A MEMORIAL IN YDRA

The family taverna, reaching it by passing a narrow alley inside the market near the port, Irene (pronounced Ee-re-ne-ya, which I understand in Greek means peace), the owner sat me down at the table with hot water to start and announced the special for the day.  Ydra, Greece is surrounded by the Aegean Sea and its landscape is Mediterranean-dry up to the hills, but rocks and limestones interspersed there is a wild habitat for mountain sage, beautiful oregano and the piquant flowers of dill. It was fall of 2016. The fisherman's soup was a traditional that season, a recipe of pureed rice, lemon, potatoes and herbs, served with homemade loaf bread. I was early and the only one at that time when the restaurant opened (I came in after my hike to the orthodox blue-and-white monastery up the hill), and Irene joined me at my table. I learned that the soup was particular to the commemoration of a passing of a loved one, a yearly memorial, as all the relatives gather around at home to pray and remember, before eating and drinking to heart. I returned to the taverna a few more times during my stay in Ydra, and my last night there I brought Irene a little white lilies and herb leaves bouquet set in an earthenware bowl. She had been hospitably nice to me every time I was at the taverna and over wine and salad we would frankly converse politics and poetry and friends, touching upon those topics from a point of view as amusements in life, and how travel and food draw the world closer to us. Ydra is rustic and ancient; no cars are allowed on the island save mules, like the one approaching Irene's taverna, saddling yokes of local groceries delivered here and there (see picture inset). I was there for a special reason (a tradition I do, alone, around that time of the year, in November, for the past 20 years, and each year at a different "world" to travel through. Meeting Irene was like meeting my mother again. She didn't know that the first time I came to her taverna was my mother's death anniversary, and the soup on offer was nothing short of a perfect memorial for her. We became friends, Irene and I, and she had wished my return to Ydra someday again. She had treated me, with food and love, like nothing short of her son... Looking back, I could replicate the lemon rice soup in my kitchen anytime, but what I couldn't is the notion that nothing good could last forever, except maybe only in memory. So, so many years have gone by of her missing in my life, but so, so many years, at last, of good memories. In peace, this is for Irene. 

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Baked Garlic and Broiled Jalapeño Sauce

Sam Sifton wrote this wonderful sentence in his Sunday column on cooking: "I'm not a line cook nor a chef, just a loving provider, trying to make what's available into something delicious for my family's meal." In the column he had also explained the similarity between a line cook and a home cook in terms of purpose in the kitchen as a brigade de cuisine. Both will look at the pantry (or the fridge), and following their food instincts plan in their heads the foundations of deliciousness by prepping the ingredients and making the sauces for tonight. Tomatillos, check. Flat-leaf parsley, check. Canned organic garbanzos, check. The cook notices a large lime, cuts it in half and juices them, check. A technique is then employed through the seasoning: Let's bake a head of garlic steeped in olive oil butter, all the while broiling the tomatillos and seeded, salted jalapeños together until the green skins are charred and the combined acids from the vegetables are caramelized in their sweetness and heat. The pasta water is boiling, too, and in goes the stems of parsley for herb-flavor absorption. The fresh ravioli-edged fettuccini is quick to achieve al dente, and so at the peak temperature, throw in the chickpeas to halt the moisture and seal in the bite. Love is in every step of this process because you are following it to your  stomach (at a professional restaurant the line cook is in charge of family meals, off menu, and the cook more than often would make something traditional from home, as if a home cook, and that's when their minds, the line and the home cook's, would meet). To lusciously coat the pasta with the garlic and jalapeño-tomatillo sauce (well, there is a bit of work to release the creamed garlic out of its head, and this is how: by laying the charred bulb on its side on the plate and with a fork holding it down and the knife scrapping the papery skin like a tube slowly releasing its allium paste as would ossu) is sure heaven. It is the same effect, that place in your heart when you're all done in the kitchen and feeding your loved ones happily around your table happily being fed. Summer is here in the central Pacific and the watermelons have bloomed.  This cold fruit quenches and satisfies toothsome following down its sweet juice after your love food. And this, too, shall provide for all your wants. 

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I AM AYU

         “Looking back I seem always to have been escaping from my kitchen into my workshop: cooking in order to work, rather than working in order to eat. 

