed by tea drinkers. Whereas black tea reaches high levels of oxidation and green tea undergoes slight to no oxidation, oolong falls in the middle. That loose definition of oolong functions as a double-edged sword: While it allows for a great range in flavor profiles, its production is incredibly hard to learn and master. Though tea quality is indeed largely dependent on terroir, the unique characteristics and flavors of the leaves are coaxed through the hands of the tea maker.

Oolong production begins immediately after the tea leaves are plucked from the stems, kickstarting the process of oxidation.

The leaves then undergo a series of complex steps—drying, withering, bruising, rolling—all carefully monitored to achieve the right level of moisture and enzyme release, both crucial factors in oxidation. A wrong call can easily turn a batch of high-mountain oolong or gaoshan into mountains of oxidized ruin. After the desired oxidation level is achieved, the leaves are then baked to kill enzymes and halt fermentation. The whole process relies heavily on the tea maker’s intuition, forged by decades of experience and keen attention to detail. But the work doesn’t stop there; some leaves are then roasted to further deepen the flavors, a flourish that highlights the tea maker’s personality and skill.

I watch as Mr. Chen becomes absorbed in the process. The tender leaves dance effortlessly between his fingers. He buries his nose in them, searching for slight differences in aroma with each inhale. When I step into the production room, where bamboo baskets are stacked high, I’m immediately hit with an intensely ambrosial fragrance. It’s as if sugar crystals shimmied with oxygen particles in the air. My tastebuds sway alongside.

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The following day, my tea companions and I sit in the quiet seclusion of Yoshan’s Tea Culture House, in the Zhushan township of Nantou. We’re joined by Andy, part of the sixth generation leading Yoshan Tea forward. Dong ding is still pulsing through my veins, but in Nantou, there is no such thing as too much tea. Andy forgoes the clay pot and instead grabs a large glass pitcher, pours in a handful of baihao, sometimes called Oriental Beauty—a semioxidized oolong that gets its distinct flavor honey profile from being bitten by bugs—and dumps in some hot water.

“This is how I like to drink my tea. Very simple! So easy! But you have to make sure the temperature of the water is boiling. Very important,” Andy says.

When asked about the current generation’s interest in tea, Andy shakes his head. The problem is that younger people have less interest in this style of tea. Nowadays, tea culture revolves around tea bags and tea to go, but Andy emphasizes the deep roots of tea in Taiwanese culture.

“To me, tea is like oxygen. You need to smell every day. I want to spread that feeling to all the people around the world.”

Andy refills the pitcher with more water, the leaves now in full bloom after an afternoon of conversation. English occasionally slips into a stream of Mandarin, with the occasional Japanese from the tea sensei who has joined us at the table. In the world of tea, convenience may currently reign, but it thrives in moments like this, when people gather and let the hours unfold steadily into nightfall. We keep sipping, refilling, chatting until the baihao fades into nothing. Within this tradition beats the heart of oolong.

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The Rebirth of Wine in Peru’s Andes WHETS TO NE

Viticultural practices at a high elevation winery that honors ancestral tradition CONTRIBUTOR

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By Nico Vera

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It’s been more than 400 years since anyone has attempted to grow grape vines near Cuzco, but that didn’t stop pioneering winemaker Fernando Gonzales-Lattini from trying. In Curahuasi, 10,000 feet above sea level, indigenous farmers plant traditional crops such as potatoes or corn, and they pay reverence to apus, the sacred mountain spirits that protect their harvests. Seven years ago, in this ancestral land, Gonzales-Lattini began to build Apu Winery by hand. After surviving the rainy season fungus, a devastating fire and a bird plague, the vineyard’s first vintage in 2017 yielded a small batch of only 150 bottles, including Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese. That was enough to gain recognition from the country’s best sommeliers and to mark the rebirth of wine in Peru’s Andes Mountains.

Sommeliers Greg Smith and Joseph-Ruiz Acosta visited Apu Winery in search of a high-elevation wine to serve at Central, a restaurant in Lima that is among the world’s top 10. Central’s tasting menu takes diners on a journey across Peru’s vertical ecology—from the coast, across the Andes Mountains and into the Amazon jungle. Foraged ingredients from different elevations define each dish’s landscape, and a high-elevation wine would complement ingredients from the Andes Mountains. At Apu Winery, the sommeliers found perfect conditions for winemaking, vines

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growing on limestone and clay soil that are exposed to warm sunny days, between 25 and 35 degrees Celsius, and cool nights, between 4 and 10 degrees Celsius. After they tasted layers of complexity, better fruit flavor, more minerality and higher acidity than wines from Peru’s coast, the sommeliers bought the entire 2017 Sauvignon Blanc harvest.

