I kept dropping the apple while frantically trying to peel it. But I was doing my best to follow the lead of my instructors at Sanctuary Kitchen. Clumsy fingers and perilous peeler aside, my kitchen slowly filled with the scent of fresh apples — as did, I assume, the kitchen in every other tiny square on the Zoom call.
When I studied philosophies of translation in the Italian Renaissance, there were effectively two schools: verbo per verbum, or word for word, and senso per sensum, or sense for sense.
Both modes of thinking come to mind after cooking along with Common Ground/Sanctuary Kitchen’s free zoom cooking class this past Thursday, “Preserving Food, Preserving Culture.”
The class is part of an ongoing series of cooking classes; the next one happens on Nov. 18.
In Iraqi society, it was explained, recipes are orally transferred and generally guided by instinct, not recipe cards. How does one translate the essence of a recipe to a public not well versed in Iraqi cooking? It turns out, at least while Covid-19 continues, the answer is Zoom. Tilting my laptop just so to see Modhi and Noor, a mother-daughter team of cooking instructors, happily chopping apples to prepare murabba, a jamlike preserve of apples with rosewater and cardamom, I chopped in real time along with dozens of others. The chatbox was alight with requests for clarification. Three apples or four? How much sugar? But there were also moments of cultural connection. An Iranian woman asked about similarities in preparation. Noor chuckled, “Well, we are neighbors.”
Disha Patel, a food justice educator with Common Ground and the facilitator-host for the meeting, also shared a moment of familial connection, noting the stories of murabbo from her own family. Across all participants was a deep desire to not only make the food, but to find connection through it; in the same way that preserving food helps it last longer, it also changes one’s relationship with it, creating an essential memory of preserving the food to be recalled later. Noor explained that the second dish, torshi, or picked vegetables, was a particular favorite of hers, and she remarked that this would be the first time she would make them with her mother.
Time and intention ran strongly through the event. Besides the time of active cooking together, pickles take time to, well, pickle. But more than that was the life cycle of the produce at hand. The event gave the option of picking up a free produce bag from Common Ground, with donations from local farms and nonprofits including Love Fed New Haven and Common Ground itself. The carrots that went into the torshi were ones Noor seeded in her time as an intern. Patel pointed out that one of the intentions behind the workshop was to ask a question: “How are we carrying our ancestors’ habits forward, and what cultural practices do we hold in each of our identities through food?” Jams can last months longer than their berry predecessors; this workshop takes that generational thinking to new levels in its honoring of youth leadership and ancestral connection at the same time.
On my stove, the murabba was getting fragrant, a rich mixture of apple and rosewater rendering my entire studio apartment an aromatic slice of heaven. Eyeballing the large bag of apples that served as a reminder of my last trip to the farmers’ market, I made a note to make another batch of murabba soon. While it bubbled and reduced into the sticky treasure it would eventually become, Noor and Modhi moved us on to the second recipe, chopping turnips and carrots to be blanched quickly in the water used to boil beets. Casting a deep crimson hue over everything, and making a brine, the torshi proved to be adjacent to my own family’s Italianate giardinera; preserved food is universal, as it was the key to our collective survival for most of our history.
Patel hopes that “we see these community classes and free workshops on personal food or land or climate connections as an opportunity to learn new habits, such as growing and tending to land, cooking and preserving fresh produce, in Afro-indigenous cultural practices.” She also wants to see the community brought together by these workshops “supporting local farmers and regenerative economies and recognizing that this is at the foundation of community resilience and climate resilience.” These pickles brought a whole tradition and history with them, and showed a way to do more with less in our food system.
The workshop died down, and I managed to spoon my now-thick murabba into a waiting Mason jar without burning my fingers. The sweet scent of apple and rosewater was almost intoxicating. Noor gamely answered a variety of questions asking for specifics of the recipe, translating cultural knowledge gained from her mother and generations before into quantifiable bites. Modhi poured the ruby-red brine over the chopped vegetables in a jar on the other side of the Zoom screen, and Noor smiled behind her mask along with Patel as the jars lined up to then wait on a shelf for 10 days to become truly pickled. The people in each tiny little Zoom window scurried around in their own spaces, pouring their own bright red brines into Mason jars, and for a moment we all understood the fundamental language of preserving food — that of capturing a food’s essence and helping it live far beyond is allotted lifespan, carrying flavor across seasons and generations.
A mother-daughter team of Iraqi-born cooks was teaching the group how to make murabba. An Iranian woman asked about similarities in preparation. Noor chuckled, "Well, we are neighbors." INDEED! A great overall message of this lovely article.