NOVEMBER 2008
In the fall of 1985, a few months after China opened the Tibetan border, Jeffrey Alford from Laramie, Wyoming, met Naomi Duguid from Toronto on the roof of a hotel dormitory for foreigners in Lhasa. It was ten at night, and since there were no lights on the roof to see by, they sat in the dark, listening to the sound of chimes and chanting, and began to talk—which turns out to have been the best way to get acquainted. They had this in common: they were restless; they were at home in strange and forbidding places; they were attached to the early albums of Herbie Hancock; and they liked to eat. But it was hard to imagine them getting acquainted in what you would call the real world—let alone getting married, writing cookbooks, and ending up members in high standing of a small scholarly circle of food writers whose work leaves the rest of the food world far behind, collecting recipes.
Duguid, known to her friends as Nom, was a tall, streaky-blond, hazel-eyed lawyer of thirty-five, with a house and a boyfriend at home, and she was traveling through Asia on a five-month work sabbatical, hoping to resolve the question of why the offer of a partnership in the Toronto firm where she had labored happily for nearly five years had made her want to flee. Alford was thirty-one, a tall, skinny, ponytailed seeker of truth with a master’s degree in creative writing, a passion for the East, a light heroin habit, and a reputation for supporting his wanderlust with tag sales in his parents’ front yard—his father was a vice-president of the University of Wyoming—and with odd jobs as a gold and cash courier on the South Asia smuggling circuit. At the time, he and five recruits were getting ready to cross the Himalayas, from Lhasa to Kathmandu, on mountain bikes, for a magazine called Bicycle Rider, which was planning to run a piece by Alford about cycling in Tibet. Duguid was traveling with the eighty-two-year-old Swiss writer Ella Maillart, a legendary adventurer whose letters Nehru once claimed had saved his sanity in prison, and whom Duguid had met for the first time that September in another foreigners’ dorm, in Kunming. “Nom always meets everybody,” Alford says. “Even me.”
The logistics of love are daunting at twelve thousand feet—Alford describes their attempt at a kiss as “two sheets of sandpaper scraping”—but not, as it were, insurmountable. Ten days later, Duguid wrote a letter of resignation to her law firm—“Dear guys, It’s not the altitude, but I’m not coming back”—placed an awkward call to her boyfriend, and set out to explore Nepal with a couple of anthropologists she had just met, while Alford finished his assignment. She wasn’t worried about their future, because they had already covered all the big, important “life things.” Did they want a family? Could they have one and keep traveling? How would they pay for “a life open to the world”? By November, they had made their way south to Thailand and were camped on an island beach, where Alford started to withdraw. (“I had scored this big hit in Hong Kong. I gave it away. But I had thought, ‘How do I explain this part of my life to Nom?’ She was great.”) It took four days, and they got through them talking about all the places that were left to see and how to get there.
A month later, they flew home. Alford met Duguid’s friends, including her old law-firm colleagues at Sack, Charney, Goldblatt & Mitchell, whose view of her defection, as she describes it, ran from disbelief to “we’re sorry for us but exhilarated for you.” Duguid met Alford’s friends and got to know his family. Her own family—her father, a navigational engineer; her mother, a physiotherapist for disabled children; and her only brother—had died by the time she was twenty-seven, and she told the Alfords that until Jeff “so much loss” had kept her running from anything like a settled life. A few months later, they were married and back in Asia, crossing the Pamir and Karakoram mountains—from Kashgar, in the Turkic province of Xinjiang, to Gilgit, in Pakistan—on a pair of red mountain bikes.
