Natasha Garrett was born and raised in Skopje, Macedonia and now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she serves as a Director of International Student Services at La Roche College. Her poetry, personal essays, and translations have appeared in Transnational Literature, Gravel, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Arts and Letters, and other publications… and she’s the editor of Macedonia 2013: 100 Years After the Treaty of Bucharest. Garrett obtained her Ph.D. in Education at the University of Pittsburgh and her Master’s in English Literature from Duquesne University.
From the Publisher: In this collection of personal essays, Natasha Garrett explores various facets of the modern migration experience. Weaving academic and literary sources, as well as personal and professional experiences, Garrett uses transnationalism as a springboard for discussing topics such as home, motherhood, identity, bilingualism, family, education and travel. The essays in Motherlands offer a well-researched, witty and heartfelt look into migration both as a global phenomenon and as a deeply intimate experience.
Note: Signed copies available here!
Bread and Bourbon
I feign indifference when it comes to any sport besides soccer—the real football—but Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania does not tolerate such indifference. The Steelers logo is on everything—on women’s purses and real diamond jewelry, on mens’ tattooed shins, on chocolate cakes and bags of tortilla chips. A game day is serious business here—grocery stores get flooded with people in the requisite Steeler jerseys, hurriedly emptying the shelves as if there is a snowstorm approaching. If they are not at the stadium, locals get together in bars or friends’ houses to watch the game. Even after all these years in the States, I barely understand football; in comparison, my dad only watched two and a half games before he started yelling at the TV at all the right moments. While I may be failing in my appreciation of the game, I saw an opportunity to reinforce my credentials as a real Pittsburgher. I started focusing on the many breaks during the game, when people turn their gaze from the TV screen and on the pans and crockpots overflowing with party food. I don’t own a Steelers t-shirt and I can’t tell an interception from an encroachment, but I can make nachos, dips, tacos or pizza. Game days are melted cheese days.
There is no sincerer love than the love of food, George Bernard Shaw famously wrote. Food is home. Food is culture. Food is also an adventure. Ask any immigrant what they miss most about their home country, and they will tell you, without hesitation: the food! Even if you have the ingredients and the recipes, dishes rarely fully translate. Is it the water, the soil, or maybe a bit of unwillingness to accept anything but the original, to not surrender to the culinary assault of the host country? Every time I visit home, I pack several chunky sweaters, even though I always travel in the summer. I need them to envelop bubble-wrapped jars of ajvar, a traditional roasted pepper spread, the peanut butter of my childhood. A few local stores in Pittsburgh sell it, and a store-bought jar will do on days when I am particularly nostalgic, but it is a pale replica of the homemade stuff. I share the store-bought ajvar with my coworkers. I don’t share the homemade one with anyone. I pack a bottle of two of rakija, homemade grape brandy. I pack tea that we picked while hiking the mountain above Lake Ohrid, where my parents live. I pack an assortment of chocolates to share with friends. If I even mention in passing that I like a particular kitchen item (a serving spoon or a set of Italian stainless steel ice cream dishes) or a tablecloth, my mom promptly has it ready for me to take back to the States. When we return home, I take my time unpacking. The suitcases may lie open in the middle of the living room floor for a couple of days, like treasure chests, while I extract, one by one, bubble-wrapped bottles and little packages that I transfer to the pantry and then judiciously dispense to my family throughout the year.
I didn’t cook much when I lived in Macedonia, mostly because I was somewhat young but also because all the cooking at home was expertly done by my mom. She made dinner every night, and reserved the weekends for more elaborate baking. While she never directly instructed me how to make a dish from start to finish, she regularly had me measure the sugar, crack the eggs or wash the pots and pans, and I had no choice but to observe her while she was putting together numerous weekend delicacies: cheese pies, eclairs, croissants. When I moved to the States, I lived on a college campus with no access to a kitchen, and I ate all my meals in the college dining hall. I was a vegetarian at the time, and most of my meals consisted of salads, cheese pizza and spaghetti that has sat in the steam well for too long. We ate ramen noodles cooked in coffee pots in our dorm rooms. We ordered breadsticks and marinara sauce very late at night. Once we made friends who lived off campus, we visited them on weekends and made random meals: scrambled eggs with tomatoes and cheese, crepes with Nutella, potato soup. It felt like an absolute feast.
It took years for me to grow from a so-so cook to a reasonably capable one. I make many Macedonian dishes, copied from my mom’s recipe notebooks. She has several of those notebooks, some dedicated exclusively to dessert recipes, others for savory dishes. Besides many of the recipe titles, she writes down the source of the recipe, usually the name of the friend that shared it with her: Rum balls—Maria, or Pork chops—Vera. My mom would tell you that even though we don’t look much alike, nor do we share similar personalities, we eat and cook the same. She is right. Years of observing her in the kitchen have allowed me to absorb her approach to cooking, her choices as to what to cook, her techniques, but also her micro-movements when stirring, kneading or chopping. Just like I have my dad’s driving mannerisms, I have my mom’s kitchen body language. I can confidently cook most of the things she can cook, with one exception—bread.
