I have never been a conventional eater and, considering my lineage, it’s no wonder. My mother, the writer Laurie Colwin, was a foodie with a salt tooth. She was pan-national in her tastes—she never met a culture whose cooking she flat-out disliked. She brought home Chinese herbs, Ethiopian bread, Jamaican desserts, and Mexican salsa. She mixed condiments based on Indian recipes and tried her hand at traditional English puddings, the failed latter of which got her into comical culinary trouble at a dinner party once. In short, she was not just a consumer but a fierce emulator, often employing extraordinary measures to obtain her recipes. She was known for traipsing downtown and up, unafraid to pick up a bun, a bread, a cheese and ask “What’s in this?” I remember her in the kitchen, worrying over a stove full of boiling pots, the counter littered with various utensils, stirring vigorously with the sleeves of her sweater rolled up past her elbows. Several hours and cross-continental phone calls later, she would more often than not emerge victorious, hot bowl or plate or tureen in hand.
My father, the publisher Juris Jurjevics, is not a cook except by necessity, yet he has his own set of food-related habits. Both a European and a Vietnam War veteran, he is content to consume his meals directly from cans, bags, and packets. Growing up, I would sit beside him on his bed and listen to daytime talk radio while we shared Goya chickpeas and pickled cabbage, lentils and black beans, packages of M&Ms and toasted almonds. Veterans Day meant Spam and Vienna sausages, served as is save for frilly toothpicks stabbed into their centers. Our Saturday breakfasts were crêpelike pancakes native to Latvia, his homeland, and sick food was a stockpot of slow-boiled cabbage soup. His love for root vegetables—the food of his people, as he’s known to say—and my mother’s affinity for kitchen adventures filled our plates with parsnips, beets, carrots, and potatoes. My grandmother’s baking provided us with saffron cakes and peppery ginger cookies throughout the holiday season.
These days, as a grown-up responsible for feeding myself, I realize more than ever just how much I have inherited my parents’ eating habits. There are times I have opened my fridge and grinned to see, next to my roommates’ tubs of peanut butter and mayonnaise, my little jar of capers, a staple in my fridge at home but an anomaly here, or a packet of rice bean cakes in the freezer beside the Chubby Hubby ice cream. Like my mother, I often crave sour, turning to cornichons strong enough to hurt the taste buds, or freshly peeled organic lemons. Sometimes it’s salt I want, and I go on ravenous sprees, buying long slices of lox and tins of black olives, sautéing zucchini and chicken in oil and garlic salt. And I am just as much my father. When I return home for holidays and observe him, hunkered over his manuscripts as he eats from a jar of nuts, I realize I have copied him movement for movement as I nosh and study. Film theory books in front of me, I pluck hearts of palm spears from their cans, spoon up cold beans, or dip my fingers absently into a tub of shredded red cabbage—his favorite. I have, as every child fears, turned into my parents. And I love it.
My friends, however, have not always shared my enthusiasm. At one former apartment, a four-flight Boston walk-up, I tried to tempt them with Latvian pancakes, goat-milk yogurt, and my favorite Chinese candy, a dried sugar-and-salt preserved plum known as wamoi. They either politely declined or recoiled in horror, depending. This was nothing new for me; in grade school, I was known as the girl with the weirdest lunch, coming in with homemade multigrain bread and all-natural treats bearing disarmingly accurate names like “fruit leather.” I tried and tried to trade; nobody bit. In Boston, I am left to enjoy my Japanese seaweed snacks and tomato-paste sandwiches solo. Oh, well. More for me.
If my mother was a food pioneer and my father is a food appreciator, I am a food nomad. My favorite thing to do on a gray, rainy day is to go deep into Boston’s Chinatown—imagine the population of New York’s condensed into less than half the square footage—and seek out my favorite pan-Asian treats. It is during the pre-midterm, calm-before-the-storm week that I venture out into the drizzle, sans umbrella, on a search for something more than the compulsory pizza and pasta that comprise the American college diet. Chinatown is still busy, tired faces under the coming rain. I pass an adult movie house and a smoke shop and finally duck into a narrow side street bordered by dark, postindustrial buildings. And there it is, sandwiched between a seedy video store and a greasy-windowed restaurant—my favorite sublevel market, nameless, fluorescent-lit, and beckoning.
The market is a wonder, an Asian Balducci’s of sorts. It is usually busy, filled with families and solitary older women who stoop over their carts and chatter impatiently at the annoyed stock clerks. The front of the market is dominated by freezer bins containing frozen buns, entire dim sum meals (in the style of Lean Cuisine), and packets of poultry parts I dare not guess the names for. Fruit abounds: oversized apples, bulging grapefruits, longan in a bucket, and, of course, the spiky, craggy, and foul-smelling durian. Vegetables have their own wall toward the back. Bok choy bottoms gleam in the white light, leeks and celery are stacked stalk by stalk, tofu floats in water. Adjacent to the produce is the seafood counter, next to which sits a bank of Plexiglas fish tanks containing discontented-looking creatures that, next to all the bright packaging, seem vaguely prehistoric. They swim in their holding cells while their felled brethren lie belly up on beds of ice beside them.
I am the only white face in the market and, feeling vaguely like a tourist, I cruise the isles with my basket, passing cans and boxes and vacuum-sealed packets of things I have never seen, the names of which I cannot read. The labels of soups and mixes feature photos and shoddy English. Candy labels boast rosy-cheeked children with eyes closed in delighted laughter. Here I make my selections: lychee nuts in syrup, pearl mushrooms, udon noodles, the dreaded wamoi. I wander past the housewares section, turning over soup spoons and Buddha statues, sniffing incense, poking snow globes.
As a kid, I used to take these trips with my parents. My mother and I would set out for Chinatown to get dim sum or venture off to the Little India section of New York for fiery-red tandoori chicken and yogurt lassi drinks. We’d hit the Union Square farmers’ market in the crisp fall air and select apples from wooden boxes and sample twice-baked dark pretzels. With Dad, it was a different kind of exotic: we ate the forbidden foods my mother loathed and banned from the house. At his office, we drank deliciously foul strawberry-milk beverages and ate from little white bags of marshmallow twists, giggling, at his desk. On the Roosevelt Island tram, we ate glazed doughnuts and Mc-Donald’s fries high above the East River, landing for a stop at the candy store for sour straws and Cokes.
Heaping my basket at the market, as much a delighted stranger here as I was in the adventure spots of my childhood, I think of them both. Roti and cabbage. Lemons and lentils. Goat cheese and pancakes. Mom and Dad.
The lady at the checkout counter gives me the once-over, takes my money without a word, and hands over my bright pink bags. I stuff them in my backpack and make my way home, up the four flights to my apartment. My roommates, watching television, studying, and lounging, look up.
“Whatcha got?” they ask me, pointing to the bags.
I look down at the tops of the cans, at the package of wamoi peeking up at me. My roommates crane their necks to see into the bags, hoping for cookies, cheese, packaged bread, the staples of our hodgepodge household. For a moment my choices seem strange, even to me, a blend of foods no normal person would put together. I consider what to say and toy with the plastic edge of the wamoi’s shrinkwrap, still half heavy with memories. I look back at my roommates; my bags are full but to them they are empty, the contents inedible. My treats and childhood favorites hold no context for them, no afternoon sojourns with Mom, no watching Dad twist the can opener in his trademark pajamas. So I shrug and head for the kitchen.
“Nothing,” I reply. “Just food.”