Sugar and Spice and Bread and Rice
How are you guys doing?
I, for one, have had a shitty couple of weeks.
The polls were always close. We always knew it could happen, that he could win. It was just also always possible that she could have won. One saving grace of this hellstorm we are now in is that, though it may not seem like it, it was close. I mean, yeah—it was a decisive victory, but that doesn’t mean it was a landslide. Which brings me to a second (pseudo) saving grace.
[And, by the way, I PROMISE this newsletter isn’t going to be alllllll American election /politics, but, you know, that’s what’s going on in my brainspace right now and I can’t really tell you about my mushroom hunting habit when all I can think about is this crap so bear with me this week and I swear we will move on next week—another country beckons, when I’ll sing you a song of a lass that is gone, over the sea to Skye.]
ANYHOO, I’m not convinced it was all about hatred and misogyny and racism. Let’s be clear—a lot of it was, but not everything. There’s moneyed self-interest and selfishness at the top, and then, towards the bottom, there was and is just a lot of full-fledged stupidity. It wasn’t the economy, stupid: it was the stupidity, stupid.
Check this out. A childhood friend posted it the day after.
It boggles the mind. Is this what people think they were voting for? Organic produce and clean air? Apparently so. I’m so confused. I want clean air too, but I’m pretty sure the Trump/Vance ticket was not the party of the environment. And now they’re saying the price of eggs and gas are bound to fall on Day One…when all he’s saying is that he’ll be starting those mass deportations that all the lovely MAGA folks have been yammering about for months now.
Sorry for the photo, but this is fucked the fuck up. And brings me to the food-related part of this possibly rambling, but heartfelt and therapeutic ditty.
I had tears in my eyes as we drove away from the Hackney East and South Asian Community Center (@hackneychinese) and Halkevi London Turkish and Kurdish Cultural Center (@halkevilondon) solidarity bake sale organized so masterfully by the one-and-only Jenny Lau, aka @celestialpeach_uk on Sunday, November 11.
Initially, I was skeptical of Jenny’s decision to pair us up—one Middle Eastern heritage volunteer baker with one from an East or South Asian heritage—and ask us to create hybrid dishes/offerings that celebrated our combined food heritages and flavors. That kind of thing can go so wrong, so quickly. Plus, she’d paired me with Emily from @therangoonsisters, and I know nothing about and have never had any Burmese food. But I did some research, and we got to cooking and, voila—pandan coconut rice pudding in a shir berenj style, with Emily adding some fresh jackfruit and me adding some dried and candied rose petals. It was excellent. It was “fusion” gone oh-so-very right. As was the entire event.
There was Sichuan peppercorn baklava, panir sabzi milk buns and a pandan pannacotta. There was a beef pad kra pao kibbeh, a lamb and pineapple pirashki, fermented black bean dukkah, miso crème filo rolls, and SO MUCH MORE. And SO MANY PEOPLE. The line was down the block by the time I arrived with our puddings and was still down the block when we left, rice puddings all sold out and tears in my eyes.
It was astonishing. It was moving. The whole thing. It was so beautiful to see people come together, to see community form in real-time, to watch people pay for hybridized treats the profits of which will be fully reinvested in these two centers and spaces that provide warmth, family, safety and home to two disparate diaspora populations. And it all happened a few days after my country voted for the guy whose supporters wave those mass deportation now signs in their hands and hearts.
Thank you, Jenny. It felt so good to be a part of that. I needed it. I felt (and frankly still feel) so broken and it felt so good to not feel that way, if only a few hours.
The hatred of the other is so confusing and confounding to me. I know that sounds naïve. I just don’t get it. But I get that it exists and I certainly get that electing someone to the highest office in the land, if not the world, emboldens and normalizes that kind of hatred. It scares me. It breaks me. I look at my child and wonder what kind of world he is growing up in, and I worry.
