News & Blog
Sage Tea, Spices and Spaces
Amal Awad, Meanjin magazine, Winter 2020
It was a random post on social media, but it unexpectedly moved me: a woman asking, for research purposes, what is something your mother can do that you cannot? There are many in my case, but my instant response was: I can’t cook like my mother. Soon followed a deeper realisation: I wish I could cook like my mother.
I am a Third Culture Kid, belonging everywhere and nowhere, proficient in Arab-lish (that odd combination of Arabic and English that forms a new word). As an adult, I take some strange pleasure in this lack of belonging, and yet the moment I return to my parents’ house and smell the aroma of Arabic food, I feel like I am home. Not in the contained space of the kitchen or the living room, but in the scent of ingredients that are familiar, warming and aromatic. The nostalgia it creates; it aches. No matter how far I have departed from what I once was, no matter how thin the cultural strings, how stretched out and at risk of breaking, I land with a thud into who I was in my parents’ house all those formative years.
My mother’s kitchen is part of who she is, in the same way all of the spaces we inhabit say something about who we are. The way my mother packs in fancy, embellished but extremely woggy tea glasses in the cupboard, wedged in between a random pair of scissors, a handful of receipts, and that souvenir glass you got from somewhere or other in 1987. And somewhere in there is a bag of dried sage that she uses in black tea.
That sage tea. Instant memory. Safety, warmth, a place to exist, even if only for the few moments I can spring into it as I drop one teaspoon of sugar into the toffee-coloured liquid. Home. Instant. I can make sage tea. Write it into my work because it’s an easily accessible link to who I am, an emblem of my cultural blood, without it being forced or disingenuous. I drink sage tea, and yes, I can make it.
But my mother’s kafta, the minced meat with parsley and herbs, baked with potatoes and tomato, or even tahini (which is more bitter, less pretty, but tastes amazing)? I have to cheat, and buy the readymade mix from a butcher. Shamefully, this butcher may not even be Arab. Inauthentic. It takes too long to find the memory in kafta skewers bought from some guy named Matt.
It tastes fine, I suppose. It’s not cheating. But it feels, as I said, inauthentic. It’s not giving me the secret ingredient my mother’s cooking does: a memory patch, a distinct and clear pathway to a simpler time, of home-cooked meals and rowdy dinners with my brothers (when my father wasn’t home yet anyway).
I tried once to make dawaleh, the tightly wrapped vine leaves that we Palestinians like to make small, about the size of a little finger, but not as tiny as the Lebanese. We pack them with rice, meat and spices; insert them into a large pot, crammed with chops and offcuts of tomato. It wasn’t terrible, but something wasn’t right. I didn’t boil the leaves enough perhaps, as they felt a bit leathery. Or my spice ratio was off because they didn’t taste like my mother’s, which always come off as so effortless. Maybe I didn’t cook them at the right temperature and for the right amount of time. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And not my mother’s cooking.
Why do we place value in food and some- one’s interpretation of it? It is a language, spoken through flavour and the emotional response it yields.
I don’t think I lack the capacity to cook well, but there is something in me that resists it as a skill; or more than that, as a way to define myself. Because instinctively, sometimes, I feel like it does. When I was getting to know the man who is now my husband, my very white carnivore of a partner who ticks zero diversity boxes, he saw the religious imprints before the cultural ones. My name, Amal, means hope; it’s very Arabic. He knew of my restrictions, the cultural and religious (in)elasticity that shaped my life. But my Arabness? It came out when we spoke of Palestine, and when I introduced him to Arabic food.
Home. Memory. Who I am, wrapped up in the scent of my mother’s kitchen. I wanted it to be more than it was; I wanted to show my husband that I didn’t just appreciate Arabic food, but could cook it with some aplomb. I once met a man who took one look at me, inspected my features then declared, ‘You look like a true daughter of Palestine.’ I wished I could show this to him with food not my eyes, to have this link to the spices and casseroles of my youth. I have done such a good job of transcending my labels, I began to worry that I had lost other things that matter, too.
What is my cultural legacy as a Third Culture Kid, who belongs everywhere and nowhere, as someone who finds a deep part of herself, a rumbling, passionate place inside that is familiar and immoveable, when I taste the homeland and home?
I am adept at self-awareness rituals. I can self-flagellate, scan my misdeeds and punish myself for the smallest of things. Shame has no true anchor. Yet it is the simplest of things that I overlooked and took for granted that I now worry about: the inheritance of culture through the kitchen.
Recently there has been a surge in Palestinian cookbooks and social media coverage of authentic cooking from the homeland. These are significant not simply because Palestinian food deserves its place at the multicultural banquet, but because coming from an occupied land—its mountains, scents and tragedies carried in our DNA and our blood—food has become much more significant than the flavours and nourishment it offers. It signals survival, and perhaps even restoration. Or is it a reminder of a presence that can be challenged but always remain? Cooking is not just an expression of a people, it is evidence of it.
I’m in my forties now, and I think about this more. Does it matter that I have failed to take on my mother’s skills in the kitchen, especially when I don’t have children to pass them on to? When my husband shares my love of Arabic food but is not an Arab? When, despite my pride in being Arab, I doubt my ability to pass as one when so much of me is embodied in that restless energy of the Third Culture Kid, displaced, always wandering, a bit lost?
I don’t think it’s too late. A couple of years ago I began the process of documenting recipes, collected during a regular meeting with my mother, who would constantly interrupt her own download to assure me that it’s simple to make koosa, stuffed zucchinis that can be cooked on a stove top in either tomato or tahini like kafta. Nowadays you can buy them pre-gutted at a Lebanese supermarket out west. It’s expensive, but it saves time; useful when you’re not of a generation where the women use the hefty preparation processes as a way to gather and gossip, to connect and normalise the collec- tive grief that comes with separation from a homeland.
My mother never really did that. She is a loner, like me. She would instead have the TV for company, or the local Arabic radio station. During Ramadan, the Islamic one playing Quran and invocations before the adhan crackled through the speakers and gave us permission to break our fasts.
I wonder now if it was lonesome, or if it was like my writing process: quiet catharsis in solitude—being alone but not lonely. Because my mother’s food never tasted too salty, like the bitterest of tears. It was always on point; the flavours wholesome and full, warm like a loving embrace.
I wonder at the number of famous male chefs when it is women who run the best kitchens in the world, the ones that matter. No hats or stars, just bodies, ready and hungry for nourishment and connection. That is your childhood, your hotline to the past. It is in your blood, a memory that tells you that you come from something, and it matters.
Home. Belonging. The way a scent can wrap itself around you. How a flavour can land you in some authentic, unbending place of knowing who you are and where you come from. It is not all of you, but it lingers and endures. It cannot be broken off like so many other things we are taught that we are; all of the things we’re told that we should be.
About Meanjin magazine
For over 80 years, Australian poetry magazine Meanjin has fostered a rich and rigorous national conversation by remaining true to its founding principles: ‘to talk poetry’, ‘to work for a healthy climate of opinion and literary activity’, and ‘to make clear the connection between art and politics.’ Whether in poetry, fiction, essay, memoir or experimentation, Meanjin writers seek audiences who are active contributors to the public spaces we all make together: readers who enjoy critical discussion and—to continue in Founding Editor Clem Christesen’s words—who ask Meanjin writers ‘to reveal and clarify our life by showing it to us though a vision different from ours and deeper.’