They began writing together about biking together, perhaps because in those days Duguid was better on a bike than in the kitchen, where long workdays had left her pretty much limited to baking bread—something her mother had taught her—and boiling pasta. But Alford, by his account, was already obsessed with food. He had cooked his way through his mother’s Joy of Cooking by the age of twenty, worked as “the sauté guy” at a fancy Laramie restaurant as a University of Wyoming undergraduate, and learned the rudiments of Thai cooking from a student from Bangkok who worked there with him. He was also passionate about baking. When he wrote his master’s thesis—his adviser, the novelist John Edgar Wideman, had told him, “Write me a story about the things you know”—he called it “Bread, Travel, and Drugs,” which just about covered nine months he had just spent in a cottage-cum-student crash pad on the Dingle Peninsula, hiking, smoking pot, and perfecting his landlady’s recipe for Irish soda bread. “I love utilitarian things,” he says. “I loved being in that kitchen, I loved the smell of the bread and the steamy windows and my sour-green-apple jam sitting on the sill.” After a month in the Pamirs—in the course of which he tasted “some amazing flatbreads,” and confessed to Duguid that he wanted to write a flatbread book—he started looking through food magazines and said to her, “Wait a minute, I can do this. I know more about food than anything.” Their first food article, “Delicious Asian Flatbreads,” appeared in Bon Appétit in 1988. (They got a thousand dollars for it, or about what Duguid would have been bringing in for a day’s work as a partner at Sack, Charney.) A year later, they published a piece on Thai drinking food—the tapas of Southeast Asia—in Food & Wine, which discreetly called it “Be Cool … with Spicy Thai Salads.” “We write to travel” is how Duguid describes their life since then. “It was never the other way around.”
By now, Alford and Duguid have raised two sons and written six books. And while their books are undeniably cookbooks (two James Beard Awards for Cookbook of the Year, for a start), they are also cultural encounters—travel journals, stories, history lessons, and photographic essays that, taken together, explore the imagination and the exigencies that produce a cuisine and in many ways define the people who create it. The couple have been called culinary anthropologists, but culinary geographers is at least as accurate. They prefer “friendly amateurs.” Ann Bramson, their editor and publisher at Artisan Books in New York—who inherited their first manuscript in the mid-nineties, languishing neglected at another press, and has been shepherding their books since then—says that she recognized them right away as “prodigious readers and unaccredited scholars,” and was determined to do justice to them with books that were serious enough to accommodate their field photographs and uncommon texts and at the same time striking enough to make you stop, look, read, and reflect on your way to a recipe that you might otherwise never think of trying. (Duguid, an accomplished photographer, “does people,” and Alford, who has turned himself into one, does the mise-en-scène, a job he more or less described this way: “I’m not a ruin kind of guy, but there were these ruins, so I took the picture.”) A few critics have found them too striking or, as Mark Bittman in the Times once put it, would have preferred more recipes. James Oseland, the editor of Saveur, disagreed. “People pick up a book of Nom and Jeff’s, and they know that it’s something else, something more than a cookbook,” he told me after a lecture they gave at the Asia Society in New York. “It’s their overriding sense of humanity that sets them apart from the flock. They’re taking the exotic out of the everyday in every sense, not simply the recipe sense. They’re telling you, ‘It’s just the world. The world won’t hurt you. Don’t be scared.’”
That world has nothing to do with states and borders. They write about foods, like grains or rice, that nearly everyone cultivates and, in one form or another, eats—their first book, Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas, took them to four continents in six years—and, most often, about the kind of cooking that defines what they call the “real regions,” which are ethnic or even tribal and topographical and ignore the boundaries of nation-states to form culinary countries of their own. Hot Sour Salty Sweet, their third book, was about the food cooked by the peoples of the Mekong Valley, and for it, they followed the river from near its source, high on the Tibetan plateau, through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, and down to the delta in Vietnam where it meets the South China Sea. Beyond the Great Wall, their sixth, was a culinary tour through the hinterland cultures of “the other China”—cultures beyond the pale of the country’s insistent Han identity—and took the Alford-Duguids from Tibet to the Xinjiang-Kazakh border, and from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the rice terraces of southern Yunnan. Alford calls it a book about survival.
They travel light, on anything headed in the right direction—a riverboat, a mountain bus, a truck that stops for them on an empty road, a train with a thousand people hanging out the windows. When nothing shows up, they hitchhike or rent a bike or walk. Duguid, who on one trip to China rode from a Dong village in Guizhou to a bus stop near the Guangxi border “strapped onto the back of someone’s motorcycle with my backpack, my camera pack, my tripod, and three Guizhou stools,” calls this “staying vulnerable” to the people, the place, and the possibility of a new taste wherever they get dropped off. “They still travel the way I did when I was twenty and backpacking through Europe, going where the wind blew me,” Tina Ujlaki, the food editor at Food & Wine, says. “They talk about arriving in a place and having no idea of what they’ll find there. The awe that comes with that—it’s always present.”