In March 2018, I took Mom and Dad to Central for lunch and became intrigued by the high-elevation wine from Peru on their wine list. I’d visited wineries and pisco distilleries in the Ica Valley and thought all the country’s wine was produced there, in Peru’s coastal region 200 miles south of Lima. It didn’t seem possible to cultivate vines at 10,000 feet, much less on the slopes of rugged mountains. I wanted to find out how they did it, and what factors made their wine so special. To do that I had to visit the winery.

So I reached out to Apu Winery in June, told them I was planning a December trip to see family in Lima, and asked if it was possible to visit the winery from Cusco. Several emails and six months later, I found myself on a two-hour taxi ride from Cusco to Curahuasi, a small, impoverished town in the Andes Mountains.

For centuries, farmers in the Andes Mountains have grown native crops such as potatoes and corn, the latter is fermented to

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make chicha, a primordial beer used by the Incas for religious ceremonies and as tribute to Pachamama, Mother Earth. So a vineyard may seem out of place here, but locals in Curahuasi believe that a nearby hacienda produced wine in the mid-1500s. And that would make the mountains, not the coast, the birthplace of wine in Peru.

My taxi arrives in Curahuasi around noon, and Meg McFarland, the winemaker’s wife and business partner at Apu Winery, picks me up in their 2014 4WD Subaru Outback.

“You came on a good day,” she says, “our enologist Guillermo is arriving this afternoon to taste our latest harvest.”

We drive up an unmarked dirt road that leads to their house and the adjacent vineyards. As soon as I step out of the car, I am enthralled by the lush valley below and the majestic snow-capped mountains surrounding it. I was born in Lima, on the coast, but spent my childhood in the Andes, and that’s where my heart lives, in the mountains. This feels like home.

McFarland welcomes me into their house, a large fireplace divides the panoramic windows overlooking the valley; long ornate

ceremonial candles hang from roof beams above the dining table near the entrance; hammocks, two small wine barrels, and a grape press are on the opposite end. We make our way into the kitchen where she is preparing a four-cheese risotto, a recipe from her husband’s former restaurant in Lima. They used to live in Peru’s capital, but they’ve made the winery and Curahuasi their home, and their two young children attend school here. Winemaker Gonzales-Lattini arrives just in time for lunch and he pours me a glass of their 2018 Sauvignon Blanc, unaged, unfiltered and with well-balanced acidity, it pairs well with the risotto. We toast, “¡salud!” and begin talking about his winery project. I want to know everything.

“There was nothing here before,” begins Gonzales-Lattini, “and I searched for years to find the right slope, the right soil.”

Everything, from carving the road up the hill, to building the solar-powered home, clearing the land for the vines, and installing an irrigation system, was done by hand. I am reminded of the three laws of the Incas that my grandfather taught me in Quechua: Ama Sua, Ama Llulla, Ama Quella — don’t steal, don’t lie and don’t be lazy; or the latter in the affirmative: work hard. The hard work of our ancestors built an empire, built Cusco, built Machu

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Picchu. The hard work of a winemaker’s hands built this home, this winery.

After lunch, Gonzales-Lattini gives me a straw hat for protection from the sun and takes me on a walking tour of the vineyards surrounding their home. Their two rescue dogs follow us and run up and down the empty rows of vines in one of the highest wineries in the world. He tells me they first followed the typical southern hemisphere cycle.

“All wineries in Peru, in South America, prune in August and harvest in March.” But December rains brought a fungus, known as la rancha, which destroyed their first harvest. So they adapted to the seasons and now follow a northern hemisphere cycle, pruning in January and harvesting in October, which avoids the rain.

“This year, some vines were damaged by hail,” he adds, pointing to a row of thin vines.

But two more obstacles delayed their first harvest. In 2013, a fire caused by a careless neighbor devastated the vineyards, and in an apparent Quixotic quest, Gonzales-Lattini persisted and planted new vines. Then, a plague of birds, attracted by the sweet maturing grapes, ravaged almost half of their crop. Now, they cover the vines with screens to protect them from the birds. Finally, after six years, Apu Winery produced its first vintage in 2017.

Gonzales-Lattini shows me a newly cleared plot of land, “Pinot Noir, Peru’s first Pinot Noir is going to grow here.” I notice that in this part of the vineyard, the hillside is carved into steps.

Many mountains in the valleys and sierras of the Andes have these steps, remnants of the terrace farming the Inca agricultural engineers implemented to control drainage and prevent mudslides.

Apu Winery is not just making wine here, they are reviving ancestral traditions.

Guillermo Arancibia arrives and we sit at the dinner table. He is here to taste their new harvest Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon, and to make recommendations for each variety.

How do they compare to last year’s harvest? More acidic? More rounded? Do they need to be aged? Arancibia swirls a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and brings it up to his nose, while GonzalesLattini opens a red notebook and reads brix levels from 2017. I sit, watch, and listen.

