S2:E33: symbolic starter

Thursday, May 20, 2021

-------

We’re proud to be sponsored by Delta Wines, whose dedication to fighting climate change is rivaled only by the quality of their delicious wines. Use the code SHELTER to get 10% off your order and support this show.

Have you taken our listener survey yet? We’d love to hear from you. Your advice and feedback will help us with everything from creating future episodes to talking to potential sponsors. Find the link on our website.

-----

Episode description: How can breaking bread--or injera--together make a place home? Last year was the year of the sourdough starter. Today we reflect on how food gives us comfort and community when we need it most.

——-

Show notes:

-------

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

When we moved to Oakland seventeen years ago, we knew almost nothing about the city, but it was where I’d gotten into grad school, into a program I was excited about, so we uprooted our lives in Minneapolis and transplanted ourselves to Oakland.

It’s an understatement to say that we were delighted by what we found. We hadn’t known we were moving to a place where the weather is rarely too hot or too cold, where hundreds of miles of trails snaked through Redwood forests. But most of all, we hadn’t known about the food. Alameda County is among the most diverse counties in the nation, and with that comes a whole lot of diversity in food. We discovered taco trucks and bahn mi sandwiches and that “California” was a cuisine. 

My Nebraska farmer grandparents and my home ec teacher mom had instilled in me the value of cooking with good ingredients and starting from scratch. But now I was in a place where food was an obsession, a religion we could all belong to, a community gatherer where no one was excluded.

Education brought us to California, but food made it feel like home.

Food was the way we made friends, the way we came to know ourselves in this new place. We cooked hundreds of dinners for neighbors, offered and received meals when babies came. Food brought people together in backyards and on church patios, in classrooms and on park benches. Food made the world feel expansive. There were endless possibilities.

You’re probably getting the sense by now that I love food. I love cooking it, and learning about it, and discovering it, and most of all eating it. Only when I tried--and failed--to make Ethiopian food for my family did I realize that in over 130 episodes of Shelter in Place, we’d never once done an episode about food. 

It’s time to remedy that. Life’s big questions can wait until next week. Today, we’re devoting an entire episode to the importance of breaking bread--or in this case, injera. 

The first time I had Ethiopian food, I tried to have an open mind, but the spongy, sour tastes and textures were ones I couldn’t get used to. Over the years I’d occasionally try it again, and each time I’d shrug and say, “I guess this just isn’t my thing.”

But when I was pregnant with my daughter Mattéa, a friend showed up at my house with Ethiopian takeout. I hadn’t known until I tasted it that it was exactly what I wanted. Suddenly the flavors seemed just right. The place where my friend got takeout was called Dareye Injera, named after the spongy, tangy bread that comes with every meal. Injera is an edible platter. It’s both a vessel for holding food and a utensil, since it’s typically eaten with your hands to scoop up the food served on top of it. Dareye Injera was a family-run establishment, just one tiny room with bags of lentils and spice racks lining the walls. There was no place to sit, and they served just one thing for takeout: for $12 you could get their “Vegetarian Combo,” a meal large enough for two, with red lentils, yellow split peas, and collard greens lovingly nestled inside a huge circle of injera, wrapped up like a present. 

Dareye Injera became a Friday night treat that my kids developed an early taste for. We’d sit around the kitchen table, fight over the injera, and lick the lentils off our fingers. 

We stopped getting takeout after Nate lost his job a few weeks into the pandemic. Dareye Injera closed its doors and the family went back to Ethiopia. Eventually we closed our doors, too. We’ve been calling this season of Shelter in Place Pandemic Odyssey, because after months of pandemic parenting, California wildfires, and distance learning, our family traveled from one coast to another to seek support from extended family. We’ve often felt like Odysseus lost at sea, wondering if we’ll ever get home.

In September, as we drove through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska, I found myself craving Dareye Injera with an intensity I hadn’t felt since I was pregnant. While Nate wheeled our minivan through northern Iowa, I searched on Yelp for an Ethiopian restaurant, and realized only after Des Moines was an hour behind us that we’d passed the only place in the state that could satisfy my longing. Finally in Chicago we found an Ethiopian restaurant where the guy at the counter gave me extra injera when I told him how much I’d been missing it. 

