Whoa. A big plastic box of "koriander" at the fruit and vegetable market. I haven’t been there for a long time—I stopped going when every time I had to pay, it was 3 or 4 more Euros than I counted on. I couldn’t say anymore whether or not the feeling of superiority and comfort that comes from shopping at the local market was worth this unpleasant surprise.
I mean, in The States you can go into a market that is designed to be a merchandising dream—like, any Wild Oats—and you know you are paying premium for being one of the chosen few...just check out the prices of the oils and vinegars if you don’t believe me. Playing at being a gourmet in America is a Pricey Passport to Prestige. Like everything, you pay up for the development of an identity.
Here, I can normally play at being a gourmet for a lot less. It becomes a matter of aligning with what I want, rather than how I want to think of myself. Then I simply find what I want. It's a lot easier just to go ahead and do it, rather than make a great show of doing it. However, so much in America boils down to identity. We are a nation of teenagers.
People generally rag on teenagers, roll their eyes, throw up their hands. But teenagers are great: they are wild, they are fun, they upset the cart. (I know this, I have two of them.) No social movement that really reversed the status quo was ever, to date, initiated by elders. It’s always been the youth. And when they are not too busy jogging in time with consumerism, over-experimenting with spiritually hollowed-out scenes, or plugged in to computer games like those blind fish in subterranean caves, the job of their age is to Change the World. The main desire of teenagers is to create identity, separation from the past, from tradition. No Obama was ever voted into office without this necessary impulse.
What is so great about teenagers is that they take great risks to learn the secrets of being an adult. They have unbelievably spontaneous, free-wheeling senses of humor, they can be radically inventive with style, they are hungry for novelty, they can take learning and philosophy and religion very seriously, they can be ravenous consumers, they can be shockingly conformist. They can be thoroughly and bottomlessly self-absorbed.
The males are often desperate to learn the secrets of power, and young teenage males in our day no longer spar with each other physically for this knowledge, but rather spar on sports fields or in front of computers. There’s a high level of testosterone, in other words—the world knows this in the reputation America has for violence, and as with teenagers, what outsiders SEE about them is the violence, the upset, the storm. They don’t see that in unseen ways, this inherent chaos is what gives birth to new forms of thinking, to new ideas, to a refreshing lack of reliance on experts to give permission.
It’s the energy that founded America, and everything, EVERY THING and EVERY ONE is formed at the cellular and intentional level with the energy that abounded in the creator or the parents at the time of conception. I mean this quite literally. We all know that modern America bubbled up from the cauldron of rebellion, but what isn't seen is that this character trait still rules American consciousness. Every American is to some degree consumed with becoming something, in transformation, in movement from one thing to another, from childhood to adulthood, from mediocrity to excellence, from good-enough to better-than.
And the great thing is, when a person hits mid-life, she gets another chance to develop herself. Oh—you might put it off by ignoring the whole biological timetable and having kids 'late' or not at all. But the break-free exactly mirrors the first time around, and can seem ridiculous to those watching cautiously from the sidelines. If the break-free was incomplete the first time around, you can bet it's gonna be a whole lot messier on the second run. Either one uses these precious moments of freedom to have adventures and expand her wisdom, or she retreats into safety and begins the long, slow decline to death. And it can take things a long time to die.
I am hoping to successfully navigate these choppy mid-life waters. Sometimes I get seasick, sometimes I want to head back to port, and sometimes the ride is thrilling and makes me come alive to myself. It is a second teenagerhood. Not talking about it does not mean it will go away. In fact, pretending its not happening keeps me domesticated.
So. There is a gourmet in me, another side to my identity, that has lately become developed, in the absence of America. I was overwhelmed by the Williams Sonomas and the Wild Oats and the Sur La Tables, and the $4000 dollar trips to make pasta in Tuscany and the $800 pendulous, somewhat obscene faucets and the $12.95 teensy metal canisters of black onion seed from Dean and Deluca. It’s just too much. It’s like begging mom and dad for pink converse tennis shoes at Christmas only to discover that Ed Hardy t-shirts are the thing you can’t live without, and there’s no way anyone is going to spend $80 on a t-shirt, young lady. (Though my folks never called me Young Lady, I've heard it said.) The disappointment to discover you’ve missed the mark, again. That it’s always out of reach.
