Dipping In to the Great American Melting Pot

It's funny how so many of our family memories, our ways of coping with stress, heartbreak and tragedy, and every single moment of celebration all revolve around food. At least at our house, whenever things go well or very, very awry, my response begins and ends in the kitchen, making something special for my family to bring us all back together again.  I feel like that is true for a lot of us.

Jonathan Gold got that fundamental truth: food is what knits the family together.

If you haven't watched the brilliant documentary -- City of Gold -- about Gold's work as a food critic at the LA Weekly and the LA Times, you should make the time to fix that right now.  Seriously, I'm not kidding, make time to watch it today.  His quirky, unapologetic love of good food is far away from the Anton Ego critic in Ratatouille, because he genuinely cares about the well-being of the people whose craft of food genius draws him into the restaurants he loves.

I've been thinking a lot about Jonathan Gold's work as I've made meal after meal for my family at home during this pandemic shut down, because I've been seriously contemplating how our food choices knit us together in a giant, patchwork tapestry here in America.

For example:  Why is there such a disconnect between people who love to eat out at a Mexican restaurant and those same people discriminating against hispanic folks in their neighborhood?  How much of our food tastes are cultural remnants, woven into the fibers of our DNA like some ancestral calling card, the nature outside of whatever food nurture you have built up from years of family meals?   How can our love of pure, ethnic goodness in our food choices not translate to a "love thy neighbor" feeling about people who are different from us -- if by "different" you mean skin tone or language, which we celebrate if it is our own or denigrate if it is not far too often these days.

One of the things that I love most about living in small town West Virginia is that because we are small in population but big in heart, we all begin to feel like family.  We care for one another, we reach out, and we check on those who are a little older and frail -- that's an important thing to do in a pandemic, and a lot easier when you already know and like your neighbors.


I feel like Covid-19's one thin silver lining has been that it reminds us that we are stronger when we work together for the greater good.

But one of the downsides to living in WV, is that ethnic restaurants can be scarce on the ground.  Where I live, great Italian food is around every corner -- back in the 1800s, my area had wave after wave of Italian immigrants from the sunny, southern coast coming here to work in the glass factories and the coal mines, and we have the Italian restaurants, pizza places and pepperoni roll bakeries to prove it.  We also have a decent Mexican/Guatamalan restaurant and a tasty place for the occasional shwarma, but that's about it.

If I want good Indian cuisine or a big bowl of Vietnamese pho with delicately spiced broth and fresh noodles?  I have to find a way to make it myself or we're hopping in the car to go to Pittsburgh -- which has not been a possibility during this pandemic shutdown.  Maybe that's why I have been thinking about food so much more lately -- because I've been cooking it 24/7 for my family, and what I'm really craving is the food that I crave when we travel a little further afield.

The Peanut and I were scheduled to take our dream trip to Europe this summer -- London, Paris, Rome, with long train trips and lots of sight seeing between each stop.  Thanks to the virus, that's off. Ugh.  Just like our spring break trip to Florida was also off the table, Europe right now -- especially the long plane ride across the Atlantic -- is just an impossible dream for the moment, because my cruddy lupus and cancer challenged immune system makes it not worth the risk for our family.

But...but...we're still healthy and safe and together, and that is worth a lot, right?  It absolutely is worth everything in the world to me.

I've been thinking that maybe this summer we'll do a lot of safer armchair travel instead.  Now that school is winding down, I have a little more space in my day and my mind to devote to planning a more exotic meal instead of lesson planning and hectic Zoom teaching.  For me, cooking is relaxing, meditative, and a way to put love on our table at every meal, which means a lot to me and my family. My cookbook collection is large, and the internet brings in even more possibilities for recipes that take me far, far away from our 3 little acres in WV.

A few years ago, I read a book that has been nagging in the back of my mind all through this pandemic -- The Turquoise Table: Finding Community and Connection in Your Own Front Yard.  The author cooked her way around the world, and in the process found like-minded people in her own backyard who longed for that same sense of connection, one to another, that sitting down to a meal around the table can bring you.  It was a profound message of hope and love, and one that I'd hoped someday to start as a regular thing in my own backyard.

This pandemic makes having a lot of people over for a potluck a little more of a challenge, through, doesn't it?

I've been missing those connections.  The ones that you make in public spaces, where you break bread and share in the little joys of life together.  We have restaurants in town where the waitstaff has watched The Peanut grown up through the years, where the guy behind the bar knows us by name, where we think of them as family because they truly are.  I've been missing that a lot, and even though we've been doing curbside take-out because we fervently believe in supporting all of these wonderful places in town that feel like home, it isn't quite the same.

So yesterday, we watched City of Gold for the umpteenth time, because I needed to vicariously walk in Jonathan Gold's shoes to all the adventurous meals he would have. I needed comfort viewing, I suppose, but it just made me hungry for more.

It occurred to me yesterday as I was falling asleep that I have a virtual backyard, and lots of friends who might like to share in a meal.  Even if it is just all of us cooking in our own separate kitchens and bonding over a pot of something delicious -- separately but still together.  So I'm going to start a series this summer on the recipes I cook for my own family that allow us to travel with our senses, even if we can't fully travel with our feet just yet.

In the process, I want to learn more about our own American melting pot, and I want our daughter to learn more about it, too.  Unless you are eating three sisters stew with some fry bread, you are eating something that comes from an immigrant cooking pot -- a lesson my history classes learned this year when we did a project on family immigration roots around Thanksgiving.  All of these different threads from different countries who chose to come here (not everyone chose, I know, but that's a whole other longer and bleaker conversation for another day) weave together to form our American tapestry, and it makes us stronger.  Our diversity makes our culture richer and more vibrant.

If I'm going to use some of this quarantine time to teach The Peanut how to cook, why not teach her with recipes that reflect the wider world around us as well as old family favorites and comfort classics?

All this to say, I'm going to post some recipes this summer as I cook them.  Feel free to try the ones that sound good to you, too.  Let's take a little time to savor our great American melting pot together. Pull up a chair...