Count on Something Sweet
all illustrations for this series by A. Andrews
In the summer of 2004, my older brother, younger sister and I could count on each other and little else, it seemed. We’d been uprooted from our childhood home—losers on the side of a divorce that left little in its wake but ruin—and deposited in an apartment complex that catered to families like ours. Unmade, and cobbling together the remaking with too-soft flesh and paper-thin walls.
Our poverty no longer sat at the edge of my awareness, a dull hum calling only in the most quiet moments. It roared, untamable, lingered around every piece of secondhand furniture we owned. The horseflies that no amount of bleach and scrubbed surfaces could eradicate. The mice lured in by peanut butter and left screaming in the endless rotation of sticky traps behind the fridge. The hot pink ten-speed I got for my ninth birthday stolen from our patio on move-in day. All echoes of a life that dripped with what was now inescapable.
I had no answers for my little sister then. But my brother. In his teenage wisdom. His endless cool. His constantly-whirring brain. My brother knew all.
We would have followed him wherever he led that summer. And each day, he led us to K-Mart.
My mom left a few worn singles on the counter most mornings before work. My brother was to ensure we ate, to look out for us, to be good. It became an adventure of sorts, counting out the money, walking to the Super K-Mart behind our building that required we jump a shallow creek in order to reach it, picking the meal of the day.
We combed aisles, made a game of calculating sales tax in our heads. The practical options were ramen (cheap, quick, impossible to screw up) and generic Kraft mac and cheese (cheap, quick, shockingly easy to screw up). But that summer, we were only marginally interested in practical. Watched a practical home ripped from underneath us. Sat by as our practical family car was repossessed. Witnessed our practical mother try to hold herself and her children together with both hands as the world threatened to tear us apart.
No. We no longer needed practical. We wanted goodness, even if it was fleeting. We wanted saccharine, even if it left us yearning. We wanted Cosmic Brownies.
We wanted their artificial chocolate flavor staining our teeth, their almost chemical-tasting colored candies coating our tongues, their thick corn syrup crawling through our veins. We wanted their cheapness, their artificiality, the honesty of their emptiness. We wanted to devour to consume to gorge. We wanted to decide what would be our unmaking.
And we did. All summer, bound together by blood and forged under the sickly shine of K-Mart’s fluorescent lights, we did.
Years later, there would come a new house, new side of town, the ending of it all. No brother, no apologies, a family unmade once more.
But in the summer of 2004, my brother counted out the measly dollar bills left on the counter. He walked us over to K-Mart. And he made sure that, every day, we could count on something sweet.
This is the final installment of DINNER PARTY, a four-part weekly series of bite-sized essays edited by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Check out the first piece, Hot Cheetos: A Chorus by K-Ming Chang, the second course, Caesar Salad: Anamnesis by T Kira Māhealani Madden, and On Grandmothers and Malai Curry as Thick as My Missing by Sreshtha Sen. Illustrations for the series made by A. Andrews.
On Grandmothers and Malai Curry as Thick as My Missing
all illustrations for this series by A. Andrews
Two months before I leave for New York from Delhi, my grandmother starts writing down recipes of my favorite dishes, trying her hardest to translate them: from bangla to what little english vocabulary we share, from the measurements of her intuition to something a little bit more concrete (but not much: the instructions still range from “a little water” to “as much thickness as you want”) from desi ingredients to “American” parallels.
She includes malai curry in it too, albeit an extremely simplified version of the one she makes. She has faith in me, but not that much faith.
***
When it came to eating skills, I was a pretty disappointing Bengali kid. I was terrified of eating fish, traumatized after watching my mom suffer a bone stuck in her throat that refused to go down for three entire hours. I preferred Lucknow’s Awadhi biryani—its saffron rice, the big hunks of mutton bathed in yogurt stewed slow in its own juice, to its Calcutta equivalent with potatoes and eggs.
But prawns. Give baby Sreshtha a prawn, head on, and I would devour it. And my grandmother’s malai curry was always my favorite. I’d start with piling the prawns over a bed of rice onto my plate. After swimming in this pool of cayenne-ed cream, the prawns were soaked through with flavor. Then, I’d separate the head, squeeze it with two fingers—shell intact—till any loose meat and all the hidden gravy fell onto the rice before bringing it to my lips to suck in the liquid center. Once I was done sifting meat through shell as best as I could, I’d simply hug it whole with my mouth, smash it with my tongue against its roof splinter out all the meat hanging by its spine till all that was left was a chewed up, unrecognizable carcass of antennae and tiny shards. Only then would I begin on the rice sopping with meat, blood and rich juice.
