The reason I eat…
I’ve consumed so much Egyptian clarified butter that it flows out of my pores. I don’t even like it. It is discriminately used in select traditional dishes, like a green mucous soup made of Jews Mallow or thick holiday cookies, and I find it irresistible only because my American-Egyptian stomach cannot resist it with a clear conscious. My palate does not differ greatly from my Latino husband’s, but I always eat these things as he politely declines and wish deeply he would join me in literally swallowing pride. Over the course of our eleven-year marriage, I’ve prevailed on him to do so just once—by lying outright.
My tendency to gorge Egyptian food is less indicative of Egyptian triple bypass surgery rates and more so of Egyptian psychology. Egyptians measure generosity, success, happiness by how many tablespoons of ghee fall into the mix or kilos in a slaughtered goat, in the flakes of a filo dough pastry or the tang of a hibiscus drink, called karkade. Both the person dropping the plate on the table and the person picking up the spoon (or pita bread formed into a spoon-like scooper) derive a shared purpose—to savor this moment. Even though my connection to Egypt is a generation removed, this is my gut. Food is life, people, joy, rather than a means of sustaining these things.
Digestives aside, I’ve been otherwise able to adapt or reject various aspects of my immigrant parents’ culture. For example, I have approximately 33% of the King Tut coasters they have and I do not attend four hour-long Coptic Orthodox Sunday mass. When I married an agnaby, or a “foreigner,” some of my family members joked that I’d found the one sure way to escape learning to cook like a proper Egyptian wife. For most of my large extended family, the fact that my husband is an agnaby is all they knew or needed to know. It explained why I vacationed in other foreign countries, why we hadn’t had children within the first year of our marriage, why I was permitted to work long hours outside of the home, etc. In a sense, they are not wrong. These facts about our life together are true, and they are likely so, perhaps in part, because he is not Egyptian.
Ulysses is Ecuadorian the way I am Egyptian, in some ways by instinct and others by choice. When we first visited his family in Ecuador together, he was mindful of me but often forgot to translate conversations too complex for me to follow. For hours, people would chat, laugh, debate, and then suddenly, aunts, uncles, cousins would burst into or out of cars. I’d get angry when Ulysses would say, “Let’s go,” without explaining where we were going, with whom, what I should bring with me, or how long we’d be gone. He’d be swept away by their company, taking me with him confused, and we’d find ourselves in someone’s home with a cold soda, a three-course meal, or nothing on the table for our taking. People only occasionally paused to chew or sip between words.
During one of these mystery day trips, the caravan stopped suddenly in front of an open-front restaurant with rotating spits. “That restaurant serves cuy. It’s guinea pig. Do you want to try it?” Ulysses asked. “Of course not,” I said as I followed him into a neighboring restaurant, while some of his family members split off towards the cuy.
Later, we attended a birthday party. There were not enough chairs for everyone, but most were content dancing the night away so it did not matter. A table of delicious food, laid out hours and hours after we’d all arrived, was little more than a brief resting station. This party was not about the food.
My favorite meal on that trip was a street-food grilled cheese sandwich and fruit smoothie, served by one of Ulysses’ great uncles as we walked from one place to another. The simplicity of that meal makes it maddeningly easy to recreate, but I’ve tried for years and it seems that those perfectly balanced flavors only exist under that tin roof. I think of that meal often. Ulysses does not remember it at all.
A few winters after our Ecuador trip, we visited my family in Egypt for the first time. I drew healthy boundaries between our vacation and their best intentions. We stayed at a hotel, visited tourist sites unaccompanied, and I did my best to faithfully translate every Arabic word for Ulysses. Rather than spend our vacation on a carousel of home visits, my uncle Joseph offered to host an open house in his sprawling Cairo apartment—complete with two formal dining rooms—so my extended family could meet Ulysses all at once. I agreed, understanding that this dinner would be the culmination of every individual meal we did not have in one sitting.
In preparation, Joseph asked if Ulysses and I had any special dinner requests. I anticipated that he would serve seafood because of the time of year. (For the forty days preceding Christmas, which is celebrated on January 7, Copts fast by limiting their diet to vegan fare, but seafood is permissible.) I also knew that Ulysses would not eat seafood, and no matter how much I begged him to make an exception for that one meal, he refused. So, I shamefully alerted my uncle that Ulysses would not eat anything from the sea, and he promised to serve a very special dinner in his honor regardless.
“So what country is he from?” my oldest aunt asked as she stared at Ulysses.
“He’s from Ecuador,” I said.
“Ah, Mexico,” she turned around, offering this translation to the rest of the crowd.
“No, Ecuador has their own soccer team! That isn’t Mexico,” a cousin corrected her. “I think it’s part of Brazil,” he continued. I didn’t translate everything.
The novelty—the otherness—of my agnaby husband faded when our attention turned to food. Joseph took me by the hand and proudly lifted the corner of fifteen, maybe twenty, trays of fried, broiled, and baked fish for me to smell. He then led me to another part of the kitchen where three trays stood apart from the rest.
“And these are for Ulysses!” he boasted. Two trays overflowed with sausages, steaks, and ground meats. The last cradled four carefully laid small birds, stuffed so fully I could see the bloated grains of rice through the thin skin. “It wasn’t easy,” Joseph said, “But I pulled a few strings and got you two a few of those pigeons that famous downtown restaurant can’t make fast enough!”
I panicked. There was no time to compromise or beg. I couldn’t risk Ulysses rejecting the local delicacy, which I knew he’d find objectionable, especially considering that he walked us into it by refusing the seafood. He would have been rejecting their hospitality, generosity, kindness, patience, our way of community and life. If they had toasted toads, Ulysses and I were going to overeat graciously. As I stood there wondering how I would make him eat a pigeon, he popped up behind me and asked what was in the tray. “Quail! You’re going to love it.”
When it was time to eat, the dining rooms were ceremoniously quiet, except for praise of the meal’s aromas, spices, variety and decadence. Ulysses and I sat next to each other at the head of one of the tables. Some of my cousins ate with their plates on their lap because the trays of food covered nearly every inch of surface. Ulysses sampled each of the meats before Joseph served him the fowl highlight of the meal.
Ulysses thanked him as he cut into the bird, “Shoukran!”
Dense grey, brown rice broke forward and everyone watched as he picked it up and ate it.
“Bil hana wi shifa!” we cheered, bidding him the traditional wish of a meal with pleasure and health.
“This tastes…different,” he said sweetly. The next time I turned to him, he nibbled and spoke between his teeth, “Isn’t this the tiniest little wing you’ve ever seen?” My stomach churned. The pigeons I know in New York have nubs for feet. They are the city rats that fly above our heads. But at this table, these pigeons made us one big, happy party. There was no agnaby, no outsider, no culturally sensitive explanation to plead or understand. Just us.
At the end of the meal, after tea and sweets, after another round of cold drinks and fruits, none of which could be declined, my family kissed us warmly on both cheeks and we went on our ethnically blended way home.
Ulysses dry heaved, tugging at his airplane seatbelt, when I took his hand and came clean about what we’d eaten. “Pigeons are rats that fly, Monica,” he kept saying. “I can’t believe you lied to me about what it was. I’d never do that to you.” In a sense, he is not wrong. It is true that a stuffed pigeon is not palatable to either of our sensibilities. And in Ecuador, I opted out of eating a disturbing local delicacy that his family was enjoying. But this is how we are different. It was that much more important, perhaps in part, because he is not Egyptian.