My oldest friend lost his mother last year. And in a recent—and rather beautiful—development under the tragic circumstances, he and his family decided to move from their place in town out to the old family home in West Vancouver. Into the same house where he’d been raised, on the same street where we’d lived opposite one another as boys.
When I eventually visited him in the new/old place, I walked in a daze from room to room. Everything was strange and yet utterly familiar. The smell of the carport, that tree in the yard where the wasps had a nest, even the looming fireplace in the basement where my friend and I once spent an afternoon gouging out the mortar with spoons. (We were four, in our own defence. And unsupervised.)
As if that whole time travel experience wasn’t enough, my friend and I then strolled across the street to revisit the house where I’d been raised. A retired doctor lives there now. And he happily let us poke around. So I had the whole experience a second time, though with even more intensity. The smells and sightlines were just as familiar—weirdly, I remembered the wrought iron stair banister, which we’d swung around so often as kids it was now like seeing an old friend. But the thing that really took me by emotional surprise was the sudden clarity with which I remembered the cooking and eating that we’d done in the house as a family. That counter where I sat and watched my mother make bread. That long family room where we had the table, where my mother would deliver a roast chicken for carving or a steaming platter of rouladen.
The most striking of these memories came to me just through the doors from the family room and into the garage, where I suddenly remembered that my mother would leave the ceviche de gambas to marinate in big plastic buckets. Even the smell came back, that saline signifier of the sea. And not just the sea nearby, just down the hill. But the seas that had been crossed by my mother and father in their years of travel that produced such a strange hybrid home cuisine in the first place: roast chicken, rouladen, beef tongue with mustard sauce. But then also ceviche, arroz con pollo, and a rice dish with cheddar and spinach that we just called “Brazilian rice.”
If you’re sensing a Latin subplot here, you’re onto something. Our blended home cuisine was the result of thousands of miles of travel that my parents had clocked before settling the family in West Vancouver in the 1960s. This wasn’t tourism, I stress. My mother, Ursula, was a Holocaust survivor and a refugee after the Second World War, moving eventually from Germany through France and Italy and then by boat to Ecuador. My father, Richard, was a nomad, travelling for work and adventure. He’d been in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Spain, France, then the States, then Venezuela, before he finally met my mother on a business trip to Guayaquil.
Of necessity, Ursula and Richard ate along the way. And that gave rise years later to what were pretty exotic dinner menus by the West Van standards of the day. My dad in particular was prone to taste nostalgia from his travels, which is why there were jars of vinegary hot peppers in the cupboard (that he’d pay us to eat, a nickel a pop), or why he’d on occasion pack us all into the car and head downtown to eat Chinese at the Green Door or sushi at Kamei.
My parents’ nostalgia inspired my own, which prompted travel, which generated new pathways and new plates, even new characters.
When I moved out years later, I carried these food ideas with me in the form of recipe cards from my mother’s collection: beef stew, two kinds of stroganoff, and then all those Spanish/Latin dishes. I never actually made ceviche at grad school. Playing poker with my buddies at Queen’s, we ordered Square Boy pizza just like everyone else. But if I had to make it for some reason, I could have recreated my mother’s version with just four ingredients and a bit of guessing on measurements: prawns, lime juice, onions, and a whole lotta Tabasco.
Eventually, I would start making that dish. I discovered that my parents’ travel nostalgia, passed down plate by plate in my childhood, had become part of my own. Plus, I started travelling a lot with writing work, to France in particular, where, I understood, for one brief moment in the late 1940s, my parents had both been at the same time without knowing it. When I wrote my first novel about a chef, Stanley Park, I was deeply imprinted by the time spent eating my way around the countryside in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté—the same source of inspiration for my fictional hero.
My parents’ nostalgia inspired my own, which prompted travel, which generated new pathways and new plates, even new characters. And in subsequent years, this chain reaction of memory and curiosity, flavour and creativity, would result in my pursuing different writing assignments that sent me to different places. And so a whole range of new things were added to the mix.
Much of this was Latin at first. I remember a trip to Bahia that sent me home with moqueca, farofa, and feijoada, each of which still shows up today on my family table. And when my kid’s grade school held a potluck dinner to which parents were supposed to bring “international” dishes, I went that direction. But I went all the way back, in a sort of tribute, and dug out the kitchen-stained recipe card for Brazilian rice, prompting the Brazilian mother of one of my son’s friends to sidle up and inform me that no way was this even remotely an actual dish from her home country.
Of course not, I explained. It came from a cookbook published by Venezuelan expat friends of my mother’s and was only called “Brazilian” because cheddar cheese, spinach, and rice may be seen to reference (incompletely) the colours of the Brazilian flag.
In the end, I likely covered more miles than even Richard and Ursula in their youth, although without a fraction of the stress and uncertainty they faced. Still, by the time I got to writing my most recent novel—The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, which returns readers to commercial kitchens—my personal home cuisine had become a full generation more hybridized than even my parents’. It revealed all the original continental and North European influences but drew on a greatly expanded Latin repertoire, as well as a whole new one reflecting influential writing trips that had taken me to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo.
No surprise then, the chef hero of my new novel ate and opened restaurants in exactly the same way. In particular, after a stint at the Tokyo Sushi Academy, both of us returned home with our taste buds permanently rearranged by exposure to dashi and miso. So I can report that in our house now, where we do eat it fairly regularly (sorry), beef tongue comes to the table based on mood either as langue de boeuf à la moutarde per my mother, tacos de lengua con mole verde as I once had it in San José, Costa Rica, or most recently as gyutan, which I first ate in a yakiniku place north of the river in Adachi City in Tokyo where the dining room was so smoky from the grills, they stored your jacket in a plastic bag in a storage unit across the street.
Does this story of the ever-expanding palate end well? For my hero, as the title of the book suggests, what inflates with ambition frequently also deflates in a hurry for reasons you never see coming. No spoilers. But consider my hero contemplating things in about the last calm moment for him before his restaurant empire starts to come apart at the seams:
We were, after all, in the middle of learning something very difficult at Magic Wolf. We were learning the strange dynamic that covers both media shitstorms and the two ways in which a Hemingway character once described going bankrupt. Gradually, then suddenly.
For me personally, I think of it a little differently. My appetites derive from my parents’ own desires, from the paths they pushed on down while navigating the world, and from the memories that we then wove together. In doing so, the map never quite draws itself to completion. The recipe box is never quite full. And one day, in a loop that I likely won’t see closing, my son Brendan will consider a plate in front of him, perhaps with his own family in a place quite different from where we both are now, and he’ll feel a quiver of connection that pulls him back in time and pushes him forward in motion, all at once. With the same bite, the same memory, the same love—and the same flavour.
Read more from our Winter 2024 issue.
