Chopping Onions on My Heart Quotes

“The Babylonian Talmud is full of rabbis shaming and marginalising magic women. They wanted a monopoly on magic.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“Languages only survive if you use them, if you bake in them.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“Eight weeks after Katrina, so many people wrote in to the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper seeking recipes they'd lost in the hurricane that they started a column called ‘Rebuilding New Orleans: Recipe by Recipe,’ which turned into a cookbook. It connected people who were trying to cook familiar foods for the people they loved, to make them feel safe in the wake of disaster.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“I cooked so much rice, buying basmati by the sack because who could manage with those mimsy bags from the supermarket? Let alone the minute packs of herbs.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“If I didn't cook rice, speak my language or even talk with my hands, maybe I was doomed to white bread and cream cheese, or the dubious meals in the canteen.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“The food writer Bee Wilson, cooking her way out of the breakdown of her marriage, came to believe that a better word for comfort food was ‘trauma food’ because it’s not just treats and stodge under the duvet (although it can be), but food that heals, sustains, consoles – and, of course, it also keeps you alive.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“We didn't fit. An Iraqi Jewish friend said that when she filled in forms, ‘I just tick OTHER OTHER OTHER until it lets me write what I am’.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“There are reasons that over half of us speak just thirteen of the 7,000-odd languages spoken or signed in the world right now, and many languages are at risk because of genocide, forced migration, forced education, suppression and racism. English didn't go from 4 million speakers in 1600 to 2 billion now by accident or luck…”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“I was beginning to see that there was always violence somewhere in the vanishing of languages. There certainly was in mind.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“I knew transmitting culture was hard. If I didn't know it before my son was born, I learned it in the delivery room.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“Language is not just words; it's intonations, gesture, facial expressions, volume, emotion, style.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“If you upset someone they might say yethrem basal all ras efadi! (you're chopping onions on my heart), the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic version of ‘you're rubbing salt in the wound’ that's so graphic it makes you wince.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“I wanted to work out how to be a good future ancestor myself.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“One weird pandemic night I read a Canadian study which showed that young Aboriginal people who learned their own languages were much less likely to commit suicide. Its authors argued that learning family languages, native languages, ancestral languages makes us more connected, more resilient, mentally stronger, richer apart.”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture

“I didn't want to live in a world where I'd shrug and say yom assell yom bassal and no one would know I meant one day honey, another day onions. I didn't want to cook a meal and never be told ashteedek (long live your hands), I wanted to be able to ask ash lonek (how are you? – but literally, joyfully, what colour are you?).”
― Samantha Ellis, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture