Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

But I realized what I love most about cake is the time and energy spent making something celebratory.

For what is home if not the first place where you learn what does and does not nourish you?

Taking a holistic look into what we consume, we see how we are what we eat.

There is beauty in the transformation, not just the result. Seeds to plant, blossoms to fruit, children to adults.

The Malay word for hair is rambut, and it’s only fitting that the fruit with the wildest curly spinterns radiating from its bright scarlet skin—like a tiny red wig fit for the creepiest of clowns—would be named rambutan.

My Filipina mother, perhaps trying to exert some control over her American-born daughter in a teenage world she didn’t understand, always had rules like No reading magazines close to dinnertime! No phone calls after dinner! No blowing bubblegum bubbles! No makeup! No hair spray! But now I had curls.

Remember, this was the eighties. Curls were all about being scrunched and crunched in gels, mousse, and styling spray.

And no matter what, your bangs had to stand taller than your poufiest curl.

Why?

“Hair spray dries your hair too much. In two years, you will have no hair.

I am twelve. The sketchy lady from Fantastic Sam’s hair salon (who smoked while she cut my hair) divided my hair laterally and made the front half all bangs, and the back half—a bizarro she-mullet. This lady teaches me how to use a curling iron.

That woman should have been fired.

No one asks the rambutan about its messy hair. They just know that if you want a rambutan, you’re gonna have to deal with the wild and unruly spinterns.

I can’t bear anything less than the weight of the same waterfall from my grandmother. No saddle, no harness. It took me decades to do so, but now I embrace the dark wildness of my hair—my rambut, such spring and coil—which refuses to lie down for any iron.

It gallops untamed—not even stopping if you try to offer it a crumbly cube of sugar.

The name mango most likely comes from my dad’s language—the Malayalam word manna, which the Portuguese adopted as manga when they came to Kerala in 1498, during the frenzy of the spice trades.

And a couple from Iligan City in Mindanao holds the record for producing the biggest mango in the world, weighing in at about 7.7 pounds, or the weight of a small cat.

Spanish explorers brought mangoes to Mexico in the 1600s, and the first recorded attempt to introduce the mango into the United States came in 1833 in Florida.

After my first year in graduate school, where my white classmates tried to decree what words were too foreign for their ears, my younger sister and I traveled to India by ourselves to spend time with our sweet grandmother. Every time we sat down at her table, we had strips of mangoes sliced up for us, orange-yellow, the brightest color of the meal.

The paisley pattern, developed in India, is originally based on the shape of a mango.

Legend has it pawpaws were one of George Washington’s favorite desserts, and I wonder which enslaved person was the first to slice one open and slide out the seeds for the tongue that carved out whole battle stratagems in his sleep.

But he loves to tell me they are called the Indiana banana even though we both know that pawpaws are also called lots of other things: wild banana, prairie banana, West Virginia banana, Kansas banana, Kentucky banana, Michigan banana, Missouri banana, the poor man’s banana, Ozark banana, and banango.

He said he was going to ask me to eat one in front of everybody, knowing it’d be almost certainly a messy affair, but thought better of it when he saw that I showed up for the event in professor mode: a new teal dress and pink metallic strappy sandals. As much as he teases me, he knows I have my limits.

Men.

The pawpaw blooms are what’s known in the botany world as perfect: each flower has both male and female structures, both stamens and carpels. Pawpaws aren’t pollinated by bees, but they require pollen from another tree to develop into fruit. Because of this, if you think about planting a pawpaw tree, you need to have at least one other tree (preferably two more), planted no more than ten feet away.

Pawpaws are an understory kind of tree, which means they are used to growing cool and green under the shade of other trees while they are young.

Even when pawpaws turn black, you can chill them in the fridge for a few hours, then scoop them out with a spoon to get to the “custard” with a bite of tartness, a small startle, like the light in late summer—the first bright afternoons of a new school year when the sun scatters and dapples your loved one’s faces.