Alford once told me that his father’s idea of travel was to cajole one of his three boys into the family Rambler—Jeff was the most willing—and drive to Colorado to play the dog races. “We’d sleep in the car and in the morning head for the truck stop with the best cinnamon rolls,” he said, sending me back to Alford and Duguid’s fourth cookbook—Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World—for the recipe: yeast, water, oil, salt, brown sugar, cinnamon, and thirteen cups of flour make a dozen rolls, and you won’t need anything else on the ride home. The first real traveling that Alford did was a bicycle trip through Wales, the summer after his freshman year in college, and he describes it this way: “I was sooooo lonesome. I missed my parents. I wanted to go home.”
Duguid, however, had been traveling since childhood—first with her family, and then as a student after her father died, on a legacy from a great-aunt who “saw to it that I didn’t owe.” By the time she finished college—she read geography at Queen’s University in Ontario, with a year abroad at the London School of Economics—she had already seen “some nice bits” of Africa. By the end of law school, she knew India and Nepal. Two years after getting her degree, she was back in India. She calls that trip an experiment in “living undefended, unintroduced, and depending on serendipity.” She was also, by all accounts, a brilliant lawyer. She had what her college roommate and University of Toronto law-school classmate Trisha Jackson calls “that special combination of intellect and intuition and engagement.” But she had no interest in a white-shoe practice. At law school, she had volunteered to work with immigrants at a legal-aid clinic. As a lawyer, she specialized in labor arbitration, “always for the labor side.” She was a radical in a suit. She loved immigrant Toronto and rented an apartment in a house on Henry Street, just around the corner from the ethnic olio of food stores known in the city as Kensington Market. (The year before she left for Tibet, she bought a house of her own on the same block.) She wanted to know where everybody came from, what their families did, and what their lives had been like in, say, India or China. And whenever she could, she went back to Asia.
Alford began what he calls his “Asia adventures” in 1977. He says that, unlike Duguid, who is instantly at ease with strangers, he was “too shy” for conversation and would simply dig in wherever he landed for a couple of months, not saying much until people got used to him. He was able to live in Asia on very little money, and when he ran out, he usually found a way to make more. (His brother Jim, who is an artist in Santa Fe, told me, “He left on that first trip with twelve hundred dollars, and he came home two years later with twelve hundred dollars, and I didn’t ask.”) He bought clove oil in Sri Lanka and sold it to Ayurvedics in India, and then he bought Indian saris to sell in Sri Lanka. He bought jewelry in Thailand and Nepal, hawked it at his Laramie yard sales, and paid for his next plane ticket with the profits. His days as a smugglers’ courier began in 1981, and they took him from Hong Kong to Kathmandu (where the airport metal detectors were always broken) with, as he usually describes it, “five pounds of gold up my bum.” He made eight hundred dollars for every flight, with two hundred more thrown in for the flight back, which involved the arguably easier job of carrying twenty thousand dollars in a money belt. He could live for a year on a thousand dollars. That was his life until he decided to write a story about bicycling across the Himalayas and met Duguid on a roof in Lhasa. “Here was my vagabond brother, moving into her life,” Jim Alford told me. “It took a lot of courage, maybe even more for him than for her.”