Bread in Macedonia is inexpensive, easily available at any corner store and consumed with every meal. All bread is good bread. It all comes freshly baked from local small bakeries and eaten the same day. When my parents came to the US for their first extended visit, my mom started baking bread for us. She said it was because she had plenty of time during the day to do so, but I have a feeling she felt sorry for us and the pre-sliced, bagged, so-called bread we were buying. A few weeks later, we bought a chest freezer for all the baked goods that were coming out of our kitchen faster than we could eat them.
Flour, water, yeast, salt. I swear I am a decent baker, but what my mom can do with these four ingredients is pure sorcery. She tells me she does not employ any secret techniques, a claim I would be highly suspicious of, had it not been for the fact that my mom never lies. She doesn’t care for fancy equipment: she kneads the dough by hand and lets it rest under a clean white towel, giving it an occasional gentle poke to check on its progress. She shapes loaves and lets them rise in my old Pyrex pans that she begrudgingly uses. Once baked in my very ordinary oven, she lets them cool on the kitchen table, while giving us a stern warning not to tear into them until they settle for at least thirty minutes. My husband, the American, would prefer to slather some butter on it. Of course, the best way to eat fresh bread is with a ripe tomato and feta cheese, when tomatoes are in season, or with ajvar and feta cheese, any other time of the year.
If my mom knew I was glorifying her cooking by writing about it, she would find the whole thing pretentious and unnecessary, and I can’t blame her for it. Cooking from scratch has become a trendy and virtuous thing to do, but it is the only way to cook and eat for a lot of people. A restaurant near my house boasts using all parts of the pig in their recipes. My grandparents lived in the country and raised a pig every year. I remember my grandma putting big yellow work gloves on to pick stinging nettles from the nearby field, chopping them up and mixing them with cornmeal and water, to give to the pig “as a special treat.” She always had a nickname for her animals, including the pig, but wasn’t overly sentimental when it was time for it to be slaughtered. The pig was not her pet. She used every part of the animal—the meat, but also the head, the internal organs, the feet. She made her own perfect off-white cubes of soap out of the fattiest parts.
When my parents visit us, they don’t raise and slaughter a pig, but they’ve been known to make homemade sausage and let it hang on a broomstick off the balcony to dry. My dad makes sauerkraut in an Igloo cooler in the basement. For this purpose, we usually purchase 40 heads of cabbage from the local grocery store, which elicits some strange looks by fellow shoppers and checkout clerks. Sauerkraut-making does not share the glamour of bread-baking; during the few months that the cabbage is fermenting downstairs, emanating interesting odors, we frequently pose a semi-rhetorical question: Who farted? We plant a garden and can plenty of the vegetables from it. Good eating requires a bit of discipline.
Good parenting also involves discipline, not only in terms of disciplining one’s children but also staying disciplined as a parent. Not until I became a parent did I realize that people with children continue to be humans with their own needs, interests and preferences. Once in a while, they may need a break. However, moms on social media often can’t wait for “wine o’clock” so that they can have “mom juice.” Of all the stereotypes about motherhood, I find the one about moms drinking wine most irritating. Wine has become a way for responsible moms to escape for a minute the drudgery of rearing children and have a wild-ish experience. I drink wine; therefore, I am still fun and rebellious, but within reason. But that’s not what bothers me the most. I object to the pigeon-holing of moms as wine drinkers, like that’s the only alcoholic drink a proper lady can handle. I would much rather have a little bourbon.
When I first arrived to the States as a student, I went through a standard-issue culture shock that lasted me good four months. Two items I found particularly shocking—gender pay inequality and drinking age. I wasn’t anywhere near getting a job, so the former wasn’t a concern until much later. The latter presented a bit of a challenge. Going to bars was a normal part of my teenage life. Bars and cafes were places where teenagers gathered. Sometimes if whatever bar was trendy in the moment got too crowded, we would hang out in front of it, creating a significant but I assure you a very peaceful crowd on the sidewalk. We would have a single beer or a vodka drink to be nursed for a couple of hours, hang out with our friends and go home (walk or take the bus). At house parties, alcohol was plentiful and rarely abused. It was a time for us to learn how to drink, to figure out our limits, to experiment, to grow. As children, we would be sent to the corner market to get beers, empty bottles clanking in the bag, to be traded for full ones. It is not unusual in Macedonia to be offered rakija if you visit an old monastery, as a token of welcome.
