Composing a Life

eating, formal daily eating was not emphasized in southern black culture, even in Johnnetta’s middle-class family, where all members of the family worked hard outside of the home.
    Barkev and I are old fashioned in our handling of the evening meal, beginning with an Armenian prayer and passing around serving dishes. My daughter’s teenage friends would comment in amazement at the idea of a family sitting down to eat together on a daily basis in a room with no television. When Barkev and I first met, he was painfully thin. He had been living alone and away from home for nearly five years, earning his keep working the multiple odd jobs available to foreign students. He had even sent money home when his family, like many Armenian families, moved from Syria to Lebanon in the heightened tensions that followed the invasion of the Sinai and Suez in 1956. It was almost irresistible for me to combine my effort to relate to him by learning about Armenian language and culture with an effort to feed him. The outcome was that I learned Armenian cooking and committed myself to almost a decade of chopping and elaborate preparation, hours of packaging foods inside of other foods—grape leaves stuffed with rice, cheese folded in dough, even meatballs stuffed with a different meat mixture. I learned to cook almost entirely from a cookbook put together by the women’s group of an Armenian church, and used lamb and rice as my staples. Ground lamb was three pounds for a dollar, but we spent the money saved on olive oil and pine nuts.
    It took me a long time to move away from the more laborious dishes in the Middle Eastern cuisine, which really only make sense when there are a number of women in the household working and gossiping and caring for children side by side, dishes that become a form of servitude in the kind of American household where a woman is alone in the kitchen. In retrospect, I am shocked at how easily I discarded my mother’s ingenious formulas for feeding me and entertaining guests. Her advice when I got married was to keep a soup pot simmering on the stove so the house would smell of home cooking without too much time spent in the kitchen—the symbol of loving effort without the hassle. The elaborate Christmas Eve dinners with which I replaced her steak and asparagus and green salad were duly praised by our friends, but they took a week to prepare.
    After we had spent two years in the Philippines, where we had a cook, I never resumed my newlywed standards. I began to branch out with simpler European recipes, even adopting beef and potatoes, a momentous change. When I first knew Barkev, he joked about beef as “poor man’s goat.” For years, to express my need to go out and escape from our domestic pattern, I would say that I “needed a baked potato,” instead of our usual rice pilaf. When we moved to Iran, our eating pattern changed again. Persian cuisine belongs to the same broad Middle Eastern tradition as Armenian, but instead of packages, most foods are combined in stews and sauces that often include fruits as well as meats and vegetables. At that time, Tehran boasted only a single, very expensive, Chinese restaurant, so I decided to learn Chinese cooking, which would give us back a contrast between my own cooking and the Iranian food we ate outside. After a trip out of the country, my luggage would contain fresh ginger and oriental spices as well as seasonal reminders of home like candy corn and cranberry sauce.
    Today, Barkev joins me in the kitchen, sharing a drink and stirring a mean wok, and we start cooking when both of us are ready. It’s a way of asserting that if all this effort is about relationship, that’s what it ought to be, a reshaping of the chores of housekeeping into the rhythms of homemaking. This means that the nature of homecoming is changed for him, as it has changed for the husbands or lovers of each of the women I talked to. The experience of going home to relax has been altered. We may both sit down and watch the news, but there is no one making dinner while we do so. And I struggle, particularly when I am writing and my professional life is centered in the household, to resist the temptation to chip away at my workday by spending extra time on meal preparation.
    This is still very different from my mother’s approach to domesticity; it was sought out as innovation rather than passed on as tradition. My mother invented simplifications and economies of time; I have escaped