And how it is intrinsically linked to the concept of home
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. (Maya Angelou)”
Ever since I came across that Maya Angelou quote in the fifth instalment of her autobiography, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, I’ve felt a great debt of gratitude to the late African-American poet for voicing my thoughts in such an eloquent and clear way. And that was before I became an immigrant.
My book, Cuban, Immigrant, and Londoner, detailed how life, culture, and the English language shaped my positive-thinking, albeit non-blinkered, attitude towards my host nation. Missing from this account, however, was food. There was very little mention of a subject on which I’ve written extensively.
Food plays an important role in an immigrant’s process of settling in a new country. There’s the recipes we leave behind and which we actively seek out when we first arrive in the new land. In my case, I still remember Cuban-themed lunches on my days off when I used to work at the travel agency and my children were little.
These midday light refreshments took the form of rice, egg (either fried or scrambled), ketchup, salad (avocado, tomatoes, lettuce, and watercress featured heavily), and pudding (usually something chocolatey). This was a throwback to my childhood years when my late grandma would have had a similar fare waiting for me on the table after I crashed in from school.
In those early years as I got used to the British weather, the London accent, and the Tube’s baffling network, it was this type of comfort food that anchored me. I discovered a good butcher’s in Edmonton Green, Enfield, north London, where my ex-wife and I made our home with our two children. Pork chops and steaks became regular staples.
But to misquote Elton John’s Crocodile Rock, “… the years went by and the taste for home just died/this Cuban guy went and tried something new and nice…” (that was a good effort, but you’ll probably understand now why I’ll never make it as a lyricist in the pop world).
To sum up: I discovered foreign food.
I’d already dabbled in dishes from other countries, including neighbouring Caribbean islands and fellow Latin American nations. At the same time, my taste buds expanded and began to include Asian (subcontinent) and far east Asian culinary offerings.
Little by little, a new concept of comfort food took shape. And with it, the meaning of home changed.
I still remember being commissioned by a magazine in 2013 to write about the explosion of paladares (private restaurants) in Havana. Whilst there, I felt a sort of homesickness like I hadn’t felt for London before. At an Indian restaurant in Nuevo Vedado, a former well-off neighbourhood in the Cuban capital, we were given chicken korma. But there was no naan bread to mop up the sauce with.
At an Italian restaurant in Playa, a municipality in western Havana, our pizza lacked the hard crust I usually dunked in my garlic dip back in London.
Something was missing. On top of that, I was confused.
Was my hankering (for what else could it be?) for London’s multicultural cuisine a sign of missing home, too?
Yes.
Consider this. By 2013 I was not only familiar with but also keen on Pakistani, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, and Jamaican food. My enthusiasm went beyond the boundaries of restaurant patronage. I cooked recipes from these cultures a few times. From a newly-arrived immigrant in 1997 struggling with the spiciness of a Madras or Jalfrezi dish, I graduated to nose-running Vindaloo and Phaal in less than ten years.
Along the way my vocabulary became richer with the addition of words related to the places I frequented and made my home: injera, shakshuka, and feijoada to name a few.
In almost thirty years living in the UK, Maya’s home for me has come to mean not just physical bricks and mortar, but also the Scotch bonnet I throw in when making jollof rice. It’s the bicycle I’m always happy to see when I come back from my travels and which cannot wait to be ridden, and also the bay leaf ready to be tossed into a soup or stew.
I come back home. Comfort food, this expanded immigrant’s concept, is the Welcome home! banner on the door.