But, for a few hours that Sunday, at the bake sale, I didn’t worry. I was full of hope and joy, and a feeling of actual solidarity and community. I was slinging rice pudding next to the head pastry chef at Harrod’s, for goodness sake, and a few tables down was a girl who used to visit the very community center we were in (and wrote about it beautifully as well) and was Fortnum and Mason’s Food Writer of 2024. Oh, and my cooking partner Emily is a badass NHS sexual health doctor, and we may not have won—but she (and her sister) and I were both shortlisted for the Jane Grigson Trust Award, and Jenny’s book went to a three-way auction, and Tintin’s food makes me want to be Filipino and Swedish at the same time, and Angela’s book makes me want to have grown up in a Chinese restaurant, and Hailin is selling baked goods from a window in Walthamstow that will blow your mind, and I didn’t and don’t even know most of these people, and they didn’t and don’t know me. But, for that afternoon, at least, I was part of that community. We were all there together, in solidarity, supporting diaspora communities, using our diverse and unique culinary viewpoints to create new ones together, working collectively to celebrate what our differences, once united, can achieve. We were, for lack of a better, less buzzwordy, word, in a safe space of Jenny’s creating, selling baked goods so that local immigrants could continue to enjoy literal safe spaces in community center form.
I thought of my dad, a new immigrant from Iran, heading to a fellow doctor’s home in suburban Detroit, Michigan in the 1960s, where he’d been invited for his first Thanksgiving dinner and, where, upon arrival, someone laughed and asked him derisively where he’d parked his camel, and how that made him feel. I thought of Emily and Jodie’s mom who made sure that my little sister was excluded from the myriad bar and bat mitzvahs in 1993 because we were half Middle Eastern, and how that made Sara feel. And I thought once again— as a someone at the bake sale skeptically and dismissively looked me up and down after I said I was Iranian (“half,” I clarified before she, who was 100% Iranian, let out a satisfied, “ahh,” as if it all made sense to her then, as if I made sense to her then)— of a line from Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow:” “As any mixed race person will tell you, to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.” I feel that way often, not fitting in anywhere culturally, ethnically. I’m neither here nor there. And sometimes it really bothers and hurts me, and sometimes, like at that bake sale with that woman, it just slides right off. Because why do I need to be one or another when I can be both? Double the pleasure, double the fun. Plus: my rice pudding tasted fucking amazing.
As we drove away from Halkevi that evening, the line still snaked up the stairs and down the street despite the fact that there was nearly nothing left to purchase, the would-be customers not yet aware that they were SOL. I was emotionally overwhelmed and blinking back tears. I just couldn’t stop picturing those mass deportation now signs. I couldn’t stop thinking about that week in February 2017 and my daily trips to Heathrow, of holding up signs of my own to help would-be travelers to the US. I couldn’t stop thinking about being on the plane from Frankfurt to Boston with my now-late aunt and a dozen other Iranians a few days later, when, for a sliver of time, Logan was the only way into the US for the “banned” Muslims. I couldn’t stop thinking about my cousin and his garbled immigration status and how I hope they don’t put him back into a “illegal immigrant” jail for months on end like they did after 9/11. And I still can’t.
It’s draining. It’s exhausting. It’s overwhelming and frightening and infuriating. But I also couldn’t then and can’t now stop thinking about how many of us will keep fighting and keep showing up. Those people in line at the bake sale showed up. All day long. Jenny showed up. 38 volunteer bakers and cooks showed up. I, for one, will never not show up. Because, however clichéd it may sound, we are indeed stronger together than apart, stronger when we celebrate our differences and see where they can take us, what kind of future they can offer us— and what kind of delicious treats, like this crazycakes rice pudding, can come of them.
Coconut Pandan Shir Berenj
Ingredients:
225g basmati rice (not rinsed– we want the starch here)
½ tsp fine sea salt
6 frozen pandan leaves (10-20g), thawed and roughly chopped
2 400ml cans full-fat coconut milk
1 397ml can of sweetened condensed milk
Method:
Add the rice and salt to a medium saucepan along with 450ml of water. Bring the water to a boil over a high heat before partially covering the pan with its lid, reducing the heat to low and letting the rice cook for 5-7 minutes, or until nearly all the water has been absorbed.
Meanwhile, add the chopped pandan leaves and coconut milk to a blender. Blend for 30-40 seconds, or until fully blended. Then, use a fine-mesh sieve to drain blender contents into a large mixing bowl. Discard pandan bits.
To the bowl of now-green coconut milk, scrape in the condensed milk, and mix well.
Pour the green milk mixture into the saucepan of rice. Mix well to combine.
Cook your rice pudding uncovered over a low heat for 25-30 minutes, stirring frequently so that the mixture does not burn. You will know the rice is ready to come off the heat when nearly all of the liquid has been absorbed.
Set your pudding aside to cool slightly if you want to serve it warm. You can of course also let it cool completely, put it in the refrigerator and serve it cold. Either way, top it with fresh jackfruit, dried and candied rose petals.
Enjoy!
Nearly all photos (+ this gif) by Emli Bendixen