There’s a rawness to cooking in a pandemic. It bears permeation of admission that this is comfort food but not in the way we know, and it’s being dished around the world as an act of compassion.
One of my dearest friends in LA just sent me two recipes for banana bread, one which she assures me is the crack of banana bread, and the other is more wholesome but still pretty delicious.
While stirring a pot of mutter paneer, my brother in the United Kingdom also shoves not one, but two loaves of banana bread in the oven – which after eating my sister informs me are as soft as a baby’s bottom.
Another friend who lives down the road tells me he’s almost perfected something similar to Toronto’s infamous Burger’s Priest beef patty – no small feat I assure you. An acquaintance I follow on Instagram has just put the kind of chocolate cake you dream about on her story, and I take note of the recipe, vowing no more chocolate mug cakes to fix my sugar cravings.
My husband started following a home chef on YouTube called Afzal Arshad, who measures all his spices with a tablespoon and cooks in Pakistan’s wild outdoors. He is now attempting to replicate Arshad’s Peshawari karahi with a bottle of passata. And a couple of weeks ago, Massimo Bottura made mac and cheese live for the world to see.
Even though Grammarly Premium still identifies the word foodie as slang, whether in a pandemic or not, it’s safe to say for most of the general population, being foodies is at the centre of much of what we do.
I am from one of the many countries where food plays an important role in the culture. Most of us live in cities where we can virtually (pun-intended) find almost any cuisine on our doorstep, and in a time when Netflix shows like Chef’s Table and Ugly Delicious fuel our appetite for drool-worthy adventures across the globe. When most of us travel, among all the things we look forward to, eating locally is high on the list.
Bearing all this in mind, it’s no surprise that while destined to stay at home, many of us have turned to sourdough, banana bread and mac and cheese. Vox nailed it on the head when they said, “quarantine cooking is about more than just feeding yourself.”
As I cook in my kitchen, I’m missing my parents. Italy. The hot sauce at my favourite restaurant where I can get a plate of momos for CAD $7. I love going to this restaurant because we can chat with Nepalese owner in Urdu. There, we talk about the food my husband and I ate in Namche Bazaar the previous year while hiking and trekking to Everest Basecamp.
Post-travel, like plenty of others, I’ve found that food is the most tangible way to keep vacation hangovers at bay and memories of destinations close to home. Whenever we miss the mountains, we visit that restaurant and take leftover packets of hot sauce home and while it lasts, eat it with almost everything.
Trying to re-create that hot sauce, sacrilegiously enjoying it with a simple plate of homemade pasta, and telling our parents about it on the phone is an act of love that did not exist in the same context three months ago.
While the obsession with posting pictures of our plates was born of Instagram, at present, the need to talk about food and share our creations is no longer about hashtags and amassing likes. Cut-off physically from the outside world, our loved ones, and other life-enriching experiences, the colourful minutiae of burger patties, crack banana bread and mutter paneer have become an emotional antidote in the face of a virus that currently has no real cure.
For years now, the landscape of social media and the online world has led to feeling disconnected and lonely. In this imposed self-isolation – because of our kindred whims to bake and cook – at long last, it has become a place to find connection.
Even under normal circumstances – during good and bad times – food has been a way for us to come together. It makes sense that right now it’s serving the same purpose. We may not be free to go outside, let alone travel, but the way our tastebuds can transport us to different parts of the world and bind us to one another has never been more important.
We’re not jumping on the sourdough and banana bread bandwagons for the heck of it. For many people, these baked treats and homecooked meals are a simple way to feel a sense of community and remember the good times – meals with loved ones, the food we ate on our travels – and most vital of all, a way to cross the distance.
Eating food from around the world is giving us the means to experience the same things as when we travel. We’re still getting outside our comfort zone. Try making a loaf of sourdough bread from scratch, and you’ll see what I mean! Hiking to Dead Woman’s Pass in Peru again would be slightly easier than growing a live culture from scratch. Still, local entrepreneur-slash-bread-maker Jeremy Potvin’s live Instagram videos have inspired me to at least try.
Along with stepping out of our comfort zones while still in our homes, experimenting with food at a time like this is giving us a way to continue exploring cultures, build confidence and empathy and to connect. Quarantine cooking is both humbling and empowering.
Gone [temporarily] are the days of a beautifully edited food picture on Instagram. This morning I watched an iPhone video of Food52’s Kristen Miglore make pizza dough from a make-shift Genius Kitchen in her own home with her husband serving as a cameraman, and she’s never been more relatable. Quarantine cooking is not about being perfect – it’s about solidarity.
There’s no need for well-lit shots of acai bowls. Instead, we’re crying out for things like Bottura bumbling around in his kitchen like a mad scientist making Thai curry while his daughter captures it live, yet another grainy Instagram story that teaches us how to to make sourdough, no end to banana bread recipes, and until we meet them again, for loved ones to share what they are having for dinner.