Here in Massachusetts, the nearest Ethiopian restaurant is more than a half hour away, most of the way to Boston. One of the few kitchen ingredients that traveled across the country with me is a small pouch of the spice mix berbere. I’d bought it in Oakland with the aspiration of cooking my newfound comfort food at home--but months went by and the berbere remained in my cupboard. I could cook pork belly confit or fried sage atop butternut squash risotto, but Ethiopian food--and injera in particular--intimidated me. 

I might never have made it if my sister-in-law hadn’t come over one night and suggested that we give it a shot. While I looked up injera recipes, she chopped mounds of onions, garlic, and ginger. It took us nearly two hours, but the results were delicious. There was just one problem: my injera--that spongy bread that everything else rested on--was flimsy and fragile, and not at all spongy or sour. 

Nate recently recounted this story to one of our apprentices, Elen Tekle, when she told him that injera wasn’t unique to Ethiopian cuisine; Eritreans ate it, too. She said that until the 90’s when Eritrea gained independence, it was a part of Ethiopia. She said that you’ll often hear Ethiopian and Eritrean used interchangeably because there are a lot of crossovers with the culture, and the food is basically the same. Elen offered to ask her mom to see if she’d share her injera secrets . . . which is how we found our way to this episode.

Elen: When I asked my mom about how she made her injera, she told me a story I’d never heard.

My parents have lived in the U.S. longer than they have in Eritrea, but when they moved here back in the 80s, they were among the first Eritreans in Tucson, Arizona. They came with very little money, and had no immediate family here to welcome them. When they arrived, an Eritrean woman named Genet gifted them with an injera starter, a little piece of home that she had brought with her and kept alive.

I love injera. Injera means comfort and family and tradition and home. It’s an everyday food that you can eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

As Laura mentioned, injera is a sour, spongy flatbread. It’s an essential part of Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine, the base of every meal; I grew up eating lots of shiro ( a spicy chickpea stew), hamli (garlicky cooked spinach), gomen alicha (boiled potatoes with carrots and cabbage), doro wat (spicy chicken with a hard boiled egg), and zigni (spicy beef)--all served on top of a big spongy platter of injera. The porous texture looks sort of like a pancake and it’s cooked on a flat circular pan called a mogogo, sort of like a crepe! But you don’t flip it. You cover the pan and steam cook the top. When it’s done, you use a big straw mat to lift it off the pan. I know I just used sourdough bread, pancakes and crepes to describe injera, but it makes sense when you see it. 

I wasn’t part of the sourdough craze at the beginning of the pandemic, but injera starter has a similar process, just with a different kind of flour. You combine flour and water, put it into a sealed container, and let the environment do its thing for at least three days until it starts to ferment, which makes that sour taste. Once that starter is active--that is, once there is naturally-occuring yeast to make the mixture bubble and rise--you have to feed it with more flour and water to keep it alive. 

Once you have a starter, you mix it with flour and form your dough. We make our injera with teff, a dark brown, ancient grain that’s super tiny and fine, but packs a bunch of nutrients. It’s gluten free, and high in calcium, fiber, protein, and iron. Each village has their own grain; some use wheat, barely, millet, or corn. You can mix and match. After you form your dough, you leave it on the counter for one day. The next day, you boil hot water and pour it into the dough to make a loose batter. At this point, you can leave it in the fridge for a day, or you can make injera now! Injera has been made and eaten and enjoyed this way for generations. 

Cooks often use the same starter for years, allowing it to grow and develop, deepening in flavor as it matures. So when my mom makes injera, her starter has some of last week’s teff flour, but it also has some molecules of the teff from a year ago, three years ago, twenty years ago. The memory of everywhere that starter has been is imprinted in every piece of injera she makes. 

These days injera is easier to come by, but back when my parents came here, if you wanted to eat injera, you had to know someone. My mom said if she didn’t have that starter, she wouldn’t have been able to eat injera. I mean, she could have--it just wouldn’t have tasted as good. The starter became hers, took on a life of its own, and provided our family, friends, and community with meals for 35 years. She still uses it to this day. 

My mom immediately knew why Laura’s injera didn’t turn out right. Laura’s recipe called for yeast; it hadn’t even mentioned a starter. 

“The minute you add yeast,” my mom said, “you destroy the taste.” 

She said that Laura could make her own starter--but it would be better if she got a starter from someone else. 

“Maybe she could ask at an Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant,” she suggested, and then added, “and if they won’t give her some of their starter, I’ll send her some!” 

