The World in My Kitchen (9 page)

We bought cellophane noodles and three sorts of soy sauce; the mushroom dark soy would also become a staple in my kitchen, as I used it when I roasted a chicken or marinated quails or fish. We also picked up dried snow fungus that looked like a dried white chrysanthemum (they don’t taste like much, Suzanne said, but added to any dish the fungus will absorb the fragrance of whatever is cooking), lily buds, wood ears, and cloud ear mushrooms. Then we looked at the fresh vegetables. Suzanne suggested that I first try the dark green, long string beans. “Try them with sautéed Chinese chives; they will taste very much like your own French haricot beans.”

I also bought some flowering Chinese broccoli. While she chose vegetables, she would cry out their names: “This is cilantro, better but stronger than parsley…. This sausage-like vegetable is fresh lotus root…. This beautiful twisted thing is fresh ginger root…. This big potato is really taro root. Chinese use them in stew, or to make puree, or deep fry them.”

As we walked along the poultry aisle, she pointed to a black skinned chicken. “My mother makes a broth with them whenever we have the flu. She says it makes you strong. These tiny brown eggs are from quails.”

I also saw small chickens, squabs, and plump quails that I had not seen since I had left France. I told Suzanne that from now on, I would come every week and shop in Chinatown. She laughed and said I would need her to translate since very few people in Chinatown spoke English. And so a tradition evolved where once a month I would meet Suzanne in Chinatown to shop. Jimmy would meet us later, and we would dine in one of her favorite restaurants. I learned that restaurants that catered to Chinese had two different menus: one for the Chinese in Chinese and one in English. I also learned that the strips of colored paper on the walls with Chinese writing were the specials of the day. Once we went alone to a restaurant that Suzanne had often taken us, and I asked the waiter for one of the dishes on the wall. He shook his head and said emphatically, “No,” but I insisted, and so the waiter brought me a dish that looked awful. Giant worms swimming in a heavy sauce was what it resembled, and it tasted like rubber tires. I had ordered Sea Slugs! From then on, whenever we went out with Suzanne and her family, I took down the names of the dishes I liked, and Suzanne would write them in Chinese so that I would be able to spot them on the walls.

Slowly my cooking changed. I became bolder in mixing Chinese ingredients in French or American dishes. I served mushroom consommé made with Chinese mushrooms, rubbed a roast chicken with dark soy sauce, made a French puree with taro root, and served steamed spinach with sautéed lily buds. My friends would always ask before tasting, “Colette, what’s that floating in my soup?” or “I like those crunchy vegetables; what are they?” I gained a reputation for being a weird but excellent cook. I also started to read about China and its culture. My dream was to visit China and experience for myself the dishes that Suzanne used to talk about but said were not available here.

On warm, sunny days, Jimmy and I would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into Brooklyn Heights where we had friends. With them we would parade down the Promenade overlooking the East River and sit in the sun admiring the vista of skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. I liked Brooklyn Heights with its narrow streets and lovely town houses, which reminded me more of Europe than my Upper West Side neighborhood. It was on one of our walks in Brooklyn that I discovered Atlantic Avenue and its Middle Eastern food stores. The discovery would change my life.