One of the things that Alford and Duguid decided, early on in Lhasa, was that any children they had should travel with them—which means that for the better part of fifteen years they packed up their boys in November, along with the books and the homework, the Beanie Babies and the Legos, and deposited them back in their classrooms at the end of January. Dominic—a senior at the University of Toronto now—rode from Cholon to Saigon on the back of a motorcycle at the age of two; Tashi, a Toronto freshman, started walking at one, in Tafraout. Neither seems to have suffered from his peripatetic life, or in fact to have found it at all unusual. (It lasted until Dom’s eleventh-grade French teacher started giving him zeros for incomplete assignments.) Sometimes they missed the sandwiches—bread by Duguid—in their school lunch boxes, or at least preferred them to some of the food they tasted traveling; Tash hates onions, garlic, scallions, chives, and “every other oniony thing,” and Dom’s view of seafood is “I have trouble being at the same table with a fish.” But Tash talks casually about the day he ran off a path in Laos—he was eight then—hoping to climb the biggest funeral jar in the Plain of Jars, and had to be rescued from a minefield. And Dom includes in his list of “fun times” the night a plane taking the family from Rangoon to Mandalay made a mysterious stop and left them stranded on a darkened airstrip outside Taunggyi, the capital of Burma’s dissident Shan State; they ended up in a hotel room with one bed and a television set and got to watch the playoffs between the Denver Broncos and the Pittsburgh Steelers. (He was eleven when that happened.) Between them, the boys can name twenty-five or thirty countries where they have traveled. When I asked Dom if they were ever scared, he said, “Why? Nom and Jeff were with us.”
Tash describes his parents’ way of working abroad like this: “When we traveled, I was always very confused. We’d eat somewhere, leave, go back to the same place, eat more. I’d say, ‘Guys, call back! Get the recipe!’ But they didn’t need to. They ‘see’ recipes.” Alford and Duguid’s methods are, by their own admission, odd. “We don’t ‘do’ interviews,” Duguid says. “We don’t take notes unless we’re asked to. We engage. We appreciate. We’re there to learn.” (They don’t use translators, either; they figure that by now, between them, they can get by in about a dozen languages.) Even the diaries they keep at night on the road are sketchy. Mainly they depend on the photographs they take—at last count, an archive of more than a hundred thousand color slides—as aides-mémoire and on the kind of confidence that comes from months spent watching and tasting and listening, or as Alford calls it, “hanging out.”
They also rely on Duguid’s prodigious memory. She remembers everything—from the date she sailed to Europe with her parents on the Empress of England (May 12, 1961) to the minutiae of cases she argued twenty-five years ago to the names and smells and colors and textures of foods she sampled months before in a Tajik yurt near the Khunjerab Pass or at a stand in a market in northern Laos, and the order in which different cooks put those foods in the pot, and even the shape of the pot. Alford, for his part, absorbs what could be called the praxis of a particular place: the way a fire is tended in Tibet, where even a cup of tea can take an hour to heat; the way the spices are ground and roasted separately for a coconut-chicken curry in Kandy; the way a mound of sticky dough turns into a five-foot strand of “flung noodles” when a burly Uighur grabs each end and, with a flick of his wrists, sends it looping through the air—a process that he and Duguid describe in Beyond the Great Wall and admit to never having mastered.
Sometimes they miss something or remember wrong. (The “spicy chickpea fritters,” from their fifth book, Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent, will fall apart unless you think to beat a couple of eggs and add them.) Sometimes their recipes are more interesting than appealing; it is hard to imagine working up an appetite for Tibetan bone broth, even if you take their advice and substitute oxtails or beef shanks for the yak. But most of the time they send you straight to the kitchen. I’ve cooked from their books since Hot Sour Salty Sweet came out, in 2000, and I made an instantly addictive Thai soup—the one with, among other good things, wild lime leaves, bird chilies, oyster mushrooms, lemongrass, and a lot of fresh shrimp. James Oseland from Saveur told me, “The difference between Nom and Jeff is precisely what makes them complementary as observers. Nom is the person reaching out, leaning over, looking into the pot of that soup lady in Thailand and finding out how many kids she has, and Jeff is the one who is there, quiet, filing away the information in his head, processing it, and someday they will use it together.”