                                    But sometimes I escaped from both — into the sea, into the woods, onto the mountainside.”     — Patience Gray 

Emerging sleek from the rapids I smell my hair and skin of cucumber. I am the freshwater ayu, breathing strong against the current… I am returning to the high mountain as a fish. The winter I was in Niigata, grilled ayu-on-sticks were already selling at the local market, and my Tokyoite companion, famished from skiing and flushed from the hot tub, devoured the legendary ayu head to tail, clicking the Sapporo a few times. She and I had met in San Francisco a way back and she’s now living permanently in Japan. We are good friends and I love eating with her, especially what she would prepare at her place, a shabu-shabu lunch favorite: dipping tofu cakes, savoy cabbage and shiitakes in sesame ponzu dressing after chopstick-cooking the veggies in a simmering dashi broth on a portable cookware on the table, and singing shabu-shabu to the extent the food will be cooked— it is named for that time.  This morning the rock pools at Iao Valley where I swim were perfect catchments for ayu. They were crystal clear, the pebbles had given up the mirage, the gentle cascades bubbled in whirlpool traps, as if this corridor river had come down from the sky. But no ayu can be found. But an essence springs from the water… a reason for cherry blossoms and magnolias to pine, in the downstream current my body has been shaped, the forest is my ground, but I am deep, very deep in the aquifer of the earth and the legend has found my way. I am ayu, the one that escaped.

(Illustration by author, copying the painting of Hokusai.)

PS. At the Morgan Library Museum in midtown Manhattan was an exhibit of Hokusai works, the artist who drew the famed woodblock print The Great Wave and other nature paintings of fisherfolk and the mountainside life. Pencil and sketchbook in hand, I drew one scene he depicted of two friends on a straw mat, but the perspective was panoramic and the gorge in autumn was the theme. The friends are not fully visible but according to the inscription are eating chestnuts and ayu and have a pot of wine while relaxing on a bank under a tree. It was many years since this memory, and I remember this sketch crediting Hokusai that I gave to my friend from Berlin (my national parks camping-mate) a picture of the ecological beauty of friendship, in all its forms.  

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Filipino-American

Those high lunches needn’t matter
If you are of businessman’s age
Anyway he enjoyed creating food
drifting across the Fragrant Nation
— Allen Ginsberg

Jose Rizal was a poet and national hero of the Philippines. In one of his travel writings, upon embarkation to Spain, he mused that foreignness was a nostalgia of home. His books liberated a country, but cost him his dear life. At the Heritage Garden in Iao Valley, there lies a bronze statue of Rizal found after passing a clearing of bamboo trees and a winding stone pond... Bushwick, Brooklyn is a beatnik neighborhood of bards, sculptors, open-studio artists and immigrant foodies. When I used to live there, my place was an elevator-sized walk-up with exposed high ceiling, hardly any room for one, but a kindred friend from grad school visited and she had to stay with me (she came all the way from Laguna, Philippines, no coincidence the birthplace of Rizal). We reminisced back to when we were study-mates, when she would always comment that my food was emotional (I had cooked for her all the time back then). She was my first New York City reunion, and we had made a castle of this tiny shell I called my home for her good time. On the Staten Island Ferry I covered her eyes with my hands, standing behind her against the wind, and when I told her: "Now," and gently opening her eyes... the Statue of Liberty was floating in front of her like a cloud. That awesome moment with her had been more than seven years ago, yet I still see it in my mind vividly. I remember weeks later sending her an e-card with a 2x2 photo of the two of us at that very spot, and below I quoted a poem from Langston Hughes to express my feelings: 

           So since I'm still here livin',

           I guess I will live on.

           [but] I could've died for love -

           [for all that you know...]

At the prep school in S. Korea I was the American teacher. At the arts high school in the Philippines I was the Filipino-American poet, the writer-in-residence whom the faculty and students welcomed home. I am still connected with several of my best students from that teaching sojourn decades ago. One in particular I am to this day letter-writing with, akin to distance teaching, although she has already followed my footsteps as educator and mentor... and a full circle has been delivered to the legacy of poetry ever since. She addresses her letters to me with this salutation: "Dear Captain." For a surreal second each time I read her letters, I glimpsed Rizal enduring the sea in a haze. In the late 19th century, I was on the ship with him, seeing him... like my heart.  

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