Laura: Elen says that when Genet gifted her parents with some of her injera starter, she didn’t just give her food; she threw them a lifeline. That starter said “welcome to your new home. There’s a community here for you, a place to make a new start.” As other Eritreans arrived in Tucson, Elen’s parents gifted them with starter the same way Genet had welcomed them. Those connections became not just a way to preserve their culture, but to create a family. By the time Elen was born, the Tucson Eritrean community was thriving; Elen grew up surrounded by adopted aunts and uncles and cousins who began their own lives here with that same starter that had been gifted to Elen’s mom. 

Boston chef Tim Chin, who spent years creating recipes at America’s Test Kitchen, waxes poetic about starter on the website Serious Eats. He says that what’s frustrating about starter is that “there’s not one perfect roadmap to success.” He writes, “You’re dealing with wild yeast and bacteria cultures. No two cultures are the same.” He says that a starter is a living ecosystem, and that time, temperature, climate, and even your own two hands will affect how it tastes. A starter in Tucson will not be the same as a starter in Boston. It can take a while to figure out what your starter needs, and there’s even such a thing as keeping your starter environment too clean! He writes, “it’s important to remember that as much as we want to keep things tidy and sterile in the kitchen, we don’t cook in a vacuum. In fact, cultivating a sourdough starter depends on this imperfection.” But he quickly adds, “but here’s the truth. Making a starter is not that hard. Follow the basic guidelines, use your senses, and your starter will live and thrive.”

No matter what culture we come from, starter is a great metaphor for life. Whether we’re in our hometown, or someplace brand new, it can take some trial and error to figure out what we need to thrive. We have to adjust to our environment, to remember that imperfection is all part of that process. But the truth is that making a starter--in the kitchen or in life--isn’t that hard. It just takes a little help and time and experimentation to cultivate.

That injera that Elen grew up with was a vessel for so many of life’s essential moments. Its taste and texture connects her to her family even when she’s far from home. And this experience isn’t unique to Elen. Every time I eat injera, I think about my friend Christine, who brought me injera when I was pregnant, about my sister-in-law Hilary, who was there to make me laugh with me when I tried--and failed--to make injera the first time. 

Elen never would have learned that her mom had been nurturing her own starter for over 35 years if I hadn’t had that kitchen failure. And that’s the thing about starters--about life. Sometimes it’s the failures that finally show us how to thrive. Here’s Michele O’Brien, one of our Shelter in Place apprentices, to tell us more about this.

Michele: Before the pandemic meant we couldn’t gather, I started a cookbook club with friends. It started as an excuse for us to cook elaborate dishes and show off our cooking prowess, but it turned into a beautiful little community. Each month, we’d sit with friends and friends-of-friends on someone’s living room floor, oohing and aahing over each other’s creations, relishing each bite. Like a starter, each iteration of that gathering evolved from the previous one, deepening our connection and widening our community. 

I can trace the impulse to gather people around a good meal to years of watching my mom in the kitchen. She was the first to show me how to cook--but also the first to teach me that making and sharing a meal with someone can be a tremendous act of love. 

I’m part-Irish, part-Jewish--both cultures of big, loud families, communal meals, and chaotic gatherings. On Jewish holidays, my mom or grandma would make brisket, or latkes, or matzo ball soup. When we visited Ireland, Granny and Grandad would ply us with roasts, rashers, sausages, and plenty of spuds. For both sides of the family, it was rich, stick-to-your-ribs kind of eating. Lots of fat and flavor, the kind of food that feels like a special occasion.

But the food that I feel most connected to is one of the simplest: my mom's Friday Night Chicken. It's a whole chicken, roasted on a bed of potatoes and big onion chunks, showered with garlic powder and paprika. Mom would make it for Shabbat most weeks growing up. We lit candles, ate challah, and said the prayers, even though we didn't actually observe a true Sabbath. I always loved her ritual of cleaning the chicken. She has a dedicated paring knife and apron for the practice--neither of which is to be touched aside from chicken cleaning, at your own peril! I loved how happy it made her to be in the kitchen, singing to herself, ensconced in the ritual of making dinner for us. (And how happy it made her to sneak little bites of the onion and potato gravy right from the roasting pan into her mouth as she puttered around the kitchen cleaning up afterwards!)