Duguid and Alford live with their sons in the house on Henry Street that Duguid bought the year before she went to Tibet—a brick Victorian row house with a garden in back and a small carriage house off the alley behind it. They have not changed much in twenty-three years, though Duguid’s idea of a great suit now is apt to involve an antique Akha tribal jacket from a Laotian flea market and a pair of jeans, and Alford’s ponytail has long been replaced by short, if unruly, gray hair, trimmed at home by a hairdresser he met in the park one day; she told him that he “needed work.” But the house has changed. It is stuffed with memories of travel, in the form of fabrics, hangings, bowls, pots, posters, jewelry, and a lot of unidentifiable objects that Duguid refers to generically as “rescued stuff.” It is also where they write their books, reconstruct the flavors they carry home in their heads from halfway around the world, and consult a food and travel library that over the years has spilled out of the big study they share on the second floor up to the door of the master bedroom, on the third, and down to the workshop in the basement where Alford listens to world music, restores whatever “useful” (or possible) furniture he finds, discarded, on Toronto’s sidewalks—the family eats at a big open maple counter that was once a length of floorboards in the local Chinese Methodist church—and mends old bicycles, including the two red mountain bikes that saw them safely from Kashgar to Gilgit in 1986.
When the Alford-Duguids work on a book at home, they divide the recipes between them, cook something, and then see if the other eats it or thinks it’s “right.” Duguid describes the testing they do as a kind of translation, because they cook in a simple hand-me-down Western kitchen, with ingredients that any of their neighbors would be able to find, albeit with some effort, in an Asian market. She says that they test “by taste,” though this is a term that for her can include the smells from the brazier in a tribal kitchen and even the stories the women cooking in it tell. They are less interested in accuracy than in authenticity. (The exception, of course, is baking.) Call it the evocation of a world on a plate. I spent a couple of weeks with them in Toronto, and on my first day in their kitchen Duguid told me to stop worrying about what their recipes said, because “our whole point is that you’re not a cookbook, you’re in your own kitchen with your own pots and pans: relax, go to the market, think ‘yummy,’ and use what’s there.” She and Alford are splendid cooks—which doesn’t always follow from being splendid cookbook writers—but if dinner on Henry Street is “less good” sometimes, she says, “it’s not the end of everything.”
Alford likes his recipes simple. “Pure” and “cheap” is the way he describes his style. Their friend Ethan Poskanzer, who claims the distinction of knowing the Alford-Duguids before they knew each other—he crashed (and cooked) with Alford in Ireland as a student, and a few years later turned up at law school in Toronto with Duguid and then at the same law firm—told me that “if there are only three ingredients in one of Jeff and Nom’s recipes I know the influence is his.” Today I read their cookbooks with this in mind. The Hani pork jerky in Beyond the Great Wall, which came from a sidewalk vendor in Jiangcheng, near the Laos border, is unmistakably Alford’s—pork butt, coarse salt, black pepper—and so is the story of how he came to eat it: “I was feeling a little let down by Jiangcheng the next morning as I waited for the bus. Then I spotted a Hani woman with a woven basket sitting on the sidewalk … everything got better from there on.” Duguid, on the other hand, likes her food “bountifully simple,” to which she often adds “soft” and “maybe a little sweet.” Her stir-fry with pork and chives, on the facing page, starts with red chilies, minced garlic, and thin slices of cornstarch-coated pork loin, each seared in a little peanut oil and then combined and enriched with a new taste or texture every minute or two: salt and chives, then broth, then soy sauce, and at the end, a sprinkling of fresh coriander. In the book, she describes the effect this way: “This pork stir-fry from Yunnan uses chives for flavor and color. The strands of green are very pretty among the strips of pork. You can substitute garlic shoots if you wish, or else scallions, cut into ribbons.”
A few days before I left Toronto, Alford and Duguid decided to have a dinner party—meaning that whenever a friend called that morning Duguid, who is irrepressibly hospitable, said “Come.” At noon, with the guest list at ten and growing, she told me, “Well, do we want to muddle along today, stretch some Kazakh noodles, or seize the day with marketing,” and the three of us headed to Kensington Market to shop. Alford markets the way he cooks: he buys just what he needs and nothing more, and if something is missing, he makes do. But Duguid markets the way she cooks; whatever she sees that pleases her goes into her shopping bag. (Alford, who had been thinking of a “simple feast,” maybe some noodle soup and grilled boar, quickly headed off to a music store, saying he couldn’t bear to watch.) We came home with rhubarb, ginger, and asparagus from a Tamil organic grocer called Potz; coconut milk, pickled mustard greens, and chili-bean paste from the Hua Sheng Chinese Supermarket; rice flour and mung dal from the Indians at House of Spice; pressed tofu from the Vietnamese “tofu lady” at Fong On; and limes and celery root from the Portuguese greengrocer. Duguid used it all.
