Lake Superior is a deep cobalt meadow, an inland field, an unsalted sea. For four years as a writing fellow and than as an adjunct professor, I lived within an earshot and short walk from the expansive sandy shores of this lake often frozen for more than half a year. Even when this coast was cragged with ice, granite glass-slick impassible, it continued to move. Never slept. Yet most of the Upper Peninsula was quiet year round. Beautifully quiet. But never the lake. Marquette, Michigan was where I wrote a book-length worth of poems and where I also really learned to cook from not just memory as much as from my heart.
The memories I sourced for food weren't from childhood. Living in Marquette was a re-invented childhood, collecting chanterelles, blueberries filled in Nalgene bottles after a long run in late July, bike rides with head lamps in pitch October cold followed by chili and corn bread from scratch. I cooked from travels where winter also plays a major seasonal role--I mostly cooked from the two years I lived in Poland. Sure, the land of fields and war wept history might not be the culinary epoch of Paris you'd expect to conjure moments of longing with a spoon in hand. I certainly had days of standing in soup kitchens slurping borcht with men who pissed standing up. (Yup, true story.) But what Poland taught me about cooking has been far more invaluable than any side street in Rome, no matter where you live you want to eat well, but you have to be resourceful.
Who better to teach me this than Tomaz Bomba, a son of a devoted Communist and Catholic. Pani Bomba, Tomaz's mother, had kicked out her drunk abusive husband when Tomaz was only two. Raised him on the food from the garden she grew and her own chanterelles she'd forage--food was a serious business to a mother of one who stood in lines for wilted cabbage--never really knowing if there would be enough or even some. But by 1997, when I first moved to Poland to teach at a British School, lines were still being stood in at cold city squares, but also German supermarkets set up a starch shop of disco music, yet whole pheasants with feathers still intake placed could be sourced from an open freezer.
Tomaz Bomba, whose name literally translates as Tom the Bomb, learned most of his English by reading Henry James novels. His English was both stilted, antiquated and way too British than any of my fellow English teachers could even understand. But what Tomaz and I did share in common was the belief we could make fresh flavored food even in wintered Poland. And we did. Thanks to a trip Tomaz had made a few years previously to London, where he bought Julia Child's seminal book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
We'd begin at a bus stop on Wednesday mornings (my day off) and pick a recipe from the well worn book while waiting for a bus we'd never really know if it would show up. Mornings were spent sourcing, foraging through mudfilled winter markets of tarps and dejected looking turnips and beets. At first, Tomaz did all the arguing--the sound of Polish even in civil negotiations sound like threats. Close body space, slinging z-filled words all harsh consonants back and forth for a few carrots. At first it seemed totally absurd. Only at first. Later once my Polish improved, I'd sling z-filled words with fist cupped hands with the best of them. But regardless of overpriced potatoes, we would fill our bags and return to my shared apartment, my British vegetarian roommate who by mid-February, thanks to our dinners and constant fumes of braised pork shoulder, turned carnivore.
For two years, we'd cook our Wednesday night meals for new teachers, visitors and of course Tomaz's mother. Despite all the meals, one dinner stands out. It was a warm April morning and Tomaz and I had a few months of suppers under our belts when he announced, "Emilka, do you fancy yourself a proper curry?" Again, I tried to loosen the British from Tomaz, but he preferred to sound like he was straight up early 19th century. Like some diplomat visiting Downton Abbey. I went along. Now there were certain cuisines that seemed impossible, meaning anything with complicated spice blends and anything that required tropical fruit. The most exotic food we'd ever encountered was at our local Chinese restaurant where Anna, my roommate, ordered fried ice cream, but it arrived with a side of pineapple. We gathered around her plate wide eyed, beginning sentences like, That cannot be? Is it? No, you taste it first? Yes, it was indeed pineapple. Paled and canned, but still pineapple.
So when Tomaz asked me if I wanted to make not only a curry, but a coconut curry, I thought, impossible. Just weeks previously, my Polish teacher, a woman of 30 and fluent in German, French and English told me, while looking at a collection of fruit, This does not exist, it must be a wrong colored lemon while looking at a green watercolored lime. So, I thought this game of hunting for ingredients would come to end until Tomaz said he saw something he thought might be a coconut. And there in the center window off a side street in town with all its fine tropical hair awkwardly messed up and leaning into a bottle of carrot juice and beets, was yes, a coconut.
How it found itself in Kielce, an industrious town aka The Knife City two hours north of Krakow, we didn't ask. But hours later with a hammer and a bowl, we bled that coconut and chewed on the firm white flesh saving pieces for our friends. Coconut curry came together in a large bubbling mass thanks also to the rich raw milk Tomaz got from his mother--thick white frothy milk carried in a jar from farm to bus to cinderblock house. And yes, I had a few limes that I had purchased weeks previously from a market in a neighboring town, to prove to my Polish teacher that limes do exist and aren't just mis-colored lemons.
We sat with a collection of friends on the floor eating bowlfuls of green coconut curry until the last of the sauce and sweet milk was gone. So proud of ourselves in being able to create the impossible, flavors we had only remembered or read about right there in the shoebox of our kitchen. And now, so many years later, maybe it isn't so strange that I run a cooking school. People ask where I went to culinary school. I say, laughing, I have my MFA in poetry and traveled a lot and simply tried everything I could, but have no training, none other than a lot of skilled eating.
And really, that is all I have, a long love story of eating everything I could find while living in Europe. But thankfully, I didn't stop with stories or moments of meals past. Nope, alone in all that cold and silence in Marquette, Michigan I decided to really learn how to make something, make something real. I made fresh pasta that failed from the desire to taste chestnut penne from a wintered lunch in Spoleto, yogurt salad that was too sour but remembered fondly from a trip to Crete and of course, strawberry pierogies from Tomaz's mother's who picked them on the side of the road on her walk home will most likely never taste as good. Mine fell apart into doughed masses.
Sure, this all sounds romantic, but what I have learned is that real love comes from the efforts of failure. Not the fact that you failed as much as your efforts to try. From wanting to figure out how to make it again, sourcing ingredients, learning the science and or course, being open to the fact that you have to figure out each step. And even then, it still might fail. Yes, failing is the hardest part, but I also know it is where you learn the most. And this is what I love about food, even in the meals of mediocre flavor, it is your chance to improve. Try again, and what else is there? But a chance to recreate and even rewrite your recipe, your heart.
So Marquette is far from Missoula as was Poland, but thankfully, I still have a kitchen. I still have my blind desire to feed myself and those I love. This poem has come up so often lately that it truly feels like the best recipe poem to share with you.
Enjoy.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who know you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
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