Her Hands His Eyes — Entry 9
What my mother knew without being asked. What a bowl of curry said about a young man at her table.
I’ve been writing about Chris this week.
Not the Chris of forty years of marriage and a scanner left on a kitchen counter without a word.
The younger one.
The one I hadn’t yet figured out was going to change everything.
The first Christmas he came to our house my mother cooked all day.
She didn’t ask what he wanted. She didn’t check if it was too much. She just decided what needed to be made and made it. That was how she operated in a kitchen. No negotiation. No menu. Just her hands and everything she knew and the complete authority of a woman who understood that feeding someone was not a small thing.
She made Massaman curry.
I watched him eat it.
That was the moment I knew.
My mother knew too.
Some things do not need explaining.
“She understood that feeding someone
was not a small thing.”
When a Recipe Carries Everything
I’ve been testing that curry this week.
My mother never used a jar. She built it from scratch. The dry spices toasted first, the aromatics pounded in the bong bong, the whole thing coming together in a way that filled the kitchen with something that had no American equivalent.
Cardamom. Cinnamon. Cloves. Cumin. Lemongrass. Galangal. Shrimp paste.
The particular combination that makes Massaman different from every other curry. Not red. Not green. Not yellow. Its own thing entirely. Warm and complex and deep in a way that takes time to build and cannot be rushed.
I’ve been standing at my stove in Florida trying to find that flavor. Testing. Adjusting. Getting close and losing it. Starting again.
This week I think I got it.
Not exactly hers. Nothing is ever exactly hers. But close enough that when I tasted it something in me settled the way it always settles when a flavor finally lands where it is supposed to be.
My mother started with the paste. That is where this curry lives or dies. Get the paste right and the rest follows. Get it wrong and no amount of coconut milk or fish sauce will save it.
The paste recipe is on the site. Start there.
What that bowl meant. What she knew without being asked. What it said about a young man sitting at her table.
That story is in the book.
“Not exactly hers. Nothing is ever exactly hers.”
Next week: the chapter I almost didn’t write. The one that took me the longest to start.
