Eating with other people's families
Thinking about everyday feasts and reunions, surprising human connections, and the lives that happened before us.
Hello! I’m Emily, and this is a newsletter about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a rapidly changing world & our personal and collective place in it.
Friends & readers,
I meant to post this a while back, as it concerns events over Christmas—though it’s really more about the evergreen themes of life and love and family so where it sits in the chronology of the year doesn’t really matter. Because I write about W.C.’s family for the first time in it, I wanted, out of courtesy, to let them have a read before I shared it—to they don’t think I’m using their hospitality, their way of life, as writing fodder!—and it took a while before W.C.’s brother visited them again and was able to translate it for them in person.
I’m glad to say they didn’t feel the need to change a thing or to omit anything for privacy reasons (which I always try to be careful about), so here it is ❤️
Every day was oriented around the dining table, sumptuously draped with string beads and tiny red hearts. In the late morning, or whenever we woke up: a bread basket and pancakes with jars of homemade apple, quince, and plum jams for breakfast. Then lunch. Then tea or coffee with homemade cookies and Stollen, a German fruit bread. Someone would light the candles and get the fireplace going. Then dinner, and a nightcap. I felt thoroughly spoiled. That’s what you get when you go home to the parents for the holidays—W.C.’s this time, not mine. Many of us who are ethnically Chinese like to say how, for our emotionally constipated parents, the language of love is food, because it’s the easier way to say I love you. But really, we all know no culture has a monopoly on that.
The first time I met W.C.’s dad, he was in an apron, coming out to greet us at the door. Let’s call him Gospodin A., because I love that Bulgarian word (господин) for Mr., or Sir? He partakes equally in the cooking and baking with his Gospozha, the two of them busying side by side in the kitchen to make us Knödel with jackfruit drumsticks, buhtichki, red veggie curry rice, corn and zucchini fritters, scrambled tofu with mushrooms and peppers, nut roast with Brussel sprouts and potatoes, mushroom and bean soup—the recipes all neatly penned on lined note cards. I’m probably conflating what we were fed on our most recent visit and our previous visit, but there wasn’t a single dish I didn’t like. Visiting other people’s homes, it can sometimes be a minor source of anxiety for me when I feel unable to finish the food they offer me, either because I am genuinely too full or I don’t love the food—we all have our preferences, hey?—since I grew up with my mum grilling it into me that a good guest eats everything their host serves them. But at W.C.’s family home, I needn’t have worried. I licked every plate clean.
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Later, after we had spent some time huddled on the sofa before the television, or played Scrabble and Take It Easy, Gospodin A. would materialize—with a glass of homemade mulled wine, or a baked quince with figs topped with caramelized almond flakes. Every night on this last trip, when the rest of the family was watching a movie or a German comedy classic, my head invariably found W.C.’s shoulder, my mouth hanging ajar—Gospodin A. has the photos to prove it. I was still recovering from jetlag; the days were growing dark at 3 p.m. My series of flights from Kuala Lumpur to Berlin had been disrupted by a flight delay, which got me stuck with a crowd of World Cup fans in Doha the day after Argentina’s triumphant game, and then later, a cancellation that necessitated an overnight stay in Frankfurt. All in all, it had taken me forty hours to arrive.
After pandemic lockdowns and food price inflations exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, it feels like there has been a greater move among many people to make more of their own food—and, for some, to go further in growing their own produce, to prepare dishes from scratch. But W.C.’s parents seem to have been doing it for a long time. Their home is on the outskirts of Leipzig, and when we were last here in autumn, they took me on a little tour of their garden where besides vegetables like pumpkin, kale, and rhubarb, they also grow grapes, plums, quince, fig, and strawberries, which they use to make assorted jams, storing them in jars and topping them with a layer of alcohol so they can last three years. I understand nothing of the alchemy of such things, but the jams—the undiluted fruit pulp! the texture nothing like the too-sweet silky-smooth jelly you can slice clean!—were delicious. Gospozha A. often sends boxes of such homemade goodness to W.C. in Berlin through the post, and though he can guzzle up a jar of jam in two days, he still has about nine jars in his pantry waiting to be consumed.
At breakfast one morning, W.C. and his brother both eyed a jar of apple-and-quince jam. His brother declared that he was going to smuggle it back with him to Erfurt, W.C. threatened to divert it to Berlin—and through all this, Gospozha A. giggled, her face glowing in the wan winter’s morning light.