Of course the point of good cooking is not in the collection of the items that prove you are good at it. It never has been, and that has always been the game of wanna-bes. But I must admit, I was raised in the suburban wanna-be culture. I have been conditioned to some extent to go for form rather than substance. I am learning everything anew. And now I find, I can experiment in Europe without that getting in the way.
Okay. The koriander is really cilantro. I used to buy entire modest bushes of cilantro at Cub Foods for less than two dollars. This koriander—there’s a mass of it—comes from Egypt. It costs 4.95 Euros. Eeek. Must have it. Must have it because I could bathe in cilantro, I could tuck it behind my ears every day, I would weave into my hair like Frida Kahlo, I would spark a cilantro revolution in middle Europe, if I could. How about rouladen with a cilantro-pesto filling? Favorite. Herb. Of all time.
Open the box. Nothing. Oh-oh. Very, very subtle, no whang of perfume, no waft of spicy musk. Almost: unsweet tarragony, smothered under a pillow. Baby powder version of an herb that I think of as central American. This would not do.
Commence to chopping for a chicken soup. Oh, yeah. Oh My. That’s what I’m talking about. That hard-to-describe tanginess, almost like a lemon grass, seriously: if plants could make patchouli to eat, we’d be forced to call it cilantro. Wafts of the fresh, oily greens, crunch, crunch. Stems and all.
Complicated. At first, cilantro is like a person with an exotic background who you’re in love with, but who barely speaks your language. You find him irresistible, but you can’t exactly communicate. It takes a while to build a relationship.
My favorite way to eat it was on 32nd Avenue at a place called Cafe Jalisco. The place had four different kinds of salsa and a fat man in a sombrero painted on the window. There were some tourist sombreros on the walls with thin black and red velour and gold lame fringe, and metal framed posters of fast cars, that decorating staple of new immigrants. Jalisco served heated, homemade corn tortillas with stewed beef, tomatoes, rice flavored with lime, guacamole and some greens, including fresh cilantro. Wonderful. Real.
Of course the other way is in every good Thai or Vietnamese restaurant I’ve ever known. In the Thai: with deep fried, soft shell crabs, upturned like steaming beige spiders on the plate, dipped into a thin, sweet chili sauce and crunched away with fresh cilantro and sprouts and carrots. Or Vietnamese, in a see-though noodle wrap with anise-spiced beef and thinly julienned crisp vegetables. Gorgeous. Can’t imagine either one without the cilantro.
I think of cilantro as a Mexican spice, and was startled to learn that the dried version of the koriander seed is what gives spice to Scandinavian baking. The seed and the herb are very, very different. The powdered seed is also used in curries and thorans in Indian food. The herb is best known to me freshly cut, mixed with tomato, onion, lime juice, and chilis. In ceviche or in salsas. The fresh herb has an Asian feel to it, again, like lemon grass or lime leaves—it seems to simultaneously cool down and heat up. Like lavender, it could go into soaps. But the dried version of the herb takes it way, way down, and it becomes a pale version of something like marjoram, with a mild heating quality, just the way dried mint becomes warming, the opposite of the coolness of fresh mint. If anyone knows how to make dried cilantro sing, please tell me. If they can make skeletons dance in Oaxaca, there must be a way.
I think of cilantro in a setting of sunburned abuelas picking over cactus fruits at Safeway, the smell of roasted chilis in September in north Denver, neon pink pastries from the Tolucca Market, huaraches on the beach and coyotes tiptoeing across the highway. Now that she is called koriander and comes from Egypt, I will have to double-dig the poetic seedbed. I will imagine ibis at the Nile’s edge, the sedge and the bee, white linen in a cool breeze, musty carpets hanging on walls, music to shake the hips to. It’s got me thinking about pairing koriander with falafel and a mint and honey dipping sauce...