The idea of Friday Night Chicken--that there was a designated time and space for gathering every week, that a meal could be a gift to wordlessly express love--began my own love affair with food and cooking. It made the kitchen a place of routine and almost meditation. And the way my mom cooked-- confidently, from memory--became an unspoken goalpost for adulthood.

So this year, when I found myself apart from my family for Passover Seder for the second year in a row, I decided to finally make my mom’s Friday Night Chicken. Somehow in all of my years of cooking, I’d never made it myself. I’d mastered dishes that were far more complicated, so I figured this one would be a piece of cake, despite Mom’s minimalist instructions. I’m the one who orchestrates our family’s Thanksgiving menu, after all, bossing around my parents and siblings in my relentless pursuit of deliciousness. 

As I cleaned the chicken and showered it with the requisite garlic powder and paprika, I imagined my mom’s hands on the bird, the way she’d mimic her grandmother’s New York-by-way-of-the-shtetl accent as she cooked: “And then you take an onion, kvetch it in there, just like that. Delicious. You neva tasted such a chick’n! Come on, whatsamatta with you, you don’t like garlic? Ooooh, is gonna be so good!” 

I set the table with its Seder plate of symbolic bitter herbs, matzo, hard-boiled egg, and charoset, my apartment fragrant with the smell of Friday night chicken. I imagined myself nonchalantly hopping onto our Zoom seder, juicy chicken pieces and matzo farfel filling my plate as I made all my cousins jealous and mom proud. 

At last, my oven timer went off and the bird came out of the oven, and… it was the driest, most disappointing chicken I’d ever made. Borderline inedible. I’ve made less-than-perfect meals before, but this one stung. Maybe it was my oven’s fault? Maybe I’d been overconfident with my “improvements” to mom’s method? Maybe I didn’t have the right kind of roasting pan? Maybe it just wasn’t the same without that green flowered apron and paring knife--or more likely, without Mom at the helm. 

It was humbling, to realize that despite all of my kitchen triumphs, I’d somehow failed to absorb this one essential meal. But my failure also reminded me of how connected I still am to my mom, how lucky I am to have her in my life, that it’s not too late to learn her secrets. Next time I’m home, I’ll watch her more carefully in the kitchen (and avoid the comedic distraction of her impeccable accent work). 

From a certain perspective, my failure was a gift. It’s wonderful to feel, after all these years, that there’s still more my mom can teach me.

Laura: One of my favorite kitchen memories from childhood was making angel food cake with my mom. The tradition of making an angelfood cake for birthdays came from my dad’s side, but it was my mom who taught me how satisfying it could be to make something complicated exactly right. You had to spoon the cake flour into a measuring cup--never pack it down--and then sift the sugar and flour twice through a mesh strainer. There was smooth precision in the way the back of a butter knife slid across the top of the measuring cup, no room for error in the separating of exactly one dozen egg whites from their yolks. “One bit of egg yolk and the whole thing will be ruined,” my mom would say. And she’d add, “You have to have stiff peaks!” as we watched the egg whites and sugar churn into a meringue. 

After thirty-five minutes of inhaling the scents of vanilla and almond extract and sugar--in other words, of heaven--the cake would come out of the oven. But only hours later, after the cake had rested and cooled upside down atop an overturned glass, could we finally taste the cloudlike cake that was so moist and sweet that it didn’t need frosting.

As an adult I prefer ice cream to cake--but that angel food cake is a rare exception. I still make it for birthdays. I made it for my daughter last month when she turned 7.

Our first year in Oakland, Nate and his brother tried to surprise me with that cake for my birthday. They scoffed at the fussy recipe, and didn’t bother with the sifting or careful measuring. They didn’t even know what stiff peaks were. When I came home from work and they proudly pulled that cake out of the oven--we all gasped--and then began laughing at the dense, tan donut no more than an inch tall. 

Because that’s the thing about food. We often don’t realize how intricately it’s tied to the people who shaped us until their guidance and instruction are no longer available.

One of our other apprentices, Samantha Skinner, learned that firsthand. 

Samantha: I grew up in Texas, but my roots are also Korean. I can tell you who makes the best TexMex, and our extended family gatherings included brisket as often as bulgogi. But the food that feels most tied to my upbringing isn’t Texan. My mom always told my sister and me how important it was to continue our Korean traditions, to make sure we remembered and cherished where we come from. The food that embodies those values most for me is Tteokguk, a traditional Korean soup with rice cakes, eggs, scallion, dumplings, and seaweed that you have first thing in the morning on New Year’s. We actually called it “tradition soup” growing up. It tastes like pure creamy comfort. 