***
In New York, I make malai curry with everything but prawns. Tilapia. Roasted cauliflower. One late night, drunk and ravenous with a craving my grandmother had predicted would come, I make do by sautéing some canned tuna and dumping it into a curry of cloves and ginger. Nothing comes close of course, but there’s no space in my paycheck for something as luxurious as shellfish.
No one tell my grandmother any of this please.
***
The one time I actually try and make the original malai curry, it’s three years after my grandmother gifted me the hand-written recipes. My then-partner had just moved in with me. I demanded we celebrate the only way I know how.
The entire time, I cook in fear: of the smoke alarm, of overcooking, of not cooking it through, and mostly of doing my grandmother so wrong, by the dish and by using the dish for such a decidedly gay celebration.
After, I take a picture for the family group chat—C and I holding hands under the table, our curry-stained smiles beaming at half-empty plates of prawn and rice.
The malai curry is the star of the conversation that follows after. No one brings up my new haircut. No one notices, or says they notice, how my new “roommate” looks exactly like my “friend” from New York. Only my grandmother (or rather her forehead taking up all the space in the video because she couldn’t figure out the camera exclaims into the phone “You look like an Italian boyfriend who just cooked for his girlfriend!” and cackles, oblivious to everyone’s uncomfortable silence.
There is something to be said about this woman articulating the never spoken about, coming closer to this truth before anyone else in my family simply because she cannot even begin to imagine queerness as a possibility. There is something about “like an Italian boyfriend” being too close already to “nonbinary.” There is something about me letting this be enough.
DINNER PARTY is a four-part weekly series of bite-sized essays edited by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Check out the first piece, Hot Cheetos: A Chorus by K-Ming Chang and the second course, Caesar Salad: Anamnesis by T Kira Māhealani Madden. Illustrations for the series made by A. Andrews.
Caesar Salad: Anamnesis
all illustrations for this series by A. Andrews
Here’s what I remember: a wooden bowl. My father’s silver hair under the spotlit kitchen island. Hands busy mashing yolk and rind; the squeeze of a tube of anchovy paste, the clinks of spoon to jarred garlic.
It was the bowl, my mother says now, that made the Caesar his. The seasoned, wooden bowl that made it so good.
It was the whole grain mustard, says somebody else.
There wasn’t mustard; that was the fresh egg, says another.
I wouldn’t know. I never tasted my father’s “famous” Caesar when he was alive. My father wasn’t much of a cook. He knew how to grill, I guess, though I never liked his barbeque; the chicken always a bit slimy, always a bit isn’t this still kind of raw? He knew how to smother steamed crab in spices and burning oil—easy enough. He knew how to order at a restaurant, how to eat. But as for his own concoctions, I wasn’t interested.
People remember his salad, though. They bring it up often.
My dad used to wake me up at 5 AM to watch the news with him, and when I complained he’d say, when I’m gone, you’ll wish I was still waking you up. Jewish guilt, yes, but the figure of him in the door, half-gone and backlit by blue, it got me out of bed every time.
Now I ask everyone but him: what went into that salad? Does mine come even close?
***
I think often of what will happen to my recipes when I die. To lose someone, I now know, is, most tragically, to lose their ideas. To lose their mind in the world, and the potential energy of that mind’s particular impact and beauty. The only chance we have against this loss is to replicate, to repeat, to talk story, as we say in Hawaiʻi, to go agonizingly and impossibly on, as imitators. Perpetuators. Gossipers.
I don’t want my food to die with me. It makes me want to can and cure and freeze and ferment, to spend my life doing it, so that people might continue to meet me through flavor and nourishment once I’m gone, so they might love the things I love. Grandchildren, strangers—I don’t care. Sichuanese pickling mother brines are passed on for generations, included in dowries, and I find that romantic.
I want my food to live beyond me for the same reasons I write, and perhaps there’s an arrogance to that; a Walt Disney immortal, megalomaniac dream. But at its center I think the desire is much more earnest and small. It’s the bathroom tag in sharpie, the etching beneath a dining room table or school desk, the whisper: please, please, don’t forget about me?