The asparagus and the limes ended up in a Thai chicken and vegetable salad. The rhubarb topped an “anyday skillet cake” from Home Baking. (“I do my grandmother’s thing,” she said, plunging the stalks into hot and then cold water three times. “Rhubarb leaves fuzzies in your mouth usually, but not this way.”) She minced the ginger with garlic, shook them into some hot peanut oil in her favorite wok, stirred for a minute, added the chili-bean paste, stirred some more, added the celery root, peeled and sliced, and a little soy sauce, tasted it, sprinkled salt, stirred again, and simmered it all in boiling water. Meanwhile, she had started the dal—a Henry Street staple—sniffed it, thought for a bit, and tossed in a handful of the mustard greens. While the dal cooked, we dry-roasted some Ethiopian coffee beans, wolfed down a lunch of pickled-vegetable and pork-pâté sandwiches from the local Vietnamese takeout, and tried the tofu. The phone rang, and with the receiver scrunched to her ear, she talked a Washington food reporter through a recipe for Tibetan stew while measuring the water for a pot of Asian rice (place the tip of your index finger on the rice; stop pouring when you get to the first knuckle).
Forty minutes into these whirlwind preparations, she instructed me on the essentials of a Thai beef salad, somewhat embellished since it first appeared in Seductions of Rice, their second book, but still the recipe everyone mentions as the one they can almost taste, just by reading the ingredients: rare sliced sirloin, lettuce, cabbage, shallots, cucumber, dandelion vinegar, fresh coriander, pepper, minced hot chili, lime juice, and “whatever else looks good,” as long as it’s laced with Thai fish sauce, preferably the kind with the picture of a squid on the bottle. When she finished the list, she laughed and said, “How good is that!”
Alford, meanwhile, had been rolling cracker dough with a French pin—a long narrow walnut cylinder that he had dug out of a drawer full of flatbread stamps and rolling pins, many of them tin chapati pins that they bought in India in 2004, researching Mangoes & Curry Leaves. Alford controls the production of all things dry, flat, and salty on Henry Street (and Duguid the production of loaf breads and most of the cakes), and he is passionate and precise about his crackers (a teaspoon of salt and a cup of “warmish” water to every two cups of organic whole-wheat flour in the food processor). He rolls his dough to the kind of paper thinness that bakes in a minute or two and breaks into hot, crisp chips. “Push from the body, not the arms,” he kept telling me when I tried the pin. He sprinkled the first few batches of dough with Parmesan, stopped for a short argument with Duguid, who loathes Parmesan crackers—“The cheese burns and everything turns bitter and it’s like the terrible crunch of burnt toast in your mouth,” she says—and put the cheese down after she started tossing coriander leaves into a pot of pristine chicken soup (chicken and water) that he had simmering on the stove. Dom, who was home by then, told me that his parents rarely fought, but that they did have “some intense discussions” about food.
Alford had promised me a lesson in making the Kazakh soup noodles from Beyond the Great Wall—flour, salt, and water, stretched by thumb and, in his kitchen, dried on a rack that had started life as a neighbor’s deck chair—so we slapped together some batter, with the help of a friend who had come early for a lesson, too, and had been waylaid slicing celery root. When the rack was full, we switched to hand-rolled Guizhou rice noodles, which you shape into balls between the palms of your hands and then flatten into pointy ovals by rubbing the palms together. (It’s harder than it sounds.) They felt gummy, so we dropped a few into Alford’s broth. Duguid tried one, pronounced it “tough”—it was—checked the label on the sack she had just bought, and said, “Aha, a rice-flour issue! This comes from India. It should have been Chinese flour. Much finer.”