“It’s yellow and gold, with a passion fruit aroma, very tropical, I also taste mint and eucalyptus, typical of the terroir in the Andes Mountains, it’s well rounded, distinctly Peruvian,” remarks Arancibia about the Sauvignon Blanc. The Cabernet Sauvignon is next. “Dark red, and fruit forward, cherry and roasted coffee beans, I feel that I am biting into the red fruit, giving it good structure, it has good body but it’s young. It needs to be aged, or,” he pauses, “blended.” Arancabia’s analysis opens a new possibility for Apu Winery, a red blend.

Immediately, Gonzales-Lattini brings out some Sangiovese and

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blends 85% Cabernet Sauvignon with 15% Sangiovese. We all taste it and brainstorm names for what might be their first red blend.

After Gonzales-Lattini finishes making notes on his red notebook, I can’t resist asking both wine experts about the origin of grapes in Peru. We agree that Spain’s foodways introduced Vitis vinifera to the New World four centuries ago, but what was the very first grape in Peru? Arancibia confirms what I had read during my research — DNA tests show that Peru’s first grape is the Negra Criolla. Used for making pisco, the Negra Criolla is in fact the local name for the Listan Prieto variety that arrived from Spain’s Canary Islands.

The conversation moves back to the recent harvest, and I ask Gonzales-Lattini about his winemaking process. “It’s very traditional, we work by hand, wait for the vines to ripen, then crush the grapes, and let them ferment after adding yeast.” After pressing, he lets the wine rest, then filters it before bottling, or in the case of their red wines, it’s aged in small oak barrels. This year’s harvest will yield about 100 bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, 50 bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, and 100 bottles of Sangiovese. “Our goal is to make more wine each year, and new varietals too,” he adds. To accomplish that, Apu Winery is expanding by four hectares in 2019.

As the sun is setting, I bid Gonzales-Lattini and Arancibia farewell, or as we say in Peru, “hasta la proxima,” until next time. McFarland drives me down the hill back to Curahuasi, and I ask her about the winery’s future plans. “We hope to train the local farmers to grow grapes so they can supplement their traditional crops and make long term investments in their futures,” she explains.

The winery will then buy the grapes from the farmers to make wine. Apu Winery is not only in the business of producing wine, it’s also giving back to this impoverished community. And its plan could significantly improve Curahuasi’s agricultural economy, one that is often at risk from its strong dependance on just a few crops, such as potatoes and corn.

The town is quiet, but we find a taxi to take me back to Cusco.

“Drive carefully please,” McFarland instructs the driver, who picks up one more passenger before we leave. Nightfall hides the road’s sharp turns and precipices, but I can still see the silhouette of the mountains surrounding the valley, and I can feel the apus protecting us beneath the starry sky.

In many ways, Apu Winery is the opposite of the wineries I’ve visited in Napa, Sonoma, or Willamette Valley that welcome visitors with their manicured lawns, neat rows of vines, paved roads, pristine tasting rooms, souvenirs and large oak barrels on display.

Yet the wine here offers something no other wine can—a profound connection to the terroir of the Andes. A true sense of place that few can ever achieve, specially at this elevation. Over the next two hours, all I think about is returning for Apu Winery’s harvest and coming back home to the mountains.

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Finding Bánh Mì That Tastes Like Home After relocating from Vietnam to the Midwest, a writer learns that the best way to find her favorite meal is to create it herself.

CONTRIBUTOR ILLUSTRATION

Although bánh mì usually refers to a sandwich, the word bánh refers to a variety of cake, bread, bun and pastry, both savory and sweet, which can be cooked by steaming, baking, boiling or frying.

Mì is short for obot ô mì, meaning wheat flour. Bánh mì means ˙ bread made from wheat flour, and it’s essentially a Vietnamesestyle sandwich, consisting of ingredients from the French cuisine such as meat and pâté. Bánh mì thit i nguoi, ô my favorite dish, is the ˙ ˙ i nguoi ô means ham or cold pork. traditional style of bánh mì. Thit ˙ ˙ A delicious bánh mì first requires a properly baked baguette, with a thin crust and spongy crumb, ideally still warm to the touch. When I take a bite, I can taste the creamy, salty pâté and mayonnaise. There usually are two kinds of pork slices in bánh u a Vietnamese pork mì. The first is cha lua u (also called giò lua), ˙ ˙ loaf wrapped in banana leaves. The second is char siu (or xá xíu), `ô chua, Vietnama sweet, Chinese-style roasted meat. Next is đo ese-style pickled carrots and daikon. It is an essential ingredient because its freshness balances the savory flavor. Lastly, the aromatic cilantro, ground peppercorn and hot chili complete the dynamics of this unique dish. The experience of eating Bánh Mì is an explosion of taste; it is vibrant and balanced.