Every year, I looked forward to eating tteokguk. It was a time where my family made a point to come together, where everyone was happy. As kids, we would bow to our elders and say, 새해 복 많이 받으세요 (saehae bok mani badeuseyo), which means “wishing you good fortune for the new year.” Our elders would respond by offering wisdom and resolutions for the year. The best moment was when they gave us the “Saebe,” a folded wad of cash, passed from their hands to ours. My sister and I would squirm in excitement until the ritual was over, stealing peaks at our palms, and then giggling in our room when we could finally count the bills once we were out of sight. My family doesn’t practice many of the Korean traditions and holidays, but this was one we stuck to. It always felt like a direct window to my Korean culture, a moment when I felt Korean. Like, look at me eating this soup that none of my friends know about. Look at me doing this traditional bow to my halmoni and halabeoji. Look at me receiving wisdom in Korean even if it needed to be translated by my mother). 

Most Koreans eat tteokguk on Lunar New Years, but my family always had it on January first, our way of combining our Korean and Western cultures. My favorite memories of Tteokguk are the times when my grandmother, aunt, and mom all made it together. But mostly it was a dish made by my mom, alone, for my sister and me, since we lived in Texas and the rest of our family lived in California. The recipe evolved as we grew up;  my mom created a vegetarian version after my sister and I raised chickens as pets and decided to cut meat from our diet. Even after I moved out of my parent’s house to go to college in Austin, I would drive home to share the tradition soup with my family. 

In the Fall of 2018, I moved to New York to attend grad school at NYU. On January 1st 2019, I woke up and my stomach sank. I’d completely forgotten about Tteokguk and I had no idea how to make itThe ladies on the Korean side of my family had always loved staking their claim on the kitchen, and the rest of the family had to stay out. It wasn’t meant to exclude others; it was their gift to us, to create this meal and share it with the family. I’d played my part and showed respect by receiving and enjoying the meal--and eating seconds and often thirds. But because of this tradition, I never learned how to make it myself.

How could I have not thought of this sooner? I panicked. The idea of not having this meal felt SO WRONG. Like bad luck and like being less Korean. 

Since the meal isn’t usually made vegetarian, buying it at a restaurant wasn't an option. I realized “Samantha, it’s time for you to learn how to make tteokguk. It’s time to carry on this tradition and make it your own.” 

I called my mom and tried not to cry as I wrote down her vague instructions. She doesn’t use measuring cups or exact temperatures, and it took me a couple of days and a few more phone calls to track the ingredients down, but at last I had everything I needed. I stood in my tiny Brooklyn apartment kitchen and stared at the notes I’d taken from my mom. I thought about my mom and my aunts and my grandma talking over each other in Korean and laughing as they crowded into the kitchen--and then I began. I soaked the rice cakes. I boiled kelp for soup broth. I added in the eggs, scallions, dumplings, and seaweed. Every time I added something, I tasted the soup, searching for something I couldn’t name, but I knew I’d recognize. 

It had taken me days to get to this point, but now that I had everything I needed, the dish took me less than a half hour to make. I set the table for my roommates, and took pictures of the three of us huddling over our steaming bowls to send to my family. My roommates told me that my tteokguk was wonderful, and I felt proud of how it turned out. And yet I knew that my version was not an exact replica of the one I’d grown up with. I was using the same ingredients, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was different.  

I think the difference I noticed was son-mat, a Korean concept that David Zilber writes about in The Noma Guide to Fermentation. Son-mat means “hand taste,”, and he says that it’s “an irreplicable quality imbued by individual cooks to their food.”

Just like that starter that Elen’s mom had been nurturing for 35 years, my mom’s tteokguk had a distinct character“imparted by its maker and the time and place in which it was made.” It had  its own “hand taste,” one that would forever be hers alone--but even so, learning to make my own version still filled me with joy. It felt like an important piece of my identity had snapped into place, a connection to a culture that often feels pretty hard for me to grasp. Even hundreds of miles away from them, it made my family feel close.

I still feel that connection every time I’ve made tteokguk since then. Each New Year’s day I make it, and each time it’s better than the last time, a little less imitation and a little more my own. One day I would love to make it for my mother, aunt, grandmother, and sister . . . or at least stake my claim in the kitchen with them, so we can combine our “son-mat” to make the version of tteokguk that brings our past and present together. 

