Hands of (Mother) Time
Culture, language, time & memory, all wrapped up in a “mama’s home-cooked meal”
Unintentionally, I have been having a lot of what I call, “mama’s home-cooking moments” lately. Earlier this month, a new Caribbean street-food restaurant opened in our neighbourhood called Mama’s Jerk. “Mama’s Jerk BBQ Marinade Recipe was originally made by my late Nan, Mama Charlotte. She was called Mama by everyone in town,” says the About section on the restaurant’s site. Then, a few days ago, I had dinner with friends at a Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Persian fusion place called, Villa Mamas. From that About section:
“A message from Mama: My cooking is founded in the flavours of my childhood: summers spent on our farm, working with my mother and grandmother in the kitchen to carefully wash and slice herbs, vegetables and fruit, watching as their quick, skilled hands prepared each dish with knowledge, experience and love passed through the generations.”
And if you follow me on Instagram, you saw my post on Adam Gopnik’s new book, specifically the chapter about baking with his mother and how sourdough starter retains the flavours of a baker’s hands long after the baker is gone. (I have also in the past posted about this Romper article by Michelle Yang and the Korean term son-mat 손맛 meaning hand-taste or, the labour and love a mother puts into making food for their family.)
While thinking about this idea of a mother’s home-cooked meal, especially one made from an old family recipe, I kept coming back to a few different threads: the notion of ultimate comfort in a home-cooked meal, often made by a mother and how that plays into the domestic labour performed and expected of mothers; the powerful link between food and home, especially in bicultural families; the idealization of home-cooked meals especially what that means for low-income families and often, single mothers. Ultimately, all of this is about time and its connection to domestic labour, culture, socioeconomics, language, and our beliefs of parental love. It is about the sacrifice of time a mother is supposed to give, want to give, to not only cook for her family but also, to pass on a cultural connection, keep the generations before her alive, make culinary memories, and after all that labour, sit around a table, ideally with a huge family, and talk, talk and talk.
There are plenty of restaurants that have papa or father in the name, so it is not just the mamas out there inspiring culinary empires. Growing up, my father did a lot of the cooking in our home, often referencing his own mother’s Polish recipes. (I remember him making cheese, pretzels, bread, traditional Polish soups and more. But his job was much more flexible than my mother’s so there was a time element to all of this.) And in our family, my male partner does most of the dinner cooking. But it is the romanticized idea of the mother cooking, the flavours from her hands, from her recipes, the comfort of a home-cooked meal prepared specifically by mom, that is still, so often, the impossible standard — all hail the maternal figure in the kitchen.
When I cook or bake (rarely), I enjoy it because it is predominantly with or for my children, but I don’t love doing either. My main issue with both cooking and baking, especially the kind of elaborate cooking that is often venerated, is the time it takes. Because cooking is not my passion, there are other things I want to spend my precious time on. It reminds me of this article by
on Who Gets “Quality” Leisure?To clarify, there are plenty of people, mothers and fathers who love cooking and have incredible memories of sitting around the dinner table, and that is wonderful, but it should not be the standard.
There is often the cultural connection in all of this and the memories of home, especially when you are far away from it. There are countless articles and essays about food and culinary practices and diasporic identity, the connections we make to our (immigrant) parents through food, and of course, the “love language of food”. For the record, I love 99.9% of those articles and will never get enough so keep them coming. But it always makes me think of that fear and that feeling of a loss of connection to a parent, a culture, a language as the driving force. And that makes me sad.
One of my first newsletters was about food and tradition and how I was so overwhelmed by it all, I decided enough was enough. I stand by that and think for many multicultural families, especially the children of immigrants now raising their own children, there is an incredible pressure, often from within, to perform these traditions not necessarily out of desire or pleasure but out of a fear of loss.
I am not one to normally emulate momfluencer content, although I find it fascinating, but a few years ago, I saw a mom using a muffin tray for snacks. Confession: I tried it one day and put in some cut-up fruit (gesture of love! yay!), crackers, other things I had in the cupboard and my children went crazy. Years later, they still ask me to serve them snacks this way, so maybe this will be their food memory of their mother. Maybe I should tell them it is a Polish way to serve snacks to keep up that cultural connection (I am kidding).
Some of my favourite food-related memories are in fact fast-food memories: celebrating my 6th birthday at McDonald’s (remember that thick orange syrup drink?); my mom, who worked shift work, bringing home Arby’s after a long shift; getting strawberry sundaes at McDonald’s with my dad. (McDonald’s is a big immigrant-experience memory for me growing up in Canada.).
We associate food with memories, and memories with time, and time with childhoods, parenting, and life and that is all important and wonderful but also, heavy. Sometimes, a burger is just a burger, delicious even though it wasn’t made with love by mom or mama, has no cultural connection, but was made in minutes, by some 17-year-old kid, working a summer job, with all the time in the world.
Thank you for sharing this. I find that a lot of my memories of my childhood has some sort of food element to it. The aromas, the flavors, the religious symbolism. Loved this issue!