Cooking the Old Way
A dish faithful in spirit, altered in every particular
Twice a year, on days that no calendar here marks, I cook the food of the country I lost.
The recipe was never written down, for my grandmother carried it entirely in her hands.
She would the dough while talking of other things, and her fingers knew what her tongue forgot.
I learned by standing at her elbow, not by listening, and so the knowledge lives in me as movement.
When I cook, I am not following instructions; I am repeating a that is older than I am.
The smell that rises from the pan is the nearest thing I have to opening a door into the past.
One breath of it, and I am eight years old again, sitting on a cold stone step in the sun.
Taste, I have come to believe, is the most of all the keepers of memory.
A photograph fades and a voice is forgotten, but a can wait unchanged for fifty years.
And yet even here the exile is not spared his small, continual defeats.
The flour is not the same flour, and the water carries a different taste.
The herb that gave the dish its soul does not grow in this at all.
So what I make is a , in spirit but altered in every .
It tastes almost right, which is a stranger sorrow than if it tasted wholly wrong.
For the small gap between almost and exactly is precisely the width of the sea I crossed.
My grandchildren eat it happily, having nothing to compare it to, and for them it is simply delicious.
They will grow up believing that this altered version is the real thing, and in a way they are right.
A tradition survives not by staying identical but by bending enough to go on being made.
The dish that reaches my grandchildren has already changed, and it will change again in their hands.
Perhaps in a hundred years a will cook something that my grandmother would not recognise.
And yet a thread will run unbroken from her hands to theirs, through all the substitutions.
That thread, invisible and stubborn, is the truest country I have left to give.
It cannot be confiscated at a border, and no officer can stamp it out of existence.
It lives, instead, in the warmth of a kitchen on two ordinary days each year.
When the smell fills the room, my late wife is there again, and so is the cold stone step.
For a few hours the sea narrows, and almost becomes exactly, and I am simply home.
Then the meal ends, the plates are washed, and the country folds itself away until next time.
But it is not gone; it is only resting, in my hands, waiting to be summoned back to the table.