When I was in high school, I drove my scooter to school every day and would often stop to get a bánh mì from the same small food cart at a street corner. Back then, it only cost 5,000 VND (dong) — roughly a quarter — which was quite luxurious on my weekly allowance of 200,000 dongs (about 10 dollars), half of which went to gas and parking. So my mom would buy ingredients and make bánh mì at home. Mom’s recipe did not include pickles, mayonnaise and char siu. Still, it was one of the most delicious bánh mì I have eaten.

When I left Vietnam for the States, I left my favorite food behind. Despite the cultural and culinary diversity in Chicago, I

Alicia Rudder

struggled to find Bánh Mì that’d remind me of home. There was Ba Le Bánh Mì in Uptown, the famous bakery founded and run by Vietnamese immigrants. Although their bánh mì was exquisite, it wasn’t the nostalgic taste from my hometown. When I graduated and moved to Grand Rapids, I found Pho 616 restaurant, inside Grand Rapids Downtown Market, which was the closest to the taste from my childhood. Still, the meaty flavor was sometimes overbearing. In Vietnam, the best bánh mì besides Mom’s usually came from small food carts on the sidewalk. Bánh mì in the U.S. are made in nice-looking restaurants and bakeries, and they cost at least $5-7, equivalent to 100,000-140,000 dongs. Compared to the cost in Vietnam, bánh mì in the U.S. is a true luxury food.

After reading a few online recipes, I realized that this dish is not hard to make; it only takes time and a few key ingredients.

While most are available at any grocery stores, Vietnamese pickles and mayonnaise are the two components that require homemade `ô chua (or dua u món) is Vietnamese pickled carrot and recipes. Đo daikon. Chua means sour, referring to the mild sourness of pickles; they have a refreshing sweet and sour flavor, which goes well with many dishes besides bánh mì. A simple recipe consists of rice vinegar, water, sugar and salt. I prefer rock sugar because it is a milder sweetener. Like any other pickling process, pickled carrot and daikon need time to build the flavor and can stay in the `ô chua tastes best refrigerator for up to six weeks. I find that đo after 12 hours, when the sweet and sour taste is more defined. I `ô Chua because it is an excellent, healthy side dish, easy to love đo make, affordable and stays good for a long time. ˛

In 2014, I left Saigon, my home for 18 years, to pursue higher education in Chicago. Four years later, I graduated, got married and moved to Michigan. In a blink of an eye, I have lived in the States for over five years. Although I love my life here, I sometimes miss my years in Vietnam dearly. I miss the landscape, people and the food I grew up with. Specifically, I miss bánh mì, which I think is the true soul food of Vietnam.

Linh N.W.

Bánh mì mayonnaise requires a little patience and technique to achieve the right texture and aroma. It’s a process of beating egg yolk in canola oil with a mixer until the mixture becomes pasty.

Different from American, Vietnamese mayonnaise incorporates butter. The natural creaminess comes from this and the yolk, creating a mild flavor that elevates the taste of the bread. At my first attempt, I only included egg yolk and canola oil, the essential ingredients. It was a complete and utter failure. The egg yolk completely separated from the oil, and the result tasted like raw eggs. It prompted me to look at other online recipes to figure out what went wrong: I’d put too much oil in the mixture and too quickly. I achieved the right texture at my second attempt by slowly adding drops of oil, but the yolk still smelled and the mix-

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ture wasn’t creamy enough. I added salt and butter to make the mayo taste richer and less smelly. After a few modifications and the help of different recipes, I successfully made a delicious batch of bánh mì mayonnaise at my fourth try. There is also Vietnamese-style recipe for pâté, but the steps are too time-consuming for a single dish — store-bought pork pâté, like the Henaff brand popular in Vietnam and available in the US, is more convenient and can achieve the same flavor.

When I moved to Michigan, I didn’t expect to find such a significant Vietnamese community, which means there are many Vietnamese restaurants and grocery stores in the area. Cha lua u can ˙ easily be purchased at these stores. Char siu is harder to find, and its recipe is quite complicated, with many ingredients exclusive to ê´ Chinese cuisine. I use another type of pork dish called cha que, a Vietnamese baked cinnamon pate, which has a similar smooth texture to cha lua. u The differences are the marinade and the gold˙ ê´ en-baked skin of the pork loaf. Compared to char siu, cha que’s sweetness is milder, but it is also salty, mildly spicy and carries the fragrance of cinnamon and fish sauce. The baked skin of the pork has a grilled flavor, which makes it a good substitute for char siu.

