LYNNE ANDERSON LIVES IN MY neighborhood—Jamaica Plain, a part of Boston—and is as proud of its diversity as I and the rest of us who choose to live here because of it. But my, what she found in our shared streets! A whole world of cooks, mostly women, living the cultures they came from at the markets I shop in and the kitchens I never see or even imagined were here.
But Anderson, a former professional cook turned teacher of immigrant communities, found them. Families recently arrived from Ireland, Greece, and Italy, traditional Jamaica Plain mainstays, and from countries that have a more recent but strong presence here, like Haiti, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Brazil. And families from countries I had no idea were so close by: Sudan, Latvia, Morocco, Venezuela, Chile, Vietnam. Yes, she went looking. But I don’t think her tour would be so difficult to take in most other large American cities.
Even if other cities might have international riches, though, they likely don’t have any listeners and writers as gently sympathetic as Anderson. She went looking for more than interesting dishes most anyone can cook, though she gives us abundant, tempting, and accessible recipes. She also went looking for the meaning of home.
In her warm, subtly attentive interviews—though she never mentions herself or her way of interviewing, you can sense her tact and acceptance of people just as they are—Anderson listens for what is most important to a cook far from the place she grew up. That can be the way to knead pasta dough, the choice of curry stirred into a stew, the friendships formed with the only people who sell ground okra or the vegetables, fish, and cuts of meat that can best reproduce a memory.
And she listens for the language of the women (and a few men) who cook, usually with children or friends, to understand and show us how cooking and food form and forge lasting connections. As they tell Anderson about the lands they left and the lives they led then and lead now, the cooks become lost in their memories, as if the smell of a certain stew is the royal route to the kitchens and the people they most loved there. The actual circumstances that brought them to leave can be too painful to recount directly. It is hunting for mushrooms like they did in Latvia, or stuffing pork into soaked corn husks for Christmas tamales as in Costa Rica, or boiling beef and beets for a health-transmitting broth as in Vietnam, that lets them live again their childhoods.
Not that most of the cooks Anderson found left terribly painful pasts. Some did, and suffered for their beliefs or family circumstances they could not change. But most came here for opportunity, for education, for better lives for their children: the goals that have always driven people to emigrate. And most seem content with the new lives they have made—or, rather, they seem adaptable and resourceful, the necessary calling cards of the immigrant. Finding or improvising the tools and ingredients to reproduce remembered dishes, knowing how to handle food and the way to move in the kitchen—subtleties and graces Anderson is alive to—will endure displacement and disruptions, will literally keep families together.
This book of vivid, living memories can help you make memories of your own. Through the cooks Anderson presents, you can reproduce some of the elegance of a cinnamon-flecked Persian green herb omelet, the earthiness of Venezuelan roast beef with baked plantain and corn cakes, the surprising satisfaction of Irish baked sole with mashed potatoes (“Be sure to use enough butter,” a mother admonishes her tech-minded son via a video camera on his laptop screen—naturally, given that the best butter in the world is Irish) and a carrot-parsnip mash. Best of all, you can—whatever your own family background, wherever you are now—live a part of the American immigrant experience through Anderson’s words and the lives and food she celebrates.