Laura: In her essay collection, Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner writes, “We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy.” She says of H Mart, the Korean grocery store where she went to buy--among other things--the rice cakes to make tteokguk, that same soup that Samantha made and loved--that now that her mother has died, being at H Mart makes her cry. She writes, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”

When I think back on my family’s pandemic Odyssey, that cross-country road trip from California to Massachusetts, I can recall the specific meals that marked our voyage: the tears I shed over taco soup in Utah, the relief and laughter over a bounty of green vegetables in Denver. Stories were recounted over eggs and bacon in Grand Rapids, hopes shared over giant ice cream cones in Ithaca. In every instance, that food connected us to people. It set the stage for long conversations. It anchored us even as we were drifting.

In Homer’s Odyssey, most of the stories are told not in real time, but around the dinner table. Hospitality is a central theme, and Ancient Greek culture operated on the assumption that friends and strangers alike would be greeted with open arms and a full table. It’s how Telemachus welcomed the goddess Athena, in disguise, without even asking her name. It’s how Odysseus was embraced at countless ports and palaces. Food created community, especially when a worn down traveler needed nourishment and restoration. 

For Odysseus--and for Elen, and Samantha, and Michele, and me--that everyday act of breaking bread--or injera, as the case may be--is a gateway to friendships and family, to finding our way home. Food is community. It’s one of the things I’ve missed most in this pandemic. I miss sharing a meal with my neighbors. I miss standing around the kitchen with my girlfriends while our kids play in the back yard. I miss laughing and telling stories while we washed dishes or chopped garlic. I’m thinking a lot about food these days, about how it can be an act of love to share it with others, about how it can preserve not just our cultures, but our relationships. Food gives me vision for a post-pandemic future. Here’s Elen again.

Elen: Right before lockdown, I stopped by an Ethiopian market I’ve never been to and bought multiple cans of fava beans with the hope of making ful, a flavorful bean stew eaten with wheat bread. I was feeling intensely homesick, and I hoped that making this comforting breakfast dish from my childhood would make my family feel closer. I facetimed my mom to get step-by-step instructions, and  few weeks later, I facetimed her again, this time to make fitfit, a spicy buttery bread dish. She was making it for breakfast too, so we cooked it together. 

From there, those facetime calls turned into weekly cooking sessions with my mom and sister. They werea rhythm I looked forward to, a ritual that made me feel less alone.

In one of those conversations, I asked my mom if she ever missed or longed for someone’s injera that she grew up with. She paused and said “wow.” I felt like I could hear the memory unlocking in her mind. She told me about the time she went to her mom’s hair braider to give her money, and while she was there, the hair braider gave her injera to snack on. Quick sidenote, injera with a little bit of salt is the best snack. It’s so simple, but so satisfying. This was freshly made injera, still hot off the clay. It was a shiny, brownish red, something my mom had never seen before, made from a different kind of grain. My mom said that just thinking about it, she could smell it. It was the best injera she has ever had, and the first and last time she ever ate it. My grandma tried to recreate it for her, but it wasn’t the same. 

The food that I made while my mom and I were on the phone was good, but it wasn’t quite the same as when she made it. My mom never writes anything down. She has stacks of magazine cutouts and cookbooks, but for her own recipes there is no evidence they exist. It's all in her head. She doesn't measure anything. You won’t get an exact amount from her. She’s constantly experimenting. Even trying to get her injera recipe, it was 1 part wheat--no 2 part wheat, 3 parts teff--no sorry 2 parts teff, 1 part corn. She’s just in her own world when she cooks, and yet somehow everything she makes still tastes amazing and familiar. 

Maybe thirty-five years of cooking and family and community has injected my mom’s starter with the warm, enveloping comfort I associate with her cooking. Maybe her most important ingredient is one I can’t write down, one that’s impossible to replicate.

When you’re a kid, you take it for granted that the people and foods and traditions that bring you joy will always be there. Only as I’ve gotten older have I realized that no day is promised.

My worst fear is not being able to preserve the elements my mom infuses into her cooking--not just the actual ingredients, but the way she makes the food her own. I worry she’ll be gone before I can recreate dishes that capture not just the flavors, but the stories and memories of my upbringing. 