So, after years of seeking the authentic taste of bánh mì, I have put together a complete recipe that is the closest to the dish from the food carts on Vietnam’s streets. Was it worth the effort? Yes, very much! It’s not an extravagant dish, just a humble Vietnamese street food that I hold close to my heart because of its exquisite flavor, and because the dish reflects a part of Vietnam’s history during the French occupation. I created this recipe not only to satisfy my craving for the taste of home but also to protect a part of Vietnam for the generations after me. Many cultural things have been — and will continue to be — dissolving in the melting pot of globalization. Vietnamese immigrants in the States, including myself, are trying our best to preserve our heritage, and bánh mì is one of my first steps to retain my ancestors’ culture and cuisine.

Traditional Bánh Mì Recipe 12-inch baguette 1 tablespoon French pork pâté 1 tablespoon mayonnaise 1 teaspoon soy sauce 11/2 ounces cha lua, u sliced thin ˙ ´ 11/2 ounces cha que, ê sliced thin 1 `ô chua /4 cup Đo 1 /4 jalapeño, sliced thin A few stems of cilantro, torn Ground pepper Heat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bake whole baguette in oven from 3 to 5 minutes to make the outer skin crusty. Remove and slice open the baguette on one side.

Spread pâté, mayonnaise and sprinkle soy sauce on both halves of the bread. Distribute slices of cha lua u and cha queê´ across the ˙ bottom half of the bread. Place 2 to 3 slices jalapeño on top of

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`ô chua on top. Top with cilantro and a sprinkle meat, then place Đo of pepper.

Mom’s Bánh Mì Recipe 12-inch baguette 1 teaspoon soy sauce 1 tablespoon canned French pork pâté 1 tablespoon butter u sliced thin 3 ounces cha lua, ˙ 1 /2 cucumber, sliced thin A few stems cilantro, torn Ground pepper

Heat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake whole baguette in oven from 3 to 5 minutes to make the outer skin crusty. Remove and slice open the baguette on one side.

Sprinkle soy sauce on the inside of the bread. Spread pâté and butter on both sides of baguette. Place cha lua u and cucumber on bot˙ tom half of baguette. Top with cilantro and a sprinkle of pepper.

Bánh Mì Mayonnaise Recipe 4 egg yolks 1 tablespoon canola oil 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 teaspoon salt

Place egg yolks in a medium bowl and beat with mixer until smooth. Slowly add droplets of oil, mixing continuously, until all oil is well-combined with yolks. Keep mixing until mixture starts to stiffen. Slowly add butter into the mixture, in the same way as oil. Add salt. Turn up the mixer to quickly stiffen the mayonnaise until it doesn’t drip from whisk.

Vietnamese Pickled Carrot and Daikon Recipe 1 medium carrot, peeled and julienned 1 medium daikon, peeled and julienned 1 teaspoon salt 11/4 cup rice vinegar 1 /4 cup white sugar 1 /2 cup rock sugar

Place the carrot and daikon in bowl and massage with white sugar and salt for about 3 minutes, until soft enough that you can bend a piece of daikon in half without breaking it. Rinse and drain well.

In small saucepan, combine 1 cup water with vinegar and rock sugar. Warm on low heat and stir until sugar completely dissolves.

Place slices of carrot and daikon in a jar with seal. Pour liquid in jar. Seal. Refrigerate when cool.

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Prayers and Pistachios

A trip to a Zoroastrian temple and the snacks that follow provide connection to Parsi roots.

CONTRIBUTOR

It is mustard-colored and viscous, angrily bubbling from a recent blast in the microwave, sloshing around its gold-rimmed tureen, a vessel impractically ornate for modern life, as so many things here are. A silver spoon constantly threatens to drown, so I rescue it to my side plate and begin on the adjacent serving dish, filled with hot Basmati rice, the long, unbroken grains a testament to its expert preparation.

It’s a simple dish: Mora dal chaval, eaten for good luck by those in our small religious community of Indian Zoroastrians called Parsis. I make a small mound of chaval (rice) on my plate, then drench it with the dal—yellow lentils gently flavored with garlic, onion, turmeric and a tingle of green chili. When the rice and dal are cooked together, it is called khichdi (pronounced khich-ree), a dish that has amusingly become the latest edible fad of the yoga mat-toting Western world. This is comfort food at its most base level; mild, and with a texture and flavor equally palatable for a toothless baby as for an adult. It is impossible to dislike, even for me, who rejects most Indian food. Yes, I am a food writer who charts her life by crumpled napkins, soup-stained cookbooks, and an overly active and preoccupying hunger, and the dishes of my heritage are not the ones I am drawn to.

I feed myself mechanically, burning my lips on the smooth, chalky dal, microwaved rice, and silverware, which bear the initials of my great-grandfather. To my left, my father’s eyelids and head droop, his dry plate in constant danger of hitting the polished marble table, and understandably so. It’s almost 3 o’clock in the morning, and I’ve just arrived from Bombay’s (as many locals call it, rejecting the relatively new “Mumbai”) Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, winding through the warren of roads with families stacked four deep on motorcycles, and trucks adorned with a hanging good luck charm of lime and chili and the painted words “Horn Okay Please.” Though I’ve just showered, my hair and clean clothes still reek of exhaust fumes from the odyssey of days and time zones swallowed by travel. After the chilly gates of Frankfurt airport and New York’s arctic December freeze, the late night mugginess, tempered

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By Leah Bhabha

by the spinning fan above, is a respite. A world and a year apart, I’m “home.” My ancestral home, my grandmother’s South Bombay apartment, the second floor in a building inhabited by my family.