By then the house was full of people. (The youngest was two.) They sniffed the pots, said “ummm” or “cool”—the one prerequisite for food and friendship at the Alford-Duguids is a healthy contempt for the rhetoric of culinary appreciation—poured some wine from an assortment of bottles and Tetra Pak cartons, and settled down on the garden steps to watch Alford feed charcoal into an old Weber for a roast of rubbed wild boar. (His rub is Thai fish sauce and a lot of pepper: “accessible home cooking,” as he describes it.) Dina Fayerman, a high school English teacher and cookbook collector who met the couple at a concert of “two-headed Ethiopian lutes” in 1992 and quickly became their bottom-line taster and grammarian, sat down next to me, and we began to talk. A few days earlier, I had asked Fayerman to describe them, from her point of view as a Jewish intellectual who could tell a Montreal bagel from a Toronto bagel in a blind tasting. “They have that Wasp virtue of not being sheeted and compressed, that pioneer thing that drives people to repudiate expectations,” she told me. “I’ve watched them making sausage. They have no casing. Nom cuts the ends off a big plastic tonic bottle, pushes the meat in one end and out the other, and it’s a sausage. Jeff does the same thing with one clean sock, and saves the mate. They mesh with each other because they’re so completely different.”
We served ourselves at the kitchen counter and ate in the garden. Nobody talked about food then. A television producer named Anne Mackenzie told me a funny story about trying to talk the CBC into a cooking show with the Alford-Duguids called Eyes Wide Open. (“Forget the movie,” she said. “It’s the way they travel around the world. And besides, it sounded cheaper to do than Nom’s title, A Travelers’ Kitchen.”) Dom, who is thinking about a doctorate in analytic philosophy, showed me his reading list. Tash emerged from a laptop session on the living room couch to announce that reticulated pythons were thirty-seven feet long. Duguid, who just that week had spotted the first lilies of the valley of the season coming up nicely a few feet from the front steps, wondered aloud if her delphiniums were doing as well at the family’s farm—ninety acres of fields and woods outside the town of Durham, a couple of hours northwest of Toronto, where the Alford-Duguids spend their summers and weekends. She was worried about skunks digging up her beds for grubs. Alford was worried about groundhogs—“my Moby-Dick”—digging up his fields. It was a warm night. We looked at the stars and ate. Everything was delicious. Toward ten, Fayerman held up her empty plate, shook her head, and said, “What do I need to cook for when I’ve got Nom and Jeff living down the street?”
Duguid likes cooking with friends around. She likes the conversation, the gossip, the chance to hear a good story. She takes her time, and she isn’t bothered when dishes pile up in the sink. She says, “Friends in the kitchen? What could be more communal than that?” Alford likes cooking alone—the concentration, the economy of thought and gesture. “Nom will take an interest in what I’m cooking—she’s more experimental, she has such an active head,” he says. “But I have zero desire to hear her suggestions for change.” He washes the pots and the plates he uses as he goes along and “all the surfaces, then the fridge.” By dinnertime, the floor is mopped and the kitchen is clean. “For me, it’s a kind of meditation,” he told me. “Like building our barn at the farm or making a stone wall or quilting. It’s all the same.” (Alford learned quilting from his mother; he makes quilts, mends quilts, and will happily spend “more money than I ever spend on anything” if he comes across a nineteenth-century double pink at a flea market.) Duguid likes the buzz of Toronto life—dim sum with friends, a morning at the museum, her weekly belly-dance classes, the pleasure of being anonymous in a big city. Alford, whose concession to city life mainly involves a morning trip to the corner Starbucks for a cup of coffee, prefers the farm—a day on his John Deere tractor or out in the woods, hacking paths, while Duguid gardens or drives to the shape-note group she sings with.
Duguid likes the party they throw in Toronto in December, the night before New Year’s Eve, with the house so crowded and toasty and the kitchen so full of good smells. Alford prefers the party they throw at the farm in July, although he complains afterward about the lawyers who drive up from the city in “a stream of BMWs.” He says that the lawyers intimidate him. (Duguid tells him, “Phooey, it’s you who intimidate them. Get over it. Preserve the harmony.”) The party at the farm lasts all weekend. Alford keeps a wood fire going in the grilling pit that he put together with rocks from the farm and rebar grating from a local hardware store. People pitch tents, and if it’s chilly at night, they grab some padding from a pile of down jackets that he and Duguid buy by the armful at a Toronto resale establishment called the Pound, where two dollars buys a pound of clothes. They hold figure-eight bicycle races. They dance to a DJ’s track and to Alford’s remix disks in the big barn that the family has been rebuilding since 2000—the year after they bought the farm and started stripping the farmhouse—with the help of a local writer, barn scholar, and shiitake farmer by the name of Jon Radojkovic. Radojkovic, who has since become Alford’s closest friend, told me that there were “two Jeffs”: the Jeff from Toronto, who doesn’t answer the phone, and the Jeff from Durham, who farms all day and talks by the fire all night.