As students in the States, it’s not that we desperately needed to drink, but to be denied access to a bar because we were not twenty-one was a strange experience. Something that was so commonplace and taken for granted back home was an illegal substance for a person my age in the States. What do people do on a Friday night, we asked our American roommates. They quickly taught us the art of dorm room partying. Bath tubs full of beer cans, procured by a friend of a friend who is of age; bottles of cheap whiskey, cheap vodka, cheap rum. I went from drinking French cognac with my high school girlfriends to sitting on the stained carpet floor of my friends’ dorm room, sipping Budweiser straight from the can, worrying about being busted for underage drinking. What was once a pleasant part of my social life became a hassle, taking all the pleasure out of having a drink and turning it into a secretive, rebellious activity. Not even in my earlier teenage years did I need alcohol in order to be defiant.
Fortunately, those days are behind me and I can enjoy a drink without the threat of a disciplinary action. In my family, alcohol has worked overtime in its social lubrication capacity. While my parents know some English and my husband is semi-competent in Macedonian, there is enough of a language barrier to prevent them from having a nuanced conversation. However, their closeness and openness towards each other is obvious. It is amazing how much can be communicated with a limited vocabulary, only if one is willing to engage. What they really enjoy doing is having a before-dinner drink together. My husband, who excels at cocktail-making, makes a special effort to produce perfect cocktails for his in-laws. Who knew that a few maraschino cherries or a strategically chosen glass can do so much for cultural diplomacy. Each time we visit my parents back home, he brings them a different bottle of bourbon. It’s a true American drink, he tells them. In return, they give him a couple of different bottles of rakija. They are both pleased with the currency exchange rate.
While we are not what you would call wine people, we have a few favorites. My wine shopping is haphazard—I may pick up a bottle based on a friend’s recommendation or a funky label. On major holidays, however, we always buy a couple of bottles of Cold Duck, a sparkling red wine. While it may lack in sophistication, it compensates with nostalgia: it’s something my husband’s family always served on Thanksgiving, which happens to be my favorite American holiday. I like the predictability of the meal—though I imagine every family has its own version if it, the backbone of the meal is the same: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce. Eating it only once a year contributes to the excitement about it. My husband and I always host Thanksgiving at our house, and gladly so; it is one of the rare meals that we cook together. In addition to a few family members, we invite friends who don’t have families nearby or international students who have not experienced thanksgiving before. I have moved away from buying a frozen turkey and finally made sure to go shopping early enough to buy a fresh one. In our initial years as a married couple, we cooked it overnight, low and slow, which resulted in sleepless nights due to the oven automatically shutting off every two hours and beeping to tell us so. We have tried brining it, with delicious final results, but the process was long and the big bucket of salt water in which the turkey swam for a few days took a lot of room in the fridge. Lately, I’ve been using an oven bag, which has cut down on the cooking time. I have bought bread, hand-tore it in small pieces, let them dry and then added broth, onion, sage, pepper to make stuffing. I have made cornbread from scratch and turned it into stuffing. Sometimes, I unapologetically buy a bag of stuffing from the store.
What I don’t deviate from is the cranberry sauce. My first experience with cranberry sauce involved the semi-transparent, gelatinous variety that comes with visible can rings. I didn’t want anything to do with it for years. Nowadays, I make more of a relish, with cranberries cooked with a cut up whole orange, sugar, and half a cup of very good port, a mandatory ingredient. I pour myself a smidgen of port as I am waiting for the sauce to thicken. I have made baby onions au gratin; while I am never excited to make them (too beige), they are usually quite enthusiastically welcomed by everyone else. I am also not excited to make green beans almandine, but I feel like I need a straight up vegetable on the table. I was tempted once to make a green bean casserole, with crunchy French fried onions on top, but my mother-in-law wisely warned me that one can get a bit carried away with the traditional dishes. Lately, I’ve been making a large pot of collard greens with a little bit of bacon, salt, pepper and a dash of vinegar. I’ve given up on sweet potatoes. The whole brown sugar/maple/marshmallow on top business has confused me beyond measure. My husband makes the mashed potatoes, because I tend on skimp on butter, and this is not the time for skimping. If my mom is in town, she bakes rolls, which I often think are wasted on this particular meal, since there is just so much else going on. The day before, I make two pies: apple and pumpkin. I use the crust recipe in the Joy of Cooking, an old copy my husband got from his mom. She had annotated her favorite recipes with her own tips and measurement adjustment; I’ve since added my own layer of notes.
Right before dinner, we sip on my dad’s homemade rakija, this time warmed up with a little caramelized sugar and water. Let the feast begin.
Motherlands is copyright © 2018 Natasha Garrett. This excerpt is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reprinted without permission.
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