This house, perhaps my only lifelong home, the one place I have returned to consistently since birth, is a repository for countless memories which drift back on my yearly visits. Each time I arrive, unfolding myself from the back seat of the car in the long driveway, I envision my grandmother, years ago, waiting for us on the front stoop after our travels. With a bowl in her hand, she would moisten her thumb with red paste, then plant it in the rice, and imprint the tili on our foreheads for good luck. Around our necks, she hung flowered garlands. I’d scrape the tili off as soon as we walked upstairs, rejecting the itchiness, falling rice and the moist clay scent. As I climb the polished stairs, I pass the rickety elevator with its wrought iron door and mothball smell in which I would ride up and down the four flights, a luxury accoutrement until I realized that its light made it a breeding ground for mosquitoes. To my right is the bottom landing where my brothers and I ran amok with our cousins, hunting for bats and resuming a closeness fostered over years of holidays together. We would rumble up and down the steps, running to the top floor every Christmas to sing carols to Amy Aunty. The marble table where I indulge in my midnight feast was, during both mine and my father’s childhoods, the site of epically large family meals where cousins and grandfathers, husbands and aunts gathered, passing bowls and platters left to right and back again. I recall being summoned to fetch pill bags and cordless telephones and, upon my return, invariably knocking my knee on the metal leg of the table as I still do today. Today, the gatherings vary in size, partly due to my grandmother’s mental and physical downturn, and partly because her generation has dwindled to near extinction. * It looks like a mash of jewels in my hand, small shards of pistachio—emerald-hued and sticky, residing in my palm after being unceremoniously deposited before any ceremony of hand wash-

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ing or sanitizer. Soft and gelatinous, it glitters warmly, waiting to be eaten. I lick and crunch until the wrinkly trails of my palm shine clean. A few years ago, I might not have done this—I might have descended too far into my germaphobia, might have even resisted the jaunt. But, fiancé at one side and father at the other, I feel buttressed, joyful, excited to show this newest member of my family a place of family tradition.

It is January 1, 2018, the first day of an important year. I will turn 30, finish graduate school and get married. In that order.

It is an overwhelming amount of change for a person easily unmoored by transition. My fiancé and I are spending 10 days in Bombay with my parents and grandmother. My father has dug up red crushed velvet prayer hats that smell like mothballs, and he and I put them on and take a picture because today, on this auspicious of days, we’re going to the agiary, the Parsi Zoroastrian fire temple. The cap is out of place with my vacation outfit of white jeans and a loose, printed top, but I like the way it curls around the tops of my ears and that its been worn by generations before me. I even like its fusty scent, though a small part of me wonders if baby moths are now crawling in my hair. This slightly damp smell, of warped photographs, mothballs and the far reaches of a closet are a signature smell of India for me. A lot of things in our home here carry this odor. When I told my father I wanted to go to the agiary, he was thrilled. I'm the only one of his three children who has really been interested in our religion. * My skin, yellowish beige in the winter and dark golden when it sees the sun, is a confusing color to people I meet. If they are being indelicate, as they so often are, they choose their words clumsily, “What are you?” Though I respond with the necessarily jokey tone tinged with discomfort that such a question imposes (“human!”), I know they don’t want to know where I was born or where I live now, but rather, they want to assert that they think I might not be Caucasian, and in fact, they’d rather like to know why my skin is such a hue. Perhaps they’ll guess, “Greek?” “You’re not Italian or Spanish, are you?” “Persian?” The truth is, my skin is this color because of diaspora. My people on my father’s side, now an ever-dwindling global community of 100,000, are a people called “Parsis,” Zoroastrians who fled religious persecution in Iran at the hands of the Arab conquests, arriving in Gujarat, on India’s Western coast, nearly one thousand years ago. They made their life anew, away from their ancestral land, in what is now mine. The credo of our monotheistic religion is “good words, good thoughts, good deeds.”