I’ve tried to figure out how to absorb some of her wisdom, to pay attention while I sit on our kitchen counter. But every time I watch her cook, I get lost in her magic. I offer help without being helpful, too distracted by the smells that have made her kitchen home: when garlic hits a hot pan covered in oil. How it turns sweet when you add onions, and then something completely different when you add tomatoes. It’s the base of all of our dishes, the smell that traps into my hair, clothing, and furniture. For these reasons

my mom has built an outside kitchen to stop our house from constantly smelling like onions and garlic . . . Now our neighbors can always tell when my mom is cooking. 

My mom’s injera starter has become a metaphor for the way I want to live my life not just because of how it’s made, but how it’s eaten.When we eat injera, we’ll use our right hand to strip off a piece, wrap it around some of the food served on top of it, and then put it into the mouth of someone else at the table. Then, they’ll strip off a piece and do the same for us. This is what we call gursha. Gursha means “mouthful.” It’s an act of love and friendship. The elderly, or guests at our table, will often receive the first gursha as a sign of respect. The larger the gursha, the stronger the bond of that relationship. 

Obviously in this pandemic, gursha wouldn’t fly. Cooking became work. We had to cook every.single.meal. In a chaotic year, we often made chaotic meals. But as we’re beginning to redefine our lives in a post-pandemic reality, I’m thinking a lot about food, about how it connects us to the people we love, and keeps our memories and our histories alive. When we cook for someone or bring them food, it’s a way to say “I’m checking in on you, how are you? Are you okay? I’m thinking of you and want you to feel good.” 

On my most recent trip back home, I was on a work phone call when an uncle interrupted it to feed me. In that moment I felt his love for me, how he would make sure I was taken care of--how my ancestors made sure I would be taken care of. but I also felt the echoes of traditions that had been handed down to me through generations of family and friends extending gursha.

We’ve been ending these episodes with an invitation, so today I want to invite you to give yourself permission to let food be more than fuel. As we approach this summer and start to reunite with people we’ve been away from during the pandemic, how can we make our meals an act of love and friendship, a way to say “I’m checking in on you. How are you? I’m thinking of you and I want you to feel good.”

Laura: Last week, a package showed up with my name on it. It was from an address I didn’t recognize., but when I opened it up, I knew immediately who it was from. It was a glass jar with a brown, flakey powder inside. It was Elen’s mom’s injera starter.

Even though she’d dehydrated it so it would survive the trip from Arizona to Massachusetts, it was still very much alive. I rehydrated it, and for the next week I fed the starter each day. I watched it bubble, made sure that the thick and gooey consistency was just right. 

Finally, a few days ago, I invited my sister-in-law Hilary over and we made the injera once again, this time carefully following the instructions Elen’s mom had given me. I was nervous as I made the injera, but also excited. The act of making it felt sacred. The smell of it was pungent and powerful, laden with memories that weren’t mine, but that I felt honored to carry into my kitchen. I knew after the first one came off my skillet that it was working. The texture was just right, and when I tasted it, it had that sour and dusky flavor I’d remembered and longed for, but also something new. It was comfort and friendship and home all wrapped up in one delicious bite. It was perfect. 

---

Support Credits:

Shelter in Place episodes are now airing on many radio stations across the nation, and station managers have told us that listener requests make a big difference in what they choose to air! If you’d like to hear Shelter in Place on your local public radio station, send them an email and ask them to air our episodes. 

As always, if you listen to the end of this episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes. But first, we want to thank one of our newest supporters. 

Melissa Lent, getting to welcome you into our first cohort of apprentices has been pure delight. Thank you for the heart you brought not just to every episode, but to our team. We are better because of the work you did here, and you helped create the symbolic starter that is now being passed along to future apprentices. Even though we never got to share a meal together or even meet in person, you’ll always be a part of this Shelter in Place family.

To you, our listeners, we want to say thank you, because Shelter in Place is listener-supported, and we really couldn’t do this work without you. Your ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts help more people find us, and your listener survey responses help us decide where to go next. 

If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. You can also join our community by signing up for our newsletter, where we pass along a little bit of the symbolic starter behind each episode. 

Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Our associate producers for this episode were Elen Tekle, Michele O’Brien, and Samantha Skinner. Alana Herlands is our producer, Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 spring apprentices are Clara Smith, Samantha Skinner, Elen Tekle, Shweta Watwe, and Michele O'Brien.

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.