The Kitchen With Two Doors

Kristina Kasparian | Longreads | November 12, 2024 | (2,043 words)

I don’t need to bury my nose in my curls to confirm it, but I do it anyway. On mulukhiyah nights, I leave my parents’ house smelling different than when I arrived. The spices that hung in the air like a fragrant fog when I walked in are now living in my pores, between my lips, on my coat. It’s a scent I can almost see—bold hues of garlic and coriander painted in one smooth brushstroke of forest green. It dampens my mother’s Shalimar and my father’s aftershave when they hold me close. There must be a drawer in the heart where these sacred senses are folded neatly for safekeeping, like my grandmother Rosine’s lace tablecloths and the jewels she hides between them.

I grew up loving mulukhiyah, surprisingly undeterred by its viscosity and bite. I didn’t care to know that the leaves that form its slimy broth come from a type of jute plant, or that this dish is common to many cultures across the Levant, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. All that mattered is how soothing it felt to lean into this meal together on Sundays. The setting sun would invite itself to our table as we’d all take our usual places. I’d relinquish my weekday spot to my grandmother Noémie so that she could sit at the head of the table across from her son. We’d pass rice and chicken and slices of raw onion back and forth, our voices decorated with the clinks of cutlery and the intermittent booms of our chairs coming off the carpet onto the hardwood floor.

In Egypt, before my grandparents transplanted themselves to Canada, making mulukhiyah involved handpicking the leaves, washing them free of their clinging dirt, and laying them out to dry in the desert sun. My mom still remembers watching her mother rock back and forth as she minced the leaves with a curved blade while the light played on the walls. She remembers the stench of the chicken they’d bring home from the bustling bazaar, and how their beloved nanny, Fatma, would pluck its feathers and prepare it for cooking. Now, my family finds clean white chickens and frozen mulukhiyah leaves at suburban supermarkets, even in the stark winter—a convenient heritage neatly preserved in trilingual packaging.

Dishes of the diaspora are strange in how they take on an identity of their own. In the school yard, I learned from my peers that their mothers and grandmothers made mulukhiyah differently than we did just a few neighborhoods away, using beef stock or rabbit stock instead of chicken, and adding tomato to the palette to interrupt the green. These variations on truth made me feel even more anchored to my family, though shaky about the veracity of our culture. Were we the ones doing it wrong? It hadn’t yet occurred to me at that age that the pride I felt for my family’s customs could be muddied by the shame of being inauthentic. The same disquietude stirred in my chest when my sister once pointed out that we eat Egyptian mulukhiyah far more often than any traditional Armenian foods. Our family traditions had become impregnated with where we had been, not where we were from. Home is not homeland.

The hankering for mulukhiyah is a unique hunger. When I lived in Europe for graduate school, it was the first meal I’d eat on my short visits home, texting my request before my plane even landed. It’s the food I crave when I haven’t been to my parents’ for supper in a while. I can call its garlicky taste to my mouth as readily as I can trick my ears into filling with the timbre of my dad’s voice when I’m miles away from him, traveling restlessly as we both love to do. Though my mom excels at every dish in her repertoire, the exhilaration of the roughly monthly cycle culminating in mulukhiyah makes me clap my palms and cheer like I’m 4. When it comes to mulukhiyah, I suppose I still am—I stubbornly eat it the way my parents used to plate it for me as a kid, the broth drizzled over rice and topped with chicken. My sister is more practical with her nostalgia and has long graduated to eating it the way the adults in our family do—plunging a spoonful of rice directly into the green soup—but my childhood rituals are entrenched and inflexible.

I inherited my affection for rituals from my mother, who has not once deviated from the classic white dinnerware she has served mulukhiyah in for nearly five decades. In all our seasons, as our family grows and shrinks and grows again, the immutable constant of mulukhiyah in these same dishes is a steadying force. Once satiated, we wipe the green speckles off the white canvas with a piece of pita, our tongues pulling every last ounce of the spice off our lips when our bowls are bare.

But it is reaching satiety that is challenging. For this meal, seconds are forgiven. As a teen, my instinct to deprive myself would be paused for mulukhiyah. In high school, I would stuff my feta-cheese breakfast in the metal box intended for pads and tampons in the bathroom stall and I’d give away my packed lunch, too obsessed with shrinking my thighs to Spice-Girl size to consider that I was harming myself, let alone squandering the measured abundance that my grandparents had sacrificed their belonging to build. Now, at nearly 40, food haunts me in a different way, yet I secretly hope the bloat I can’t shake is triggered by gluten, not garlic.

The shape of our bodies is under perpetual scrutiny in perfectionist Armenian households. We are reproached for being too thin or too plump, for eating too little or too much. If your grandmother didn’t see you fill your plate, you must not have eaten. Our ears collect comments about our appearance as soon as we enter a scene, often before we are even kissed hello. A body’s roundness is blamed on indulgence, never an ailing uterus. Only a pregnant belly is permitted to bulge. Still, declining dessert is an insult to your elders, who lay out dozens of traditional pastries and cookies they’ve baked as an act of defiant survival.

Maybe heritage is simply what we make of it—our own rituals that hatch and thrive in a kitchen with two doors, where we honor both what we were given and what we dream to give.