I fed my wife when we started dating, elaborate frittatas and a warm, winter stew. We were long distance then—she, in Texas, me in New York—and she missed my cooking, she said. I once labored over that stew a whole day, purchased a military grade thermos, and overnighted it to her so that when she opened it, steam rolled out, the meal still hot. It was a ridiculous gesture, once that earned me the nickname TK Suavé, but it worked. Years later, she married me.
Food is love; that is not hyperbole or inflation.
My friend Suzanne is in her late eighties, and I hope she lives forever. Recently she told me about the fig tree clipping her friend gave her in the 80’s, before he died of AIDS. He clipped the fig branch from Plato’s Academy in Athens, Greece, smuggled it back to the states, and then he gave it to Suzanne in their shared New York City laundry. For 40 years she’s kept that tree alive in the center of her living room. I watch Suzanne with the plant and I witness her spending time with her friend, keeping him around. He’s there, in the center of her living room. The last time I left her apartment, she offered me a clipping of the fig, so that I could keep her with me. She wrapped it delicately in a wet paper towel. As I drove it home in my lap I said please, please make it home to the center of my living room.
Soil, seed, bud; pan, salt, plate. It is love, to feed someone. To build root systems. To propagate however you best know how.
Here’s what I remember: my father, never in an apron. A worn t-shirt, drooping shorts, skinny ankles, especially once he was sick. He’d take a bite from the wooden bowl and say, are you sure you don’t want to try it?
I don’t remember the last time he said that, only that I said, for the millionth time, I’m sure, I’m sure.
I ask person after person after person: How did he make it and why was it good? The act of asking is perhaps more important than the taste itself.
The fig is from Greece and the Bronx and it is now in its new home in the south. Suzanne taught me about plants, the way my father’s father taught him about food. In a glass jar, the green stem is rooting.
My Caesar isn’t my father’s, even when I use his wooden bowl. But it is a rebuttal, a resistance, to an end.
DINNER PARTY is a four-part weekly series of bite-sized essays edited by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Check out the first installment, Hot Cheetos: A Chorus by K-Ming Chang. Illustrations for the series made by A. Andrews.
Hot Cheetos: A Chorus
all illustrations for this series by A. Andrews
Our fingers were permanently stained, dancing in a dust so red it seemed to originate from inside our bodies, birthed from our arteries, a pigment as abundant as the moles on our faces, the ones that troubled our mothers, who sent our faces to get read by fortunetellers. Unlike moles that could be scraped off and boiled into peas, our redness couldn’t be removed by soap or water or spit, though we suckled on our stained knuckles like udders, mothered ourselves with that color. Even years after we graduated high school or left our hometown or eschewed processed snack foods, we couldn’t deny the evidence of our former appetites, each of our fingers a flapping red flag. When we showered for longer than the drought policy allowed, water filtered red through our fingers, slopping at our feet like pig’s blood, and when we scratched ourselves surreptitiously beneath faux-wood desks, our crotches burned for hours afterward. When we touched other girls on the chin or the back of the neck or beneath the right breast, we trailed red streaks like fenghuang feathers, flicked into flight by our siren-tipped tongues. We learned that some bird species grow bright feathers on the breast to attract mates and wondered what would flock to us. We scoured our hands with steel wool, cheese graters, the bark of starved birches, but beneath our skin was blood, another red, and we wondered what our mothers meant when they said it was a lucky color, that someday we would get married in it, that gods with red faces should hang in our doorways. We thought of our own ruddy faces when we ran to the 7-Eleven, the only place that served food within the radius of our school, where the woman at the counter demanded that we drop our backpacks on the blacktop before entering, and we stood outside waiting to be let in, watching our own faces in the windows while she counted us aloud, her wrists so thin we thought they would break beneath the weight of our combined coins, her silver-capped teeth when she said, You girls always eat such shit, don’t your mothers feed you better? We staked Hot Cheetos through our tongues before responding, we tracked red fingerprints into the tip dish when she wasn’t looking, we flew our fingers to the perch of our lips, ate an entire family-sized bag before PE because we loved the steam it generated in our bellies when we ran, like matchsticks striking alive inside us, we twined red tongues in bathroom stalls, we packed red dust beneath our fingernails and called it a French tip, we practiced snorting it, we ignored our daily recommended serving of sodium and our names, we deemed our dyed teeth a deity, we pet the plumage of our thumbs and dipped them into the powder at the very back of the bag, never enough, the silver lining mirroring our mouths, multiplying them infinitely, refracting all the red in us.