After leaving Egypt for Paris in 1947, I had consciously shunned my Egyptian past, desperately wanting to be French. I had worked hard at losing my singsong Egyptian accent, learned to dress like I imagined a French young woman would, and never looked back at my Egyptian past. Now being French in the United States seemed to be my passport to a better life. In New York everything French had cachet. As Jimmy and I walked past a store on Atlantic Avenue, I stopped short as I noticed a cascade of loofas hanging on a nail.
Loofas!
These were the vegetable sponges that Aisha, my maid, washed me with until my skin would be red as a lobster when I was a six-year-old girl! As I stepped into the shop—the Oriental Pastry and Grocery—the smell of cumin and coriander hit me with such force that I staggered. I was back in Cairo in the kitchen with Ahmet, sitting on the counter, eating a pita filled with warm, lemony
ful medamas
(richly braised fava beans). A smooth male voice said, “Ahlan wa sahlan.” Without thinking, I repeated the familiar greeting. The words came out without my knowing that I could still speak some Arabic. I looked around at the shelves filled with food I remembered: jars of
tehina
and
tarama
, buckets of briny vine leaves, jars of rose petal jam, honey, and tiny stuffed eggplants. On the floor were barrels filled to their brims with multiple varieties of rice, small red and black lentils, dried brown beans from Egypt, and a panoply of macerating olives—pickled, cracked, oiled, and peppered. There were also pickled onions and lemons that I remembered using in stews, and my favorite, bright pink turnips pickled in beet juice and vinegar to eat with
ful.
Near the counter were baskets of fresh pita breads that I had not seen in more than ten years, and in a jar in a corner, were paper-thin sheets of apricot paste that we used to roll around ice cubes and suck like lollipops in the summertime. I wanted to buy everything. The voice I had heard belonged to a man with curly black hair and a warm smile standing behind the counter. How did he know I would understand? And did I? I thought I did, but I wasn’t sure. Shy and afraid of making a mistake, I responded in English, “Why me?”
“Habibi,”
(my dear one), “you look Egyptian or Lebanese,” he said laughing. I asked for a jar of
tehina,
and a pound of
ful medamas
and wondered if he had
mulukhiyya
(a bitter green herb used to make a popular soup in Egypt)? “Yes, of course…two kinds. You want dried or frozen?” I didn’t know, but having an aversion for frozen foods, I chose dried and was handed a large bag of brittle leaves. I asked for cumin and coriander, two loofas, a pound of olives, and a container of pickled turnips. Then with a loud, happy
Ma’al-salaama
(good-bye), laden with my purchases, Jimmy and I returned home. On the way, I promised Jimmy that he would have a great dinner that night.

Back home, as I looked at all the food, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how to prepare any of it. In Cairo, no girl in my family was allowed in the kitchen. The kitchen was the cook’s domain. True, I had managed to sneak in without my grandmother noticing. Ahmet, our cook who liked me, would plop me on the kitchen counter and let me taste what he was preparing. I looked, smelled, ate, but nothing more.
Tehina,
I remembered, was a light creamy sauce, not that thick oily paste I had in front of me. What should I do with this enormous bag of
mulukhiyya?
The soup I loved was a smooth, deep green soup, redolent of garlic and cumin, and served with a mound of steamed rice. How did one transform these dry leaves into that lovely soup?
Ful medamas
was served with pickles and slices of hard boiled egg. But what had made the egg whites so brown? I didn’t know, but I thought that I could cook the beans and do without the eggs. I boiled the beans for two hours and tasted them. Their skins were too tough; it was nothing like the warm soft ones Ahmet would give me to taste in a fresh pita bread. That night we ended up eating pickles, olives, bread, and cheese. I promised myself that the following weekend I would go back and ask the owner of the store how to prepare the dishes I longed for.

The following weekend, I dragged Jimmy back to Atlantic Avenue. Mohammed, the owner, on seeing me again so soon, affectionately called me
sukkara
(honey, sugar) and was willing to explain everything to me. Pen and paper in hand, I took notes. He told me how to make a good
tehina,
with water and lemon juice; that dried
mulukhiyya
had to be pressed through a very fine sieve and added to strong chicken broth along with cumin, coriander and garlic; that
tarama
was mixed with soft white bread and lemon juice, and that
ful
had to be soaked overnight and slowly cooked for nearly twenty-four hours. “It is much better to buy cans of
ful.
All you have to do is heat them and mix them hot with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper.”

