Recipes for Trouble

A couple of weeks ago I joined my my mother, my brother The Aspiring Vintner and my niece The Aspiring Journalist in a trip to church to bless our baskets of food. It’s one of my favourite Ukrainian traditions. A basket is filled with the food that will be eaten at the Easter breakfast. Paska (the challah-like Easter bread). Meat (ham or garlic sausage). Butter, eggs, horseradish.

Looking down the aisle of the church, lined with dozens and dozens of carefully arranged baskets of food, I could see where it all comes from…

Our almost manic obsession with food. The commitment to its preparation. Food as language, food as epistemology.

Food as sacred text.

Soul food.

Every basket was unique work of domestic art, with its own embroidered towel, handmade Easter eggs, or particular arrangement of food. Some. People. Bring. Everything. said my brother in his usual dry way. I’m. Pretty. Sure. I. Saw. A. Basket. With. Booze. In. It.

We took photos outside the church. My niece wanted to recreate photos we’d taken with our baskets many years ago when she was a kid. I’m. Going. To. Post. The. Pictures. On. Facebook. she said.She’s in her twenties now, struggling to make a life for herself. Wistful, perhaps, for childhood. Knowing her for all these years, seeing her bright intelligence, her love of learning, I wished I could tell her: this is your best moment yet.

We went back to my mother’s house, to eat borscht, and make the cabbage rolls for the over-the-top Easter feast.

The cooking never stops.

Food memorializes each moment, makes sense of of displacement, change, history, and the passing of the years.

The Community Organizer, the youngest among us, lights the candles, signaling the beginning of the Seder, ceremonial meal of Passover.

The educated, urbane banter ceases for a time among the twelve women, aged thirty five to ninety-six, gathered around the table. We reluctantly put down our weapons and defenses: our jokes; our political analyses of BC’s neoliberal Liberals; our complaints about our jobs or our sex lives that mark our bodies and our souls.

We are reduced to ritual.

We take turns reading the Haggadah, rewritten by the Anti-Poverty Activist into a socialist feminist text in the tradition of secular Judaism. It draws from sources as diverse as The Women’s Haggadah by E.M. Broner, and a Haggadah edited by her grandfather and translated into English by her father. Words like liberation, slavery, freedom, intifada, and human rights fill our mouths, as familiar and unfamiliar as the charoset we eat halfway through the ceremony.

This is family too. Like any family, there are new and old faces. The Film Editor is as permanent in my life as any blood relative, the raucous evenings of wine and cigarettes we’ve shared as crucial to me as any family gathering. The Queer Organizer, whom I’ve known for over twenty years is in Vancouver unexpectedly for a funeral, an ex-lover who’s died of cancer. Her face glows with grief, vulnerability, and her own steadfast humour, as she holds the afikomen aloft.

The Bartender, experiencing her first Seder, watches the proceedings closely, as though memorizing each moment. She co-owns a local cafe that has become as comfortable for me as my mother’s livingroom.The Elder fiddles with her hearing aid, tells us wryly and without self pity what a nightmare this contraption is.

We write down modern-day plagues, read them to each other. Poverty. Colonialism. Capitalism. Homelessness. Not Believing in Yourself. Cancer comes up twice.

We read, drink wine, dip parsley in salt water. We wash one anothers’ hands. And finally, dig in to roast chicken and potatoes, tsimmes and salad.

By the end of the evening there is a sweet, lovely energy in the room. Twelve women, one conversation. There is no competitiveness, no sarcasm, no complaining. It is as though the prophet Elijah himself, bearer of hope and good tidings, has entered the room through the open door.

The smell of rain, of earth, of cedars, and of roast chicken, floats serenely in the air.

I make cheesecake with my mother for the Easter meal. She sighs impatiently as I struggle with the food processor, tsks at the not-quite-stiff texture of my beaten eggwhites. It is like working with a master chef; I am the eternal apprentice.

The recipe has been passed on by her friend, one of the women I lovingly call The Divas of the Church. It is akin to a religious text; there is doctrine, ritual, and discipline embedded in its directives. What’s more, the author of this recipe will be coming over in a few days to taste the cheesecake, and this may explain some of the tension in the air.

It is a beautiful sunny day. I am honoured to be asked to help with the cheesecake. I am of two minds, two hearts. I long to walk in the River Valley, and leave this small, warm kitchen with all of its traditional, labour- intensive, culinary demands.

Still, my senses are alive to this moment. The sharp smell of the lemon zest. The beauty of her graceful, wrinkled hands working the pastry dough. The simple artistry with which she decorates the cake: a dusting of icing sugar, a spray of daisies. Her serenity as she does so.

We have lunch with the nieces and grand niece, six of us crowded around my mother’s tiny kitchen table, perogies at the centre, my mother at the head.There isn’t much talking: there is borscht to be eaten, its blood red hue staining our lips; two kinds of perohy, potato and sauerkraut; two kinds of cake for dessert. Peyton, the youngest, is happily passed from arm to arm.

The ages in this room range from two to eighty-two.

There is youth, and old age, and energy, history, anxiety, longing, love, and hope, here, in this kitchen, that in this moment, is home for me.

We were at a party. Neither of us knew very many people there. Over canapes and the white wine, we got to talking.

She was a straight, late 30’s musician/secretary who has immersed herself in Lava Life, the online dating network.

I’m doing it my way. she said. I’m using it to expand my network. You have to be disciplined. I check my Lava Life mail once a week. I delete all the innapropriate ones immediately.

Like many straight female users of social networking I’ve met, she was open, unabashed, and very pragmatic. I’m. Open. To. Anything. she said. I. Might. Not. Feel. Attracted. To. A Guy. I. Meet. But who knows. I. Might. Fall. In. Love. With. His. Roommate. I laughed, charmed by her candour and kooky logic.

The queers are much more ambivalent. Indeed, we’d been invited to the party by a mutual friend who’d just started dating someone new. An aficionado of craigslist, she’d met this woman in real life, and was inordinately proud of it. There we were, in a roomful full of both of their friends and family. This. Feels. Much. More. Grounded. she confided to me. I. Never. Want. To. Go. Online. Again.

That’s the thing about online dating. You meet without the cushion of mutual friends, a shared hockey team, or a common community history.

But you do meet.

Like most online/offline lists of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to decide on either/or. I guess it’s about not letting real time encounters lose their lustre or their importance. People cross your path in so many unpredictable ways. Someone smiles at you across a crowded party, or eyes you in a restaurant as both of you wait, awkwardly and self consciously, for your Vietnamese takeout. Someone messages you, sends you a flirtacious email.

What’s real? What isn’t? Online personals are a hybrid space…open and restrictive; vulnerable to surveillance, yet, also, a place, a village, a community of sorts… of seeing and being seen.

What do you think?

[I'll get back to talking about food soon, very soon....]