Photo by yvonne lee harijanto on Unsplash
Nostalgia.
I follow a woman on Instagram, and I think I may be jealous of her. She’s a food writer and recently posted about her mother cooking her favourite food and serving it to her in some kind of beloved bunny bowl of her childhood. There was something about the way that dish was served up - the warmth and fuzz of it - that summoned and stirred all that simmered within me. I wanted to smash that bowl against a wall.
The way food is synonymous with love and romance on social media has nothing to do with my experience. I have never and nor do I now live in a rural homestead decorated strictly in neutrals. Cotton wearing influencers drinking rainwater fetched daily from a well. Their children seem to enjoy vegetables, especially raw ones. They scatter seeds and allow nature to do the rest. To partake in the pure joy of it all, we are welcome to click a heart at the picture-perfect harvest come season’s end.
There were no beloved bowls in my childhood home. We ate from the same dishes the adults did. We ate from leaves, from metal and from melamine. Food was sometimes love and sometimes warmth and sometimes not. Food could be a weapon. The start of wars. A tool of manipulation. The trigger of anxiety. A bomb explosion.
My fascination with food started early. My parents were excellent cooks; my father was a passionate lover of eating out and educated us on foods of different cultures. I remember the taste of things from a young age. The freshest of fried calamari in Lumut, where our family would rent a holiday house on the beach. The smell of fish drying on the wharves. The prawn sambal eaten cross-legged on the floor from a banana leaf, the intense heat of the sambal but still asking for more. Chili was a flavour to me – not just heat. Even as a child.
I was born in Kuala Lumpur where children eat fish heads and crab roe. A place with the stink of fish markets and the buzz of the flies they attract. A place of fragrant roadside food stalls wafting with the promise of the tastiest sup kambing.
I was born into Thursday pasar malam, hot corn pancakes, read bean ice cream and the offensive allure of durian. I relished it. I was a foodie from the beginning. I remember drinking warm formula milk from a baby bottle and refusing to graduate to a mug. Later, for the sheer flavour explosion, I snuck spoonfuls of milk powder from the tin. In the Disney cartoon Snow White - a pirated copy watched on my uncle’s dodgy VCR - the part where she makes the pie was the part that captivated me the most. What a deft hand she had with pastry. How ingenious to allow the birds to crimp the edges!
In our garden were jack fruit trees and an ageing mango tree that wept when we had to cut her down. The mango tree was infested with termites, and our wooden home, just a few metres away, was in danger. I watched them cut the tree down; I still remember the thick slices of her trunk and how she wailed against the chainsaw. That was the day I learned that trees could cry.
Sydney.
Home wasn’t where I was born but where I grew up. Home is Sydney.
As a child, I read the food section of The Sydney Morning Herald like it mattered. I knew what samphire was. Sacher. Dijon. Veloute. Salt cod. The value of prawn heads. I subscribed to the Gourmet Traveller and cooked from it. I would make the paella, the baked trout, the buttered Kipfler potatoes, and the mini lemon curd tarts with mango and raspberry. I cooked the magazine food; my parents cooked the real meals.
Indians know how to fry fish; they fry it until the crisped exterior of the fish yields to silky white flesh. They also know the perfect pairings for fried fish. Dhal. A garlicy stir-fried bitter green. Rasam. Rasam is headstrong on its own but creates pure harmony on the plate. The fish had to be rubbed with spices, and in our home these spices were a moreish combination of salt, turmeric and chilli that nowadays serves as a reminder: my father had a temper. I couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 years old at the time. One evening, my sister and I were bickering when we sat down to a fried fish dinner with rice, rasam and something green. I asked my sister to pass the fish and she handed me one from the bowl; I made a face - that wasn’t the piece I wanted. Right there at the table, a bomb exploded. You never knew what the trigger would be and when the explosion would come. Overcome with fear, I understood that I had been foolish to feel safe enough to express myself. I should have known that to make a face at a piece of ill-chosen fish could bear catastrophic consequences.
There was no fish in the end, I mean, it was there, but I didn’t get to finish my dinner. I remember a meltdown. Shouting. A fist pounding the dining table, the clinking sound of the rattled cutlery and glasses. I remember tears and being made to kneel down in front of a white painted brick wall. Kneeling down was punishment. There was pain. There had been a beating, I the recipient. I had had my hair in a ponytail, that was dumb of me. Ponytails can be held on to, a ponytail can be used to propel your head in any direction. A ponytail, as I learned, could be used to shove your head into a white painted brick wall. The next morning before leaving for school, he approached with a cheery disposition and a few questions directed at me. Was I ok? Was it the flesh or the bone that hurt?
Dalcha.
My mother sometimes cooked a Malaysian style dalcha. A stew of sinewy meat on the bone, lentils, carrots, eggplants and spices, best eaten with rice. My mother made a decent dalcha, and I let her know. She knew that dalcha was my favourite dish; she used Osso Buco meat, and I liked to suck the marrow from the bone. Knowing this, she would leave the marrow bone for me. I had spent years being my mother’s daughter, and the practice around dalcha had always been the same. She cooked it; I ate it.
As I grew older and spent more dinners out of the house than in, she would sometimes cook for guests and make sure there was some left for me in the fridge. On one such evening, I went to the kitchen to say goodbye to her. She was cooking dalcha and told me she’d put some aside for me for lunch tomorrow. I raided the fridge at lunch time; I searched but couldn’t find it. She found me in the kitchen, head in the fridge, still trying to locate my promised portion. “Oh”, she said. “Your brother came over this morning and I gave the food to him.” I reacted angrily, but she didn’t understand. “I can always make it for you again,” she was exasperated. My brother had moved out of home in less than happy circumstances. He’d come to see her, and she’d given him the food she’d saved for me. Me, the second daughter. He the only son.
Food was sometimes love, and sometimes not at all.
Bitter Melon is an Australian woman, currently based in Europe. Contrary to what her name suggests, life has been exceedingly kind to her, and she’s really not that bitter at all. Though not as well read as she’d like to be, she has travelled and eaten to a standard that can only be described as not too shabby. Nostalgia is the first of her essays to be accepted for publication.