HELENA LEON MAYER
CITRUS & SLOW DISHES
for Hailey
I text you: citrus, tomato pasta, plum cake.
The first thing we eat together is your mother’s muttu curry. Sitting on your front porch in the sun. Giddy. I scoop more and more yoghurt.
The first date we ever go on (though we had been in love for months) is at a café near the flat we will move into and out of (though we don’t yet know that). We eat battered cauliflower and I promptly vomit: in the bathroom, the rubbish bin, the water fountain, the bushes on the way home. It’s the second day we have spent together and suddenly I am at my most vulnerable in a city where I know no one else. You wash my clothes and hold me and carry around an ice cream container with tissues and toothpaste for the rest of the week. I am used to this feeling: years of anxiety meant holding a bent body over sinks and toilet bowls, at sleepovers, before speeches, and school mornings. In moments of uncertainty or newness my body seeks to empty itself entirely, a kind of disappearing. But you are calm and funny and we are both still here.
We make dinner together for our friends at their parent’s house. I chop; you fry. You knead; I roll. After they say karakia, they ask how we bless food. We show them, reciting each step of how we made the meal and naming as many places as we know where the ingredients came from.
Then, there are the embarrassing moments: how I made myself eat jalapeños before I visited you for the first time; the bland tomato pasta I was ridiculously proud of, doused in oregano; walking around Yogiji’s in circles, checking your list: henna cones, Mother’s coriander chutney, a big bottle of Frooti, a few red onions and some bay leaves. Then, there are the memories that fill me with shame: telling you not to make chana masala because we need to eat the vegetables in the fridge; telling you that you used too much za’atar in a soup, it is expensive.
Then, there are the moments my whiteness eats me whole. I ask a man with a great smile and big sunglasses sitting outside the supermarket if I can get him any groceries. He asks for a silverside. When I don’t understand he tells me it is beef. My chest gets tight – I don’t even know where to find it. So instead, I tell him I don’t buy meat, and get a bottle of milk and cookies. Later, I narrate this back to you, telling the story like it is a joke, falling over myself. You turn away from me. You show me: here I am with my reading groups, my protests, my stickers and my ‘solidarity’, still failing to arrive at human moments with a basic level of care. It is not that I didn’t want to buy meat, you explain, but that I made an offering and didn’t follow through, in service of my comfort. Who am I to control what he wants for dinner? Saviourism sitting in my chest, the only thing saved was my cash. The next afternoon, I pass the smiling man in the gardens and walk to the supermarket. I find the meat, it is heavy in my hands. I pray to the cow: I’m sorry. Thank you. Go well. I return to the gardens and offer what he asked for. Here we are together: I trip over my feet again and again. You explain the fall and carry the weight.
I make sauerkraut for the first time, giddy about a German food without wurst. Even though you suggest I do, I don’t weigh the salt. Then, you recommend asking my ancestors about ingredient quantities and I think that, surely for at least this, my ancestors will be of use. The sauerkraut turns out inedibly salty. After my ancestors prove themselves unreliable, I turn to yours instead, and they always follow through. A few months later, you throw out two big jars of sauerkraut after I go home; I have no recollection of this.
The first time our parents meet it is at the house on the hill. When I arrive with my parents they go to the living room with your dad and I join you and your mum in the kitchen, chopping veges and washing dishes. She has made as many different dishes as there are people at the table, in less than an hour. You tell me later that this was a moment I proved myself: coming to help rather than sitting down.
Last night you told me I eat with my hands like a brown person and I felt so proud, though the food was still all over my fingers. I hear your instructions in my head as I eat: With one hand, use your thumb to tear of a small piece of naan / chapati / dosa. Use the bread as a vessel to scoop the food into a small ball. Use your thumb to push it of your fingertips into your mouth.
You told me you never finish food; with me, I always have the last piece.
There are three kitchens in this city where I have fallen in love with you. The first has a high ceiling, a loose floorboard, and a perpetually shedding tree. In this kitchen we make dumplings from scratch when we can’t leave the house, we hold each other and cry, we kiss quickly with the door closed. The second kitchen is tiny, only two elements and a shelf that the landlord has yet to screw to the wall, on the verge of collapse. In this kitchen you make the best brunches when I come home from the market: bread, eggs, vegetables you glaze and sweeten. We feed each other. The third kitchen has yellow cupboards, a green roof, a purple door, and a coffee machine that grumbles and tuts in the morning. You layer the pressure cooker with rice and spices, bring me spoonfuls to try. I rest my head on your shoulder as you stand at the stove, my arms around your waist.
You text me: flatbreads / slow dishes / egg curry / caramelised leeks & the seasoning of a dahl.
Helena Leon Mayer is quite chaotic. They help run creative fundraisers at @crafting_change_aotearoa.