Alisa Tanaka-King, a collaborator joining me from her home in Australia is en route to Lancaster. At least, I hope so, as her flight was canceled once already.
Fittingly, today’s focus in The Common Kitchen is Roots/Routes. For now, I cannot quite decide whether they are two separate ideas that ought to be considered under two distinct chapters.
As a migrant, my roots show up as much as the journeys I’ve taken. I don’t know If I would have ever thought about cooking a curry if I hadn’t lived in England (cue here resonances to the spice routes and to culinary colonisation) or have become quite the expert at preparing Patatas Bravas (on the lunch menu for tomorrow at the Common Kitchen) if my partner did not happen to be Spanish.
In many ways, this is the heart of the Common Kitchen. The food you make is never yours alone… it transforms, changes, shifts with every person you share it with. To claim expertise or ownership over a particular recipe or ingredient is quite foolish.
I’m also reminded here of Katherina Radeva’s text from Breaking Bread about the journeys her parents take vicariously through the photographs she shares with them. There is also possibility in the kind of sensory escapism cooking from places you have never been. A tangible dream, perhaps.
I’m off to make some kind of dukkah.
It’s not from ’round ‘ere.