bacalhau / cod

Last night we had two friends over for dinner, and I was in charge.

The menu:

• red cabbage salad with avocado, carrot, pumpkin seed, figs, and a honey-mustard-almond butter vinaigrette
• Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá with tomato pesto garnish
• steamed aspargus with Argentine reggianito cheese
• dessert: cherry and almond clafoutis
  

I began to search for a way to prepare bacalhau after a Spanish friend brought a dish of red peppers stuffed with salt cod to a dinner party at our apartment a few months ago. The cod in bechamel sauce was a perfect complement to the roasted peppers, and Pedro insisted that "it was the easiest thing in the world to make." Was it? I wasn't convinced.

Though I had seen the sheets of flat, dried fish at La Rosa Fine Foods and other bodegas up here in the Heights, and I'd certainly eaten plenty of bolinhos de bacalhau (cod fritters) during my time in Brazil, I was always a bit intimidated by the raw look of the fillets, and the fact that they required an overnight soak. This fear is somewhat unwarranted, I must admit now that I've made the dish, because soaking salt cod is about as easy as soaking beans, which I do at least once a week.

Leite's Culinaria provided me with the recipe for Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, but before I was ready to try making it, I wanted to know what it tasted like. A few weeks ago we went to Via Brasil, a Brazilian restaurant near Times Square, and I ordered an uninspiring version of the dish, drenched in too much oil, the fish almost flavorless, the potatoes without seasoning. Yet I suspected that the recipe had the potential to be so much more; it shouldn't be hard to bring out the flavor in the combination of cod, potatoes, and onions -- almost like a tortilla española with some Portugues cod thrown in for variation, ¡a la portuguesa!

My suspicions were correct: made in a large cast-iron skillet in the oven, this version of Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá was just as I had hoped: easy, mellow, and rich. I added a couple of eggs and a few tablespoons of cream to the mix before popping it in the oven, and the result was fantastic!

When I told my mother about my determination to find some use for bacalhau, and my fond memories of Brazilian cod fritters, she responded with her own recollections of the New England version: fried cod cakes that her great-aunts made for her in Maine in the 1950s. I'm not surprised that cod, so strongly linked to the Portuguese-Atlantic trade, has now made its way full circle in my kitchen: from the waters of colonial New England to imperial Portugal; from the Portuguese colonies of the Azores to its crown jewel, Brazil; and from Brazil to New York, Atlantic metropole:

B A C A L H A U is in my blood and on my dinner table.

C O L O R

Since I began to knit again last year, I have found myself drawn to the color of yarn with such intensity that it sometimes startles me. I might spend an hour in a yarn shop staring at the shelves of yarn and pawing at one skein after another before, disappointedly, I admit that I can't find what I want, and won't settle for second-best.

Whence this love-affair with color? I was never the painter in my family; I preferred music and books to drawing and sculpting. Yet, the passion that I feel from color must have come from somewhere, or some time when my eyes were open wide enough to see.

The first time I remember feeling a certain way about color was when we were living in China; I became fascinated by a certain shades of brick orange and dark, deep yellows -- similar to the yellow in this ball of yarn here, the shade of goldenrod.

Perhaps I dreamed of colors because, for the first time in my life, I could not speak or understand what was spoken to me -- or, rarer still, what was written. Chinese characters on store-fronts and roadways might as well have been drawings to me, for that is how I interpreted them. Neurologists believe that, when one part of the brain is injured, other parts learn to function in its stead; a small miracle. But forget lesion -- what happens when a faculty is not injured, but instead rendered useless, as was my ability to speak and interpret speech in China?
There, I spent a humbling half-year deaf and dumb, but enchanted, nonetheless, by the smells and the tastes and the sights -- as if they could make up for my voicelessness. Those colors, like the yellows and green of the clay Buddhas at the Fragrant Hills, find strange parallel in the yellow yarn and green grass of the photos that I took yesterday at the Cloisters.

It took China for someone like me, enamored of languages and other sounds, to let go of words and explanations long enough to start seeing the patterns in front of my own eyes: the gray stones of the old hutong neighborhoods around the Forbidden City; the swirl of rice noodles in beef broth; the swoosh of the Beijing subway as it circled the outer boroughs; and the swinging wicker cages that old men would carry along to "walk" their birds. I sought an older, imagined China, growing more nostalgic for it even as the people around me looked ahead, towards the Olympics that are, now, almost upon us. I looked backwards, towards temples and emperors' gardens and pleasure grounds; they anticipated that the Middle Country would rise again, and prepared for it.

What does all of this have to do with my knitting? I didn't knit in China, and I never saw anyone knitting there, although my mother-in-law says that she used to knit her own sweaters after the Cultural Revolution, when everyone learned to make do. No, knitting doesn't have a lot to do with China, but I believe that color does -- or, at least, it has to do with my version of China, imperfect and fragile and beautiful in its wordlessness. I'm sure that, had I stayed longer and learned more Mandarin, some of the charm of incomprehension would have been lost, and I would have begun to read signs as words, not drawings, and look for a label for every passing sensation. Instead, I remained eyes-open, childlike in my delight and appreciation. Something of this same feeling I have now, when I grasp a yellow ball of yarn, take a strand between my fingers, and cast on for another project.

No words -- just yellow.

Fleeting

Tonight, I walked back home from the Cloisters Museum in Upper Manhattan, and heard the rage of a isla beat from the speakers of passing cars; watched crowds buy treats from the ice cream trucks; and felt the moist, warm air of the city waft between my toes. Spring has come to the island.

