Finding My Roots Through Mystical Cooking

Peel the skin off the salmon. Toss in a pot of water and boil for 10 minutes. Strain and save for later. Sauté in potatoes, carrots, salt, pepper, fresh dill weed, a dash of allspice and cream. At this point, a pleasant aroma should waft throughout the kitchen and inside the pot, all the colors and textures swirling around like a tiny galaxy in a snow globe. Finally, add the salmon chunks. Boil uncovered for 10 minutes. Salt to taste.I love to cook. Without access to much of my ancestry, my interest coincided with a desire to reconnect with my cultural background, to color in the blank faces lost to estrangement and history. This process started when trying to do research on my family origins for a personal project. Realizing what limited information I had, I started researching traditional recipes, on both sides of my family. I come from a long line of estrangement. My mother was the bastard child of a mid-level goon in the Jewish mafia. Her mother was a lifelong addict, who was similarly estranged from her mother, a schizophrenic. I am estranged from my father, a fundamentalist pastor, who is also estranged from his father. It’s not so much that history repeats itself as that it is passed down. But that is also not all that is passed down. I have this recipe for lohikeitto—a fish soup with subtle variations across Scandinavia. It’s simple and unpretentious, but delicious and hearty. It nourishes me like it nourished some of my ancestors long, long ago.

Cooking is an act of love. It’s also our oldest ritual.

I Am Fascinated by the Rituals Around Cooking

Cooking is an act of love—to oneself, to the loved ones you are cooking for, to the cultural history of the dish you are preparing. It’s also our oldest ritual. There’s a special, spiritual satisfaction in watching all the disparate ingredients alchemize into something wholly new. In the traditional folk religion of China, there is a separate deity of the kitchen—named Zao Jun, or “the stove god.” He is the force where all things’ food is referred to. In Norse mythology, Andhrimnir, or “the one exposed to soot,” is the chef for the gods, who butchers a magic boar every morning, and after it is consumed by the gods, the cow springs back to life. So on and so forth. This is all to say the mythic, cultural and personal components of a homemade dish fascinate me.Studies show people experience more happiness and life satisfaction the more often they eat with others. There is something innately healing about sharing a meal with friends and family. By hosting dinner parties, I was able to bring together disparate people from my life under the shared experience of eating good food. The collective excitement in laying the dishes out in front of my guests provided a secret, special spice to the food that would otherwise be lost in solitude. This is all to say that preparing food for others is a love language in its own right.Within the pandemic years, our ability to come together has been drastically limited. More often than not, fresh-cooked meals are deferred to Postmates and Grubhub, something that, even if the food you order is nutritious, cuts the human element from the process. You miss out on the alchemic satisfaction of creating a meal. The initial pandemic years were difficult, when even intimate gatherings were made impossible. This was a difficult period that I remediated by diving even deeper into my interest in cooking. Despite being apart from each other, I remember the distinct period when everyone was experimenting with kitchen projects—sharing TikToks for the perfect sourdough starter, exploring fermentation, making jams and so much more. Even though we were socially separated, even in our isolation, food was still communal, albeit in a novel way.

Taking old recipes and experimenting with new ingredients and technologies is part of a conversation with our origins.

I Try to Be Intentional and Mindful When I Cook

The labor and love poured into a meal is not incidental—it grounds the chef in the present moment, as well as the cultural history in the recipe. Taking old recipes and experimenting with new ingredients and technologies is part of a conversation with our origins—both collective and respective. Like lohikeitto, for example. I didn’t have allspice on deck, but I had harissa, which takes its origins in Middle Eastern cuisine. While harissa has a distinct spice, much more different than the subtleties of allspice, the experimentation bore fruit: the soup suddenly had a newfound depth to it, a slight edge that gave the dish a satisfying complexity. Maybe you don’t have fresh elderberry at hand, but that doesn’t really matter—what matters is the unique way you experiment to fill those gaps or absences. Recipes are not algorithms; their beauty comes out when you open your imagination to whatever you may or may not have at hand.To cook requires the designation of a space wholly dedicated to the meal—the kitchen. You clear the counters, wash the dishes and set out your materials. While you begin to cook, the experience becomes circular, hypotonic and sensual—your attention is pulled away from time and into the touch, taste, smell and sound of cooking food. The beauty of food isn’t necessarily the product but the process. It’s a ritual, and like most rituals, it’s the participation that grounds each action, each ingredient, each moment into something that feels larger than simply a meal. And when you’ve finished eating, cleared the dishes and sit down to relish in the satisfaction, you often discover a quiet peace, as though you just finished doing yoga. And that’s not coincidental, because cooking is meditation. It pulls you away from the noise and chaos of your life and provides an avenue to step away and step into the recipe itself.Whether cooking for loved ones or just myself, I try to dedicate the process to slowness, a space to relish in the little things—the tiny sensory joys and discrete pleasure of moving through the world.