Atlantic Avenue was like a slice of Cairo to me with all its Arab shops. There was, for example, a larger, more elegant store across the street from Oriental Pastry called Sahadi, selling foods from all over the Middle East; further down the street were two bakeries, more Syrian than Egyptian; a butcher; and one or two Yemenite restaurants. I was eager to return home and try again to cook an Egyptian dinner. The
tarama
turned out perfectly, creamy clouds of lemony caviar flavored mousse, just as I remembered. I tried to squeeze the dry
mulukheyya
leaves through a fine sieve, but my fingertips were scraped, and I decided that next time, I would buy the frozen version. Miraculously, the soup turned bright green, and its garlicky, grassy aroma summoned Jimmy to the kitchen. I had succeeded. The food was good but not quite what I remembered. Jimmy loved it. Soon I started to cook Egyptian dishes for our guests. Later I went further, remembering my grandmother and Ahmet’s other dishes, and tried from memory to reproduce exactly what Ahmet had cooked in Cairo. I made stuffed vine leaves, cooked rice the Egyptian way; I made
sanbuseck
(small pastries filled with cheese) and baked chicken on a bed of leeks. To my surprise, I had, through memory, become an expert cook of Egyptian dishes.

Something else also changed. Gradually, I began to recall with a certain pleasure small incidents from my life growing up in Cairo. I would tell Jimmy about my grandmother’s poker day and how, if she won, I would get some money, or about my grandfather who took me to Cairo’s mango market. I even sang Arabic songs to Marianne. From then on, I often spoke about my life in Cairo to friends. I was no longer ashamed of my past, and to everyone who asked where I came from, I now answered, “I am half French, half Egyptian,” to the chagrin of Eunice Whittlesey, the wife of one of the partner’s in Jimmy office. She would state in an authoritative voice, “You don’t look Egyptian…you look French.” I had a problem dealing with people like Eunice who thought of me as too loud, too Mediterranean, and probably just a bit too sexy. Jimmy tried to explain their reaction as naturally Waspish, more reserved, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I preferred to spend time with Americans of European background, and happily, most of our new friends were.

Another chance encounter opened up a world that enchanted me and helped me develop an entirely new way of understanding the art of cooking. I met a Japanese artist, Arakawa, and his wife, the American poet Madeline Gins. Arakawa loved good food and believed that my cooking, which mixed Asian and French ingredients, was fantastic. He thought I should also get to know Japanese cuisine. He talked about dishes I had never heard of like
soba,
a buckwheat noodle that you eat cold, or
shabu shabu,
a dish of thin slices of meat that you twirl in a hot broth. I made him a French potee, a dish of poached meats and vegetables that is served with an aioli sauce; and while you eat, you also sip the rich, golden broth. The dish resonated with Arakawa, as it had the same basic idea as his beloved Japanese dish. He loved it and promised then and there to introduce us to a real Japanese dinner.

One night, he invited us to a Japanese restaurant on Fifty-seventh Street, located at the corner of Park Avenue. I don’t remember its name, but I will never forget the meal. I had walked along Central Park on my way to meet them at the restaurant; I had a feeling of well-being. It was an early autumn evening; the sky was clear, and a crisp breeze rustled the red and gold leaves. I felt alive and happy. When I arrived at the restaurant, I was ushered to a beautiful private room whose floor was covered with tatami mats. We sat upon silk pillows on the floor around a lacquered table. In a corner was a tall, black vase that held one apple tree branch with tiny pink flowers. The first course was a soup served in miniature tea pots. The tea pot lid held a little cup, and in the cup was a thin slice of lime. I was told by my host to squeeze the lime into the soup, drink the broth, and then eat the morsels from the little teapot. The broth was clear and warm with a faint taste of fish and flavored with a mushroom that I learned later was the famous Japanese matsutake mushroom, and the zest of the lime came from a citron called Yuzu whose perfume made me swoon. In a single moment, I was warmed by the delicate broth, enthralled by the tastes and textures of what I discovered in my little teapot: a shrimp, two gingko nuts, and several bits of mushroom.

Absorbed in the ritual of the dish, I realized suddenly that this extraordinary soup echoed and prolonged the feeling of calm energy inspired by my autumn walk to the restaurant. The remaining dishes were as extraordinary an experience as the first one: a golden broiled fish, sweet, spicy, swimming in a transparent broth topped with shaved white radish and seaweed, tingling like the autumn breeze. Sake was served in delicate china cups, and at the end of the meal, we were brought warm, smoky tea. For dessert, we were presented with grapes peeled and threaded onto a beautiful carved wooden skewer, with overlapping slices of bright orange persimmons.