According to folklore, upon arriving in the Gujarati town of Sanjan, the Parsis were almost turned away by the local ruler Jadi Rana. Adorned with the luscious jewels and robes that befitted

a leader of the time, Jadi Rana shook his head, telling the assembled masses that the area was already overpopulated. In response, it is said, the Iranian leader requested a cup of milk and a teaspoon of sugar, pouring the sweet crystals into the liquid. As he did so, the sugar dissolved, but the cup of milk did not overflow. “We will be like sugar in this milk”, he told Jadi Rana, “and blend completely with the locals, living in peace and harmony with our fellow men.” Jadi Rana acquiesced, allowing the Parsis to stay, but only if they assimilated completely, adopting the local dress and language, which they have continued to do. The Parsi women, whose milky skin mimics the folklore of their ancestors still drape their sarees in the way they were taught in Gujarat, while the older members of the community still speak a slang, called Parsi Gujarati, one of many Indian languages I can’t speak.

Recently, as different areas of her brain dim and fade, my grandmother has begun speaking it to me, and I must gently remind her that I don’t understand, or simply nod and smile, pretending to comprehend.

Before he died in 2005 after a long struggle with ALS, my father’s brother Sorab, a neuro-physician, devoted many hours to tracing our family history. He was particularly interested in exploring the etymology of our name, and the origin it might suggest. Because the older members of our family had last names ending in “ ji”, for example my grandfather Kharsedji, whose name came from generations of men before him, Sorab concluded that they hailed from North Gujarat, as those from the South more commonly ended their names with the suffix “bhai.” He wrote, on the now defunct website he created, Bhabha.org: “Bhabha was the form of address used for the eldest or pivotal male member of the clan or family… So, in every family, the final nod, the capo, the person where the buck stops: Bhabha.” After years of childhood embarrassment at my surname, which incited jokes of “Bhabha black sheep” and endless mispronunciations, I now feel a sense of pride at knowing its origin, even if it is grounded, unsurprisingly, in a patriarchal power. * My family’s year of arrival in Bombay (originally from the Portuguese ‘Bom Bahia’ meaning “beautiful bay,” called Mumbai as of 1995, as the government decreed “Bombay” was an unwanted legacy of British rule) is as hazy as the coastline itself, a pollution of facts and records that places the time period sometime around the early 19th century or earlier. From the start, my ancestors were an illustrious group, with one, Bhikaji Panday (c. 1725), dealing in explosives, and building infrastructure in the nascent city like wells and sanatoriums and another, Cooverji Hormasji Bhabha, establishing himself in the widespread cotton trading business and as a property investor in various neighborhoods in Bombay. His great-grandson, my great grandfather, Hormasji

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Bhabha (after whom my father and his cousin, both called Homi, were named) was a money manager, stockbroker and advisor, who guided the investments of many of the new class of Parsi industrialists. He had two sons and five daughters, one of whom was my grandfather Kharsedji, a lawyer and, as I knew him, bristly and white-moustached, with a penchant for brutal honesty and cloying candies, who passed away in 2004. Our family is a family of favorites, and my grandfather’s was my brother Ishan.

I have only distant memories of the agiary from a decade ago or more—the dark air thick with sandalwood smoke, the fact that my mother had to wait in the car because she is not a Parsi, priests called dasturji in white flowing robes, hats and masks stoking a fire in the middle. It's a memory so foggy it feels like a dream.

I’m not religious—an atheist or agnostic depending on the day—but I want to go this year to absorb all the auspiciousness, luck and honeyed vibes I can. I probably believe in a higher power of some sort, but an all-knowing, white-bearded God is not part of my dogma. However, something tangible, grounding, “good words, good thoughts, good deeds”—that I can sink into. I am also taken with the cultural associations around members of the Parsi religion in India; they are known to be lovers of food and humor with noses that might be described as larger than average.

I tick all of those boxes. I also want to remind myself what happens in the fire temple so I can tell my children, who won't be allowed in, as the religion is passed patrilineally. There have been movements and efforts and even an agiary built in another city allowing (non-Parsi) children of Parsis to enter, but the old guards in the community are committed to a pure bloodline and sense of unwavering tradition. I stopped saying Parsi prayers more than a decade ago, when Sorab died, reasoning that praying was futile if such terrible, unfair things could still occur. Lately, I've started trying to combat my insomnia by repeating the prayers, trying to lull myself to sleep with Sanskrit words.

As I remembered, the agiary is dark and dark-smelling. A lumpy old woman nods us through the entrance without smiling. The space is dusty and spare, the air cool from the lack of light but also thick with the suggestion that nothing has been disrupted or updated in many decades. We walk to the back and arrange ourselves on a wooden pew. I'm not sure what to do, so I just watch my father and mimic his movements: lean forward, eyes closed, muttering prayers. Even without all the trappings of belief, the formality, stillness and hallowed respect of this place of worship calms me. On this rigid wooden bench next to my father, my white jeans surely collecting dust, my hat slipping to one side, I feel rooted in the moment.

