BANGKOK – My grandmother in Tokyo kept a bucket under the sink. It was full of what looked like wet sand. But from its poignant depths came what I considered the most miraculous of treats – a pickled carrot or daikon or, one of my favorites, a bud of a ginger-like plant called myoga.
The bucket contained rice bran, which provided a fermentation bed for a Japanese style of pickled vegetables known as nukazuke. Every day, even in my 90s, my grandmother put her arm in the bucket and aired the bran.
The fermenting bed was my grandmother’s equivalent to an initial yeast, a lesson in ingenuity from a war widow who transformed humble ingredients into something delicious.
I don’t have to worry about preserving ingredients because of economic deprivation. Still, I received instructions from my grandmother about the taste.
At home in Bangkok, I usually conserve canned food: Texas okra, Hunan long beans, garlic miso and kosher dill. But until the coronavirus pandemic, my job as an international correspondent for The New York Times took a long time without being at home. Nukazuke was off limits because it required the care of a housewife, the daily turn of rice bran, or nuka, so that it would not spoil in a moldy mess.
When Thailand practically closed its borders this spring, it was clear that I would be an international correspondent without much international correspondence to do. And then one of the first things I did was to get my hands on some nuka. I added salt, seaweed and vegetable scraps needed to achieve the right environment for lactofermentation and started making pickles.
For me, the bitter and salty punch of a good nukazuke is a taste of home, even though I never really lived in Japan, except in my childhood summers in my grandmother’s cedar-scented house, chasing fireflies, watching fireworks and learning from her in the kitchen. Her pantry was full of umeboshi, wrinkled pickled plums; young ginger with vinegar; and a loquat-scented brandy that I stole sips from when she wasn’t looking.
Of all senses, taste, inextricably linked to smell to awaken flavors, is perhaps the most evocative in its ability to evoke memories of time and space. I was fortunate to have wandered the world, both for work and leisure, and my kitchen maintains the abundance of this wandering, allowing me to relive a trip around the world that stopped the pandemic.
My freezer is full of Istanbul sumac, Chengdu Sichuan pepper and Jodhpur chai masala. The cabinet has water from Malta’s orange blossom, sardines from Portugal, hot sauce from Belize and tea from Sri Lanka’s first generation.
And that without taking into account the fullness of Thailand, a country of 70 million inhabitants that can taste different types of eggplant and countless varieties of shrimp paste.
If we can’t travel physically, at least my family can do it at every meal, and we’re lucky to be able to explore continents at the table.
While eating, experiences are evoked: oysters sipped with green Tabasco in a port city in Namibia; the tiny skewered octopus stuffed with quail eggs at a Kyoto market; the noodles pulled by hand by Muslim Uighurs who lived in exile in Kazakhstan after escaping repression in China; reindeer and cheese soup on an island near Helsinki, when cold rain meant only chopped reindeer and hot cheese to indulge us.
Also for work, food creates bonds that transcend language and customs. Being a journalist means constantly invading, entering someone’s life and demanding sensitive personal data. How did your wife die? When did you have an abortion? What’s your religion? Why do you hate your neighbor so much?
Livelihood during these meetings can serve as a peace offering. In 2019, on the island of Basilan, in the southern Philippines, Catholic teachers terrified of years of deadly insurgent activities participated in a seafood feast with a local Muslim leader. Salty rice stuffed with sea urchins has transcended matters of faith.
And I have often found that people who have very little are willing to share with a stranger who asks the most invasive questions.
In eastern Indonesia, after an earthquake and tsunami devastated part of a city, an elderly woman, suddenly homeless, offered aromatic rice with turmeric and lemongrass cooked over an open fire.
In southwest China, at the request of my host in his grass-roofed house, I dug my chopsticks into a honeycomb studded with fat and juicy bee larvae.
“Eat, eat,” said my host, a nutritious refrain that seems even more genuine when there is not much food around. I ate.
Once, in northern Afghanistan, just after the 9/11 attacks, a plane flew low and launched ersatz Fig Newtons from the sky. The children ran and tore the packages, just to wrinkle their nose. I am afraid that the only people who ate the treats from that American launch were journalists who scoured the arid landscape for shiny packages of cookies.
For the Americans who covered the war, perhaps the fig treats brought back a childhood flavor: a powdery mass around a thick jelly that left the seeds hidden in the molars for many days.
My mother remembers that when she was a child growing up in Japan during the occupation era, a burly American soldier offered her a piece of gum. He was so big, she said, and the gum so sweet. Every day, when I grew up in Asia and the United States, I had to drink a large glass of milk in order to grow up as an American.
One day, in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, I took refuge in a shelter where a group of women were waiting for me in the darkness, away from men and the dust of refugee life. I was reporting an article about girls and women who became pregnant as a result of rape by members of Myanmar’s security forces. The collective rape, along with village fires and point-blank executions, forced more than 750,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar in 2017.
While we were talking, the sister of one of the girls who was pregnant, she was still a teenager, kept her fingers busy, rolling balls of dough into balls the size of grains of rice. She was making a traditional Rohingya dessert, often reserved for religious festivals. The tiny dumplings are sun-dried, roasted in butter and served in cardamom-flavored sweet milk. Making dessert takes a lot of work.
The sister said that she too had been raped. The girls cried when they remembered, wiping tears in transparent veils. Someone’s baby crawled across the dirt floor. Then the girls’ hands picked up the dough again, rolling, pinching and shaping, a taste of home that they’ll probably never see again.