Last summer, Alford and Duguid decided that the time had come to take on separate projects. They were at an impasse on the research for a new book, about Celtic cooking. Duguid had flown to Galicia and Asturias in November, to see what remained of traditional Celtic food in fusion Spain, and hadn’t found much besides spelt bread. Alford had flown to Wales and found some, but most of the people cooking it were rich Londoners in weekend cottages. (“The best thing I learned in Wales was when I passed this guy, way out on the Llŷn Peninsula, who was building stone walls,” he says. “I pulled over. He taught me so much about walls!”) In the end, they were relieved to stop. Duguid, who has always thought of herself as “a photographer first and a food writer second,” wanted to put together a book of her own—a book of photographs and maybe an exhibit to go with it—about “how humankind has fed itself, but without being geeky.” The title she had in mind was Food Everywhere (“from planting and threshing to herding and marketing and cooking,” she said), and she had already started taking pictures for it, on a trip to Ethiopia last spring. “There was an aroma of butter and woodsmoke in the air—I thought of Tibet,” she told me. “And the people? They were ecstatic, they were kissing their churches, they were melding with the walls!”
Alford, for his part, was thinking about some time on his own in Thailand. He had fallen in love with Thailand in the seventies, on his first trip—with the food, the language, the music, the dancing that starts in the bars at midnight and goes on till five in the morning—and since then had managed to get back nearly every year. Three years ago, he and Duguid bought an apartment on the “liveliest, tastiest street” in Chiang Mai, sixty miles from the Burma border; he calls Chiang Mai “the city where I belong.” (“People are so much their jobs in Toronto,” he told me, “but in Chiang Mai I’m the one with more of a job than anybody.”) Last fall, writing there every day, he finished his first novel—a “love story” about four young junkies hanging on to each other and to their tattered lives in a Kathmandu flophouse called the Bluebird Lodge. He wanted to go back and begin a new one: “I’m thinking, it’s about northern Thailand, a year in the same place, some food in it, with me as the fly on the wall.”
There was nothing to stop them. The boys were in college, the world would survive for a while longer without Celtic recipes, and as Duguid said, they never compete for space; they cede it. Alford put it this way: “We’re massive talkers, we negotiate.” But a few months later, to no one’s surprise but theirs, they set those plans aside and called Ann Bramson about a new cookbook they were going to write together. “It was a Saturday, but we were so excited, we called her cell phone and caught her in the middle of brunch with friends,” Duguid wrote to me that week. The book was going to be “Burma-focused,” because Burma, with its variety of tribal peoples, “closes the loop of food cultures” between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and because “the situation in Burma makes it all the more obvious and necessary to go”—and of course because the food there is spectacularly interesting. They were going to base themselves in Chiang Mai. Alford could start his new novel, and since they would both be there, why not hold a series of Chiang Mai cooking classes, featuring their local street vendors? Alford, in his own letter, called it “a chance to do something, workwise, to help make money for people we know who are struggling to survive.” They plan to leave this winter, right after their Toronto party. As Duguid says, “How good is that!”
Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford separated and divorced in 2009. Since then, Alford has lived and cooked with a Thai woman in a Khmer village near the Cambodia border, and has produced a book about the food there. Duguid has spent much of the last ten years in exhaustive culinary commutes, first from Toronto to Burma—as a food scholar, she was one of the only Westerners allowed to travel freely there—and then to Iran and the four neighboring states of what she calls the Persian culinary region. The books she produced in those years, Burma: Rivers of Flavor and Taste of Persia, were instant classics.