That my husband Ethan adores mulukhiyah has allowed him to redeem himself in my grandmother Rosine’s eyes. She’ll watch him devour it and turn to flash me a smile. Nearly 15 years ago now, I dared to marry not only outside our culture, but also our religion. All that my grandparents had done to protect our Christian faith, I’d unintentionally dishonored by choosing a man who grew up loving latkes and gefilte fish. Perhaps even more inexcusable, I opted out of the selfless act of bearing and birthing, and chose to end my lineage with me. My sister’s branches are far more solid than my pruned ones: she married an Armenian man and has two beautiful Armenian boys (though neither of the three can tolerate our mucilaginous mulukhiyah). Still, while I may have seemed careless about my heritage to those watching me make these choices, my sense of home sits deep in my cells; Ethan and I chose to wed on a Sunday in honor of the golden afternoon light that bathed my parents’ dining room and swaddled my childhood.

Though criticism lives on my grandmother Rosine’s tongue, she has not once defamed her daughter’s mulukhiyah. My mom takes its preparation seriously—a laborious ceremony she reserves for weekends. The ingredients are few and simple, but the timing is delicate. She closes both kitchen doors to keep our chaos out. The garlic and coriander are toasted in a separate skillet while the minced leaves gradually dissolve in the chicken stock. The garlic and coriander mustn’t burn, the broth mustn’t boil, and the ladle should slit through a body that is just silky enough. She repeats the ritual with as much concentration and humility as her first ever time, aware of the stakes, aware of our hunger. The bitterness of the raw mulukhiyah leaves dissipates in her patience. When the umber contents of the skillet are ready, they are swiftly combined with the simmering verdant broth—now, here, roots meet foliage. I can see through the French doors that my mom’s posture has relaxed as she turns her attention to the rice. There will be leftovers but, unlike other meals, we won’t be sent home with them; they will be for my parents to privately savor.

In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised impulses. As tempted as I am to try, I’m afraid to fall short. So, I leave the art of mulukhiyah to my elders, and secretly wonder whether I am protecting the dish or myself.

My sister’s mulukhiyah is delicious and is a source of pride for her. She doesn’t mind devouring it on her own when her boys aren’t around to taint her enjoyment with their grimaces. It appeases me to know that our mulukhiyah is safe with her. My grandmothers’ aging has been measured by the incremental changes in their dishes’ textures and tastes. Since my grandmother Noémie left us, my homesickness frequently flares like a siren warning me of the next unwanted tide. Though my grandmother Rosine is still with us at 93, my angst swells at the thought of not knowing when I’ll taste her mulukhiyah for the last time—maybe I already have. I wrap myself in the memory of playing cards at her kitchen table with my sister, the pressure cooker whistling on the stove and garlic being pounded into a pungent paste in her mortar. Maybe when that mortar comes to live in my kitchen cupboard, my longing will outweigh my fear of inadequacy and will propel me to practice.

The hunger for home asserts itself in mysterious pulls. Since I was a toddler, I’ve longed for the Mediterranean, for its fruits and flowers, blues and breezes. My memory somehow already knew of its light, of the coolness of a home’s stone walls, of the sand in the air. In Moorish Sicily, I felt compelled to tug at a ripe fig on a tree and split it open. Its pink flesh tasted so pure that something moved inside me. I suddenly better understood from where and from whom I’ve come, and I ached all the more at the thought of my family’s displacement and my people’s displacement from our homeland only a generation before theirs.

The guilt of having clipped the family tree is acute when belonging is complicated. Our culture neither fits here nor there. Here, my last name and darker skin tone instantly expose my otherness, and I have to work harder to earn my place. There, in both Egypt and Armenia, we are foreigners with our accent and gaps in our vocabulary. We live in the in-between but belong to each other, around our table. I assuage my shame of being untraditional by telling myself that so much of how I long and love stems from the stories I’ve been told, not the genes I’ve been programmed to hold. At least both our egg donor and our surrogate love coriander, so the binary switch in our baby’s brain will be securely toggled on. Our fragile culture will be left in clumsy hands, but a wildly sensitive heart. Maybe heritage is simply what we make of it—our own rituals that hatch and thrive in a kitchen with two doors, where we honor both what we were given and what we dream to give.

I recently asked my sister whether it was my mom or my grandmother who gave her the recipe for mulukhiyah. “It’s not a recipe,” she corrected me. “It’s a process.” I thought of all the conversations with my mom and grandmothers that had erupted into an unexpected step-by-step tutorial on how to make this or that, with me totally unprepared to catch their wisdom on paper. Our foods are our stories. Mulukhiyah is simply the sum of its parts—the sum of our parts.

Kristina Kasparian is a writer, health activist, and entrepreneur with a PhD in neurolinguistics. Her writing about identity, wellness, and social justice has been published by Roxane Gay, Longreads, Electric Literature, HuffPost, Newsweek, Catapult, Fodor’s, Elle, the Globe & Mail, and elsewhere. She was a finalist of Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Essay Contest and shortlisted for CRAFT’s Memoir Prize. She is querying a lyrical memoir about reclaiming lost confidence in work, health, and motherhood. Connect with her on Instagram @alba.a.new.dawn and kristinakasparian.com

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor:  Cheri Lucas Rowlands