And if you are around anyone still in school, you know how they all start to smell a little like erasers and freshly sharpened pencils. Or perhaps a marker smell so strong it chops and wrinkles your nose.

O don’t let him hold a grudge for all the hundreds of times I told him no. Let him remember as he’s walking to and from his classes the thousands and thousands of times I told him yes. Maybe by the time he first comes home from college one weekend a few Septembers from now, we will have our earliest pawpaws to pick.

Things I wanted that year: pink-and-black British Knights high-tops and Liz Claiborne perfume in the red triangle bottle.

???

Lumpia is a deep-fried finger food in the Philippines, made of a filling of chicken or ground beef, carrots, and green beans, and my mom puts raisins in for a hint of sweetness. Shanghai lumpia is rolled thinner and smaller and uses giniling (ground pork) and lettuce and diced garlic and shallots.

A party without lumpia! was her astonished reply. No. We don’t do that. No. There will be lumpia!

should have known the very fact that a fourteen-year-old was having a birthday sleepover at a mental asylum meant I’d never ever be like everyone else, so it would be pointless to pretend.

But my husband of all people comes the closest to replicating my mother’s recipe, so I am more than happy.

Woe to the Filipino child who did not want to dance, or worse, didn’t like dancing at all.

A couple of them wouldn’t even try a bite, literally wrinkling their nose at the plateful my mom artfully stacked in a pretty pyramid.

Folks in the Middle Ages thought tomatoes were poisonous, but that’s only because they regularly ate them off pewter plates, which leached lead.

Filipino breakfast with bangus is so nice, you say it twice. The scientific name for bangus (milkfish) is Chanos chanos—one of my favorite tautonyms, in which the same word is used for both genus and species.

Bangus is the national fish of the Philippines. They have gorgeous silver flanks, a pale belly, and large eyes that can locate algae and wiggly invertebrates to nibble on, even in cloudy coral reefs. On average they are about fifteen inches long, almost the length of a bowling pin.

Filipino breakfast for me means bangus, garlic fried rice, and fried egg with the yolk just a tad runny: bangusilog! And you can’t forget diced, salt-and-peppered tomatoes on the side.

Filipino breakfast means a party on the tabletop and a jamboree in my heart when I finally stand up from the meal.

When pan-fried, it gives a delightfully sharp crunch before you get to the flaky white fillet.

Asking for school supplies that weren’t on the list was out of the question for my parents, who thought school supplies were already superfluous. “We have pen here! Look, I have notebooks from work! Good enough for me, good enough for you!”

To “use rice” was not a metaphor, it was literal—my mom loved to regale me with stories from the Philippines about how the sari-sari store in their province, where they usually bought all their supplies, didn’t carry glue for envelopes or wrapping paper when she was growing up. They simply used cooked rice instead—spreading it with their fingers like a thin paste, one grain at a time. Suddenly my Prozac notebook didn’t look so bad anymore!

Sort of: while the Great Wall was being built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, workers used a porridge made of calcium carbonate and rice as a mortar to hold the wall’s stones together. But rice is a very thirsty plant to farm—five thousand liters of water are needed to produce about two pounds of rice.

Americans eat more than twenty-six pounds of rice every year. That might seem like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the rest of the world.

Rice is adaptable, easy to grow (provided there is a good water source), and has a very high production yield—just one seed of rice can result in over three thousand grains.

Dip the tip of your fingers straight down into the pot until they just touch the rice, and add more water until it reaches the first joint-line of your ring finger.

but it turns out the distance of the tip of your ring finger to the first knuckle is relatively similar for everyone.

The volume of water between the top of the rice and your first knuckle is always the same.

On the island of Oahu, red cayenne pineapples ripen to reveal their signature golden flesh, and sugarloaf pineapples glow pale, almost white, when they are ready to pick.

Hummingbirds show up in every state in America except Hawaii—their tiny wings can’t make the long distance to the archipelago and survive strong oceanic winds.

Cold feet are a thing of the past if there’s a spare onion around—a rub of a halved onion on your freezing toes is all you need to get your blood warming like a soup again.