Preface

By MICHELE ANNA JORDAN

There is no flavor called moon
although I feel as if I can taste it
cool, soft and powdery.
Tea-cookie, translucent jellybean, host.
Swallow her down
nibble by nibble
until you too glow.
Soon, people will stop
to lick your hands
and ask for the recipe.
—Lizzie Hannon, “A Night in My Kitchen”

Whether we travel to eat or eat to travel, when something tastes good we want more: We ask for seconds and sometimes thirds, we lick each other’s fingers, we ask for the recipe. We carry the treasure home, in our hands and in our hearts, where we hope to recreate the magic.

I was lucky to have been born with an adventurous palate. My first memory of food on the road was the sweet ripe watermelon I ate on my fourth birthday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A few days later, on the California Zephyr from Chicago to Oakland, I ate what I consider my formative meal, the one that that transformed me bite by bite from a passive into an active eater, one eager to discover and savor all the enticing flavors the world offers.

I was in the dining car, asleep in my mother’s lap, when her complaints about rare prime rib awakened me. She’d ordered well done and did not know what to do.

I sat up, tasted the juicy red meat and then devoured the entire slab.

When we got home, I wanted more and I learned how to get it. I began to tell my mother how to cook—yes, I was a cheeky little thing—and I used smell and taste to find my way back to flavors I had discovered here and there, at my grandmother’s house, in a friend’s kitchen, in the neighborhood Chinese restaurant, in that silver dining car with the tuxedo-clad waiters. Soon, I could convince my mother to take me to San Francisco for Dungeness crab, to a farm stand on the outskirts of town that had the best tasting watermelon and juiciest plums, to an out-of-the-way deli for smoked salmon, smoked oysters, and good Italian salami. On my eighth birthday, I received my first cookbook.

Married at just sixteen, I defied all predictions that my husband would starve at the hands of his child bride. I cooked my way through The White House Cookbook by Rene Verdon, the Kennedys’ chef, and figured out where to buy ingredients like fresh rosemary that were then all but impossible to find in suburban America. I learned my way around unfamiliar streets and aisles, guided by hunger and curiosity, invaluable tools for any culinary traveler.

With my first venture abroad, an accidental trip to India—I was on my way to Canada when a new acquaintance was so certain that I should go to India that he bought me a round-trip ticket to Bombay—I began to discover how intimately hospitality and the pleasures of the table are entwined in other cultures. A visitor, any visitor, was received with open arms and an abundant table filled with the best foods the family could afford. There was always rice, dal, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, meat (usually goat) curry, vegetable curry, a dizzying array of condiments, including raitas, fresh and cooked chutneys, raisins, toasted nuts, coconut, and platters of huge papaya for dessert.

Soon, I was making chapatis in a rustic country kitchen with a tiny little woman named Mansari, a long silver braid stretching all the way down her back. As little birds flew in and out of the barred windows, we patted the dough into perfect rounds and cooked them on a hot grill until their aromas filled the air. Mansari sang one Beatles song after another, tunes she learned from young visitors. We spent each afternoon this way, wrapped in the rhythm of the patting and the melody of the songs as we sipped sweet chai and savored each other’s company.

I was dazzled by the colors, aromas, and flavors of India but it took some time before my hosts—other than Mansari, who knew instinctively that we were eager to learn anything she wanted to teach us—would take my curiosity seriously. Yet by expressing my interest slowly and somewhat indirectly, often the best way to get what you want in a foreign land, I was able to get the cook who worked for the family with whom I was staying to understand my sincerity. Before long, she invited me into her kitchen and let me help as she toasted spices and roots, ground them into fine pastes and powders and stirred them into rich stews. All these years later I can return to that moment in a kitchen on the outskirts of Ahmednager, revisit the aromas and textures and bring them to my own table.

The world opened to me while I was in India and it has never closed. And always, it is the foods of any land that most entice me. I had never thought of what I do as culinary travel because to travel for any other purpose, to not immediately look for the best local trattoria in Genova, say, or the most delicious food stands in Kuala Lumpur’s night market, is simply unthinkable. Within an hour of arriving in Paris for the first time, my bags were stashed in the tiny seventh floor walk-up where I was staying and I was happily ensconced in a bustling local bistro over a mound of steak tartare and a hot ramekin of brandade de morue. Before noon the next day, I had a recipe for that brandade tucked into my suitcase. I am, obviously, one of those lucky people who lives to eat.

It was inevitable, I think, that traveling for culinary adventures coalesce into the popular pursuit it is today. As Americans, we have become, in general, more adventurous when it comes to food. That there is now a chain of fast-food restaurants called Chipotle, after that delicious fiery smoked chile of Mexico, tells it all. As recently as the 1990s, it was almost impossible to find chipotles outside of Mexican communities. Just a generation ago it was difficult to find olive oil and today we travel to Italy to see the olives harvested and to search for the most flavorful oils.

Americans still have a reputation among hotel managers around the world for wanting our own food when we travel, a preference we share with Japanese tourists, but increasingly we are venturing away from bacon, eggs, and cereal for breakfast and Big Macs for lunch and dinner and discovering the joys of jook, tagines, and tapas.

Cooking has become the universal language, an international tongue that allows us to communicate, to resolve every cultural challenge, be it language, custom or belief, and even overcome personal inhibitions like shyness and insecurity. We take a bite, smile, and raise our eyes to see the same response in our companions.

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