DINNER PARTY is a four-part weekly series of bite-sized essays edited by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Illustrations for the series made by A. Andrews.
Welcome To The Dinner Party
all illustrations for this series by A. Andrews
I’m hungry to throw a dinner party. I taught myself to arrange flowers during the past year. I perfected my mashed potato recipe, my fried green tomato recipe, my pakora batter, my spicy margarita. Okay, sure, I’m still working on the handmade pasta and the soufflé cheesecake. But I have an arsenal of taper candles for mood lighting and a pitcher for serving ice water with sliced lemons. Last Christmas, my girlfriend got me the sharpest knife I’ve ever owned and a set of cocottes that are perfect for serving a starter soup or individual desserts. I have the space. I have the overwhelming desire to wear an apron. To curry fish and scurry between my narrow kitchen, the balcony, the round table. To pour wine and fling a wooden spoon around and chop garlic for a million years, all while talking to friends, listening to music, pointing out the Miami sky beyond the balcony for people to take pictures of that won’t quite do it justice. I’m equal parts elated and exhausted just thinking about it.
What I’m saying is I’m very fucking ready to throw a dinner party.
It’s coming, I know. I’ll meet more people in Miami. It’ll be safer for friends to travel in. It’ll be safer in general. I can wait a little longer to throw my big, perfect, messy, queer-as-hell dinner party. I want to do it right.
For now, there’s this. DINNER PARTY—a series of micro essays on food. It’s the first “dinner party” I’ve thrown in a very long time. I asked four writers I admire deeply to write bite-sized pieces about a dish of their choosing. I told them to aim for around 500ish words, but outside of that, they were free to improvise on the recipe, so to speak. The best dinner parties to me are the ones with a little bit of improvisation and “rule-breaking.” I like mismatched dinnerware and an array of seating that might even include pillows thrown on a floor. I never try to hide my messy kitchen. I told these writers I wasn’t feeling precious or particular about “food writing” or even “essay”—they were free to write whatever they liked.
A little bit of queer magic happened. Unbeknownst to each other, my dinner party co-hosts turned in four micro pieces about four different “courses.” A snack, a salad, a main, and a dessert. Together, these four pieces touch each other in surprising ways. Together, they make a perfect meal. Honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised at how well it worked out—queer folks know how to potluck.
Today, you’ll enter the dinner party. I love this part. The arrival. The small talk as people gather, coats shorn, the first drinks poured. Listen, I don’t believe in a lot of “rules” when it comes to dinner parties, but here’s an important one: Serve your guests arrival snacks—a cheese plate, finger foods, hell open up a bag of tortilla chips and jarred salsa, it doesn’t matter. Just give people something to nibble on during that small talk, something to do with their hands. This particular dinner party starts with hands and with gloriously red hot cheetos, courtesy of K-Ming Chang. Go ahead, plunge your hands on in and lick the powder off.
Now that you’ve had your appetite whetted by some spicy, puffy snacks, it’s time for more. Settle in, choose a seat, get a refill, maybe talk to someone new. Next Tuesday, let T Kira Māhealani Madden serve you a wooden bowl of caesar salad, death, and remembrance. Recipes are about more than just measurements and ingredients.
Here we are in the middle part of the dinner party, when time ceases to really matter, when maybe a glass has been broken, but it’s okay, really, no I’ve got a broom don’t worry about it! A little bit of broken glass just means the party’s alive! The third piece in the series features the next course, a malai curry prepared by Sreshtha Sen. It tastes like memory and family. It tastes like enough.
And now, the dishes have been stacked by the sink, but the drinks and conversations are still flowing. Maybe someone cracked a window to let in more air. Maybe the party has expanded to an outside area. Maybe someone has suggested a game or an impromptu living room dance party. In any case, it’s time for dessert. Leah Johnson made Cosmic Brownies, and they’re sweet, but they’ve got layers to them, too. Look out for this gorgeous final serving—a story about siblings one summer that’ll stick to your guts.
These essays are short, but I hope they’ll fill you up. Welcome to the dinner party!
– Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Guest Editor
DINNER PARTY is a four-part weekly series of bite-sized essays edited by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Check out the first installment, Hot Cheetos: A Chorus by K-Ming Chang. Illustrations for the series made by A. Andrews.