The end of a holiday always makes me feel melancholy, like Sunday night when I was a little kid, and knew that I had to go back to school the next day. When I lived in Brazil, I dreaded weekends, because those were the longest, loneliest hours of the week, when the cars cleared out of the city, the shops shut down, and my friends went out of town with their families. As long as the city was busy, its streets filled with noisy buses and office girls, I felt at home amidst the bustle. It was only when the streets cleared, except for the beggars, that I was reminded that I had nowhere to go; that I was a foreigner, and the city was not my own.

This city, New York, is mine, now that we have decided to remain here. And yet today, Memorial Day, I feel a longing for a city and a time that is not my own: strange, because I had such a beautiful weekend, and have only more of such weekends to look forward to as we head into summer: days riding my bike and knitting and reading, nights spent cooking meals for friends and enjoying the lit splendor of the George Washington bridge from our building's rooftop, glass of wine in hand. I love the humidity of New York nights, and the way that the city's restaurants and bars spill out onto the sidewalk, like in Buenos Aires, inviting guests to linger far into the warm nights. I love the summer, and even as it is just begun, wish that it could last a little longer.

Something in me resists change, wanting to hold perfection in my hand, like the poppies frozen in the digital frame. When happiness comes I grab at it, hoping that I can keep it just this one time -- golden moments, like this afternoon spent wandering the paths of Fort Tryon and snapping photos of blooming flowers.

There is a whole genre of poetry devoted to this sentiment, I know: tempus fugit, gather ye rosebuds where ye may, etc. When I read the verses I know that what I am feeling is universal to the human experience; I am not the first to wish for things to remain just as they are. Yet has another generation lived in a world where things recycled themselves with such speed and rigor, I ask myself?

Even that feeling, of living in a tumultuous age, unlike any other, is nothing new: think of Rome at the end of the Empire, or 15th century Spain, when the crops had failed and the New World was just a glimmer, or those anxious years just before the first Great War, when European poets thought that a new era was near, explosive and clean:

Guillaume Apollinaire,

La pétit auto

A commentary on what I understand is another of his poems of the same name, whose text is not available on the internet.

This afternoon, I was not thinking of the French avant-guard as I sat in front of John Rockefeller's castle at the Cloisters, knitting a lace cardigan and trying not to get sunburned. I thinking, in fact, of what to make for dinner, and whether or not I needed to buy anything at La Rosa, and whether or not my favorite Spanish bodega would be open on this holiday. I pictured the salmon that was defrosting on our kitchen counter; and I thought of my father, and mother; and I imagined my husband scoring a goal on the soccer field all the way down in Chinatown, and buying me dried persimmons for me before he caught the subway back up to the Heights. All of these things I thought about -- so much, right here -- as my fingers moved back and forth, and the sun sunk lower over the west bank of the Hudson.

A V I D A L E G R I A

Life is tough.

As the Buddha said, life is suffering.*

I don't want to write about suffering; it may be the stuff of great art, but most of us can agree that we'd rather it stay out of our own lives, thank you very much.

Besides, people suffer in so many ways; Viktor Frankl wrote that even the smallest bit of unhappiness can cloud our entire vision, filling up our lives until we think that that is all that there is. So how can we measure suffering, if it means something so very different to the people struck by the earthquake in Sichuan, to an abandoned child in rural Massachusetts, or to an old woman who has lived with depression for 80 years? What do these forms of suffering have in common, if anything?

But I said I didn't want to write about suffering; heaven knows there's enough of it in the world without me putting in my two cents on the topic! I want to write about happiness, because happiness doesn't always catch our attention the way that sadness does, or anger, or jealousy. While these feelings come to me all too quickly, unbidden, happiness needs to be cultivated. And such work takes time, and care, and purpose.

Cultivation of anything is always purposeful; cultivating happiness requires that we know ourselves (that I know myself), and that we are attentive to our own responses and, sometimes, obey those urges towards happiness. We are beings who want to be happy; it is in our very nature to be so, whether you believe in original blessing or in Buddha nature, and yet so often we put obstacles in the way to our own happiness. My work this year has been to find the light-filled, glistening moments of happiness among the dullness of grad school applications; my 9-to-5 job; a family member's illness; and piles of scientific articles to read and comment upon -- to find those moments, and grab them tightly, noting them to myself and storing their passage in my memory so that I can, I hope, repeat them again.

Among other things, this year I've learned just how much I like to cook, to feed myself and others, and to plan new meals. I've acquired a shelf of fantastic, classic cookbooks and foodbooks: Mastering the Art of French Cooking; A New Way to Cook; The Silver Spoon; 1080 Recipes; Madhur's Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking; the last six months of Gourmet magazine; Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Sometimes I read these books before bed, slipping into an infinity of recipes that is similar to the infinity of knitting patterns that I want to make, or the countries that I want to visit, or the novels that I want to read. I want it all -- and I content myself, making do, with one recipe, one happiness, one moment.

Tonight I am going to a friend's apartment in Brooklyn, a friend who wants to learn how to cook (better), and I'm showing her how to make the wonderful garbanzo beans that my husband and I shared a few weeks ago. It's an easy recipe, and sharing it with someone else makes me happy. As I become a better cook, and more confident in my understanding of the way that food works, I like being a cooking teacher, helping another person to demystify the chemistry of the kitchen so that she, too, can eat well. This is all part of my pursuit of happiness today, these one happy moments that follow each other.

Bom apetite!




*The Buddha also said that there is an end to suffering, but that is another story. I don't think that the end of suffering -- nirvana -- is the same as a pursuit of happiness, but maybe those paths will coincide in one way or another...

George Washington Bridge

Who could feel sorry for us living up here in Washington Heights, when we have this for our view only five minutes away, across the bridge? All of Manhattan is in front of us.