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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Sep. - 4 Oct. 2000 Issue No. 501 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Sep. - 4 Oct. 2000 Issue No. 501
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Comfort food
By Fayza Hassan
My grandmother knew about food. I do not mean that she had necessarily memorised a large number of complicated recipes, or that she possessed one of those old-fashioned cookbooks every young housewife wishes to have handy when she runs out of original ideas. My grandmother was totally uninterested in the culinary arts. Instead of measuring cups and deciliters, she used her instincts and infallibly came out with the right ingredients to produce a delicious dish, which not only pleased the palate and the stomach, but somehow managed to produce in the eater a state of emotional fulfilment. I often wondered what made the food she cooked for us so different, and eventually concluded that it was the complete selflessness with which she approached the task that made it so special. She herself seldom tasted the fruit of her labour, partly because, with age, she had become rather frugal, and partly because she had reached a moment in her life when she derived her pleasure only from that of others.
As a child, all my moments of unhappiness and peer rejection were invariably soothed when I returned home from school. My woes were kissed better by one of my grandmother's specialities. Soon, reveling in the subtle taste of her cream of spinach with freshly boiled potatoes, or her paper-thin crepes with homemade apricot jam and caster sugar, I forgot both the offence and the offender.
My grandmother did not believe in using spices, which, she informed us, had been invented for the sole purpose of disguising the taste and smell of rotting meat in the pre-refrigerator era. She hardly made any use of this household appliance, however. She was an advocate of freshness first, and insisted that supplies be bought daily. I remember her standing in the kitchen, her glasses askew on her nose, pricking, poking and pinching everything as she unwrapped the meat, poultry and produce that my mother had gone to buy at the crack of dawn at the market in Bab Al-Louq or Al-Tawfiqiya, and ruthlessly discarding items that had not passed the test. I also remember an instance at the end of the war when the little imported butter that could be found was not to her liking. It tasted rancid, she announced, after opening half a dozen packets that she promptly consigned to the garbage bin. For a while, she refused to cook anything for which butter was required. Only in Alexandria was there a farm, owned by a Swiss family, where fresh butter could be had, she had heard; she decided that we had to find it without delay. After protracted inquiries, my mother finally came up with a vague hint only: it was somewhere in Mandara. It made no difference to my grandmother how far away the place was, or how hazy the indication. We just had to look a little harder, she said. A bit of detective work was in order if we really cared about good food. Armed with practically no information, therefore, we piled into the car and headed in the general direction of what may well have been a mythical farm. Surprisingly, we actually found it, and returned with one or two packets of the coveted ingredient, which was declared satisfactory enough for my mother to add bi-weekly trips to Mandara to her already full schedule.
Nothing, however, among all the delicacies my grandmother concocted, equaled her coffee. To my mother's surprise, it did not "turn our stomachs" as she claimed it had hers on the school bus when she was a child. She objected on these grounds to the large cups of steaming café au lait that I gulped down in lieu of breakfast as soon as I was old enough to have a will of my own. "Your liver will be ruined," she would say gloomily as I asked for more.
Coffee-making was a ritual for my grandmother. She took it seriously, and I suspect that she made the effort to prepare it herself, although she never touched a drop, only because she knew how much it meant to us. Green beans were needed, of course; she would roast these at dawn and then grind them manually just before putting the water to boil and starting the filter. The very first thing I missed when I married was the rich aroma that wafted under my bedroom door every morning, announcing the beginning of the new day. It could only be full of wonderful surprises with such an exciting smell in the air, I used to believe.
Since then I have traveled many oceans and drunk more coffee than I care to remember: invariably, a feeling of great expectation precedes the first sip, and unfailingly deep disappointment follows. Not once have I tasted coffee that remotely compares to the one brewed from scratch by my grandmother.