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In India, the Parsi religion has dwindled to less than 60,000— worldwide, it’s 100,000 and shrinking—and yet so much of my existence in this country is tied to being Parsi. In Bombay, our circle of family and friends is almost exclusively a part of this tiny group of light-skinned Iranian descendants that no one in America has heard of. The British colonials superficially ranked the Parsis higher than other castes in India because of their lighter skin and merchant background. As a result, the Parsis have enjoyed an exalted status in India, though as our numbers dwindle we may become a thing of the past. What does it mean to be part of a religion that may cease to exist? I think about it so little 11 months of the year, and upon my return each year, I submerge myself in this question.

A dasturji throws pieces of sandalwood in the central fire, then walks over to my father and me. He is in the traditional all white clothing: cotton pants with a drawstring, a long biblike shirt, a crisp, erect cap. He brings us a trough of ashes and we dip the pads of our ring fingers into it and press them to our foreheads.

A tili, like the crusty, red rice ones my grandmother used to implant on our faces when we’d arrive in Bombay as children, for good luck. We walk, slowly and ceremoniously, to the center of the small room. I watch as my father removes his shoes before he arrives at a small carpet and kneels, prostrate, head to the floor.

I do the same. I am uncomfortable, unsure of what I am doing, sure only that this is where I should be. I stand, return to the pew, and try to slow my thoughts. I shift backwards into the hard pew and drop my head, repeating the words to prayers I still surprisingly know, again and again, hashem vahu… * After our trip to the agiary, my father takes Q and me on an improvised Parsi food tour, an experience we’ll still talk about months later. We begin at the Parsi Dairy Farm, an old family-run establishment that has long been an institution in the Parsi community. We eat their fresh dahi (yogurt), which comes in earthenware pots, and paneer every morning in our home.

Though he has never visited the actual store, Q has become addicted to the Parsi Dairy Farm caramels, which I bring back for him in big plastic sacks with red and blue insignia. He hasn’t visited the store before, so we spend extra time, wafting in the slightly sour smells, sampling chunks of paneer and fluffy round confections called barfi.

Most of the time, I cannot stand Parsi food. In fact, I struggle with many Indian foods, but Parsi food is different—its milder flavors and layered rice dishes descend from Iranian originals. In the few times I’ve tried it, I’ve always enjoyed Iranian food, so I’ll never know quite why this doesn’t appeal to me. But it doesn’t. I don’t

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A ‘Chinoy Mansion’, once the childhood home of Cooverji Hormasiji Bhabha, was demolished long ago and a skyscraper now stands in its place.

like the creamy sauces tinged with vinegar and dolloped over fish in a dish called saas ni macchi (fish with sauce). My stomach rejects dhansak, an oily, overly spiced meat stew. The Parsi mithai (sweets) covered in silver leaf and encrusted with cashews and pistachios do not appeal to me, even as my family wolfs down boxes of them after meals. I like only the simplest Parsi dishes, like mora dal chaval, yellow lentils cooked down and served over rice.

But on this adventure, as we wind through a back alley called Princess Street, I am entranced and far more open to culinary experimentation. It is, I think, because Q is such an adventurous eater, often more so than me, and always less snobby. We stroll to a store with a dual focus: on one side, the wares are to wear: prayer caps called topis, like the one I have just removed, leather slippers called sapats (Q and I each buy a pair), formal all-white men’s outfits called dagalis. Across the store, the items are to be consumed, and we buy a chicken cutlet sandwich, the meat encased in a mild coating of egg, whose strands stick out past the chapatti in which it’s served. Q takes a bit, surprised that it’s served room temperature, my father looks on approvingly, chewing as one does when watching a baby eat—phantom munching, as my dad is perennially on a diet, until the next meal. Like many Parsi foods, which were inspired by a combination of Iranian and English foods, it is mild,

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not overly spiced, unattractive and comforting. I make a video of Q saying to my father “To a lifetime of obesity!” as he takes a bite.

We walk further down, through weaving bicycles and vegetable carts to a small storefront, a counter really, called Paris Bakery, the name a funny accident thanks to an either dyslexic or distracted sign painter who switched the last two letters, giving “Parsi Bakery” an unintentionally international flair. Like Parsi Dairy Farm, this is another vendor whose foods I recognize from our house, but whose storefront is an only occasional sight. At home, we have glass canisters filled with Paris’ cheese pastries in all sizes and shapes—flaky straws, small stamp-like squares and round cookies called batasas. As is his habit, my father vastly over-orders, and we wait, watching the proprietor and his assistant package our sundries. As we settle up, the owner, a humorless man whose eccentricities are a topic of family discussion (“He told me he had no rum cake, but when I called back 10 minutes later, he said ‘Just call it “special cake”. I have some.’”) asks us to hold out our hands. No sooner do I unclenched my palm—wishing more for Purell than ever before— than he dollops on a soft, bright green concoction. I lick and chew until my hand is glistening clean, the dense mixture of chopped pistachio a sensory revelation.

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A J O U R N A L O N F O O D O R I G I N S A N D C U LT U R E

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