Two Dishes

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 6 original essay.

BY AGATA ANTONOW

One of my earliest memories is me in a kitchen, on a small step stool in my godmother’s tiny Soviet-era Polish apartment. Her hands are a floury blur, shaping paper-thin dough into tiny crescents. I’m trying to help, but my jam-sticky fingers are too small at the ripe age of four and I realize now I must have pestered more than helped.

My family has always been known for food, maybe because my paternal grandfather grew up on a farm. When others starved, hunted pigeons in the rafters of the city cathedral during the war, my father ate cabbages from the field and plums from the garden. I climbed the same cherry tree that sheltered him, crawling along the thin branches, my four-yearold hands too soft for the rough bark. They kept a pig, and cows, fat hens that chased me around the yard, a loud dog and hissing geese that I was afraid of.

My first dishes were all Polish. Pierogis, little ears, floating in a broth of beets. Meat and potatoes. My father wrapped translucent herring around pickles and carrots, layering them in a big white bucket, covering it with brine. Four sisters, all younger, and he was the one known for cooking. The thick cucumbers on the kitchen counter, fat white garlic cloves like dragon’s teeth, the long, lacy yellow of dill. All of it placed in thick jars, saved up from purchases at the store. Salty water like the ocean poured over it and everything lined up on the counter. I always wanted the pickles too soon, and I’d ask and ask to open a jar. Cutting in, I’d see where the outside was pickled, turning a deeper emerald and the inside of the vegetable still pale.

In our adopted land, no one knew my father knew how to cook. He worked in a factory in Canada and my mother took over duties in the kitchen. Eating food here was like having the volume turned down to static. Everything like paper, beige and white, tasting plain, but this is what I wanted. It was what was served on TV shows, what others brought to school in lunch boxes and brown paper bags. Plain peanut butter and bread sandwiches. I never did understand why the crusts had to be cut off. Casseroles. Barbecue. Buffets. The words like nothing I heard at home.

Immigrant food is serious, and we start learning with the verbs and the nouns of the vocabulary lists we were handed on printed paper in the church basement where we took English classes. We bought TV dinners, marveled at the thin layer of foil, everything on one small tray. Mashed potatoes, chicken, pale peas, a square of red dessert. It was my job to read the instructions in English, to make sure the foil over the apple crumble was pierced with a fork. We were familiar with all the tastes. Meat. Vegetables. But this did not taste like food.

I begged and begged for candy. Thin ropes of red fruit, like plastic wrap. I would wrap the sticki-

ness around my finger, relish the sour-sweet of “apple.” Nothing we tried at the grocery store was real, but I loved the colors. Bright orange cheese. Impossibly green apples. The deep brown of a Coke and the smooth orange of juice. My teeth tingled with sour candy and my tongue furred over with blue, all of it like acid in my mouth. The taste of our future.

At school, I wanted the foods everyone ate. The foods that tasted like nothing, because in fifth grade we children were already too cool for taste, growing up in the shadows of steel mills, tougher than the big city, tougher than the country kids. Ready for the world, our taste buds empty like snow.

Now I have two dishes. There are the foods I ate growing up—the ones that kept me apart from everyone at school, yet kept me close to my family. And there are the plates I have made as a Canadian, have cooked from the Anne of Green Gables cookbook, have made with maple syrup. The nourishment of two countries.

I made my first casserole years ago, pouring in frozen peas and tuna cans and mushroom soup into a glass plate. But maybe it’s not just two dishes anymore—Canadian food has changed as much as the world has. Now I walk through stores stocked with bright yellow turmeric and paper-thin wonton wrappers. I bite into jicama. Turmeric leaves highlighter-yellow suds in my sink after dinner. Even in my tiny town, I can bite into curry, into sushi. It would have been unthinkable here twenty years ago.

Two years ago, before the pandemic, I traveled back to where my father learned to cook and where I first tasted meals I’ve long forgotten. Along the cobblestone streets of Wrocław, where my family went hungry, my nose led me to milk bars, where workers would fill themselves on cheap meals after a day at the factory. I spooned my way through a vacation of cabbage-smelling soups, kielbasa, scoops of ice cream melting over my fingers. Wasps buzzed around me as I bit into fat paczki, donuts with orange zest glaze.

In Krakow, we ate in the Jewish quarter, sipping elderberry tea and sandwiches. I drank lemonade looking up at Wawel castle. Outside the salt mines of Wieliczka, we sat down with other weary tourists amid the din of accordion music. Platters arrived—brown bread spread with lard. The circle clicked closed and I bit in, remembering my father, home from his factory job in Ontario, spreading his bread with a layer of white lard, speckled with coarse salt and bacon bits. I chewed through my past, wondering what he must have thought of his meal, thousands of miles from home. I remembered his large, hardened hands black with motor oil and his tired, content sigh biting into his dinner.

Now this. This is food.