Camera Eats First
I will not be original and call the memoir "Famished," or perhaps, "A Hungry Heart"—something in this vein. It will be a story about love, life, death, and food.
I take pictures of food because I enjoy writing about it. I imagine myself writing a food memoir thirty years from now, flipping through the images and recounting, every time we visited La Hacienda restaurant, Fredrik would complain about the parking situation. 'The parking spaces are too small,' he would say. Every single time. Yet the food was wonderful. They served tomatoes with shallots, a bit of sea salt, and a lot of vinegar. They were punchy, briny, and simply delicious. After every meal, we went to the beach to pick seashells, which I would later turn into candles.
In a memoir, there will be an ode to a lot of different dishes. For example, a bone marrow I ate in 2022 at Café Tandem in Mulhouse. It was served with a baguette and a small salad. We were full after the first bite, yet we finished it, and at least I wanted more. I still think about it all the time.
I will not be original and call the memoir "Famished," or perhaps, "A Hungry Heart"—something in this vein. It will be a story about love, life, death, and food. Because where there is life, there is death, and where there is love, there is food.
I prepared many meals and took many pictures. Some of them were delicious, some were impossible to eat, some were burned, others undercooked, some were over salted, some too sweet. Some were perfect.
Sometimes I make pasta from scratch. I don’t have a pasta maker so it’s a devious labor: rolling and turning and turning and rolling. And then there is sauce: creamy and thick with a splash of wine wine, shallots and garlic. I put garlic on everything.
I grow up in a house with a garden and my whole life the tomatoes tasted and looked like summer: fresh, sweet, yellow and red, red-purple, leaking with juice, bursting with seeds. You could flick a bit of sea salt on the slice and have a perfect meal.
Even to extend of sounding dramatic I’ll say that it pains me that food production took out of the fruits and vegetables their evolutionary necessity — to evolve in a way that makes them not look but taste better. While people talk about wine and terroir, they forget that grapes were not meant to be the only plants reflecting the soil that brought them up. Every single plant deserved it.
I was the luckiest girl in the world in that sense. I was brought up on heirlooms. New fruits and vegetables held heritage of the previous generations, passed from garden to garden, from grandma to mother. The harvest season meant picking fruits which would give progeny the next year. The seeds were treasured.
The farmer’s markets here remind me of home, just a bit, but it’s something. They give me the feeling of closeness and an unadulterated joy when I take a bite and feel that tomato tastes like summer.
There will of course be chapters on mother’s tomatoes and farmer’s markets.
I will write about Coq au Vin I made in September 2020. I have just rewatched Julie and Julia and was craving something hot and hearty and delicious. I had a bit of wine left, some sad looking carrots and, of course, the chicken. I turned the heat on and forgot about it for at least an hour, which is a bit longer that you want to cook it for. I have no idea what I did with that hour. In the autumn of 2020, I was very much into the puzzles, so I was probably busy with that. The chicken was tender to the point the meat fell off the bones the moment you touched it. But not only that, it was hot and thick and did exactly what it was supposed to do: warmed you up. The whole autumn of 2020 I was trying to do just that — warm up.
I will write about my travels, the short and the long ones. South African oysters, Spanish paellas, Swedish meatballs. There will be a chapter about the time I and Alina went to Naples and ate “the best pizza in the world.” We got two of them: Margherita and Four Cheeses to go and ate them on the steps of some old building, the cheese dripping down our chins. I remember it well mostly because I took a picture. It was late evening, the picture was taken with a flash, Alina had red eyes and the pizzas were shining in the dark. I can’t find the picture but I know it exists. Alina, do you have it? (Alina does not have it either).
I can’t write memoir without writing about the brunches. How many there were and how many more are to come. I will write about Eggs Benedict, English breakfast with sausages and beans, waffles with maple syrup, avocado toasts, halloumi burgers and greek yogurt with berries. I will write about my girlfriends and Mimosas and the gossips we shared over them. Good food is timeless, and so are good friends.
I will write about everything.
I will write about a bag of rohliks. I tried many times but it was simply too funny in real life, and I don’t yet have the skill to make it funny on paper. I would first have to write about the casino, and the apartment of a mysterious man and drinking vodka in the middle of nowhere with two brothers, and how Alina stayed home and I and Olesya didn’t. I would also have to write it in Russian.
I will write about the cakes I made for my loved ones birthdays. I will write about my parents and family dinners, about shashlyk and lagman and shurpa, my mom’s aubergine salad, my brother making me chips in the Microwave. I will write about being alone and takeout, mostly Korean. I will write about my many dates at the restaurants. I was always famished when we sat down, they always told me to order whatever I wanted. I never quite knew what I wanted. I will write about my third date with Fredrik, how when I couldn’t decide, he ordered every dessert on the menu, and the way to my heart — is through my stomach. He ordered every dessert on the menu and here we are.
I will write about the death of my grandmother, about food and grief and regret, for not being able to go to her funeral, for not asking her for the recipe.
Writing and cooking have more in common than people think. Both are the evidence of the time passing. I am afraid to wake up one day and to remember nothing. So I take pictures of food — and remember.
