When I was six we moved from the comfort of America with its giant supermarkets and convenience, to Moscow, then capital of the Soviet Union. My father was a journalist and this was his big break, a foray into the world of international news, and covering the Cold War was just about as huge a story as there was in 1979. I’m not sure my poor mother, with two small girls and another one on the way, was prepared for the frankly shocking food situation we were heading towards. I do want to preface all of this by saying I’m absolutely aware that our situation as foreigners in Moscow was vastly better than what locals experienced. We had access to expat stores that were certainly more abundant than the small berioskas for Muscovites.

We ate lots and lots of ground beef and potatoes and bananas (I think they got a good deal from Cuba) during our years in Moscow, and long before seasonal eating was a trend, we were forced to do so because there was no other choice. Still I have the fondest memories of buying wonderful black bread from the local bakery, the loaves sorted into open wooden bins with a silver spoon-like tool tied to the side to gently press the bread and check for freshness. To go with the bread, borscht or a vegetable broth; maybe a beet and walnut salad heady with garlic. I remember the sharp perfume of vinegar and dill at the rynoks, markets, where farmers from the provinces brought their harvest, and the first time I identified that unmistakable metallic bloody stink from animals being slaughtered. In winter there were the ice cream trollies on the boulevards that served brick-shaped vanilla (only) ice cream wrapped in festive burgundy and silver foil.  Oh, and the occasional chicken Kiev on those very special occasions when my family ate out at one of the hotel restaurants that catered to foreigners. 

We were able to add to the local fresh necessities with pantry items imported from a company in Denmark. My mother spent days flipping through the thick Peter Justesen’s catalog, noting what we needed and could store in our limited space. A telex was sent off:  all varieties of Campbell’s soups, After Eight Mints, Betty Crocker frostings, Blueberry Muffin Mix, Angel Food Cake Mix, Spaghetti, Taco Dinner Boxes, Pizza Crust Boxes, Pringles Original Flavor, Dijon Mustard, Spaghetti-O’s, Sweet Pickle Relish, Jiffy Cornbread Mix, Tang, Honey Nut Cheerios, Corned Beef Hash. When the boxes arrived months later it was like Christmas. But my mom quickly squirrelled it all away, hiding it from us girls and our father who I’d seen with a fistful of After Eights in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other. I was known to steal tubs of the frosting and hide them under my bed with a spoon in them for a quick sugar fix. At the time it seemed like the most normal thing in the world to have all of this shipped to us, but it recently dawned on me that when we ran out of say, the tomato soup, we never just made tomato soup from scratch. Nor was any attempt at say an apple strudel muffin made when we depleted our stock of Pillsbury blueberry muffin mix. We never had taco night if it didn’t come complete out of the box.  Our soups came from cans, breads and cakes from boxes, sauces from vacuum-sealed jars. 

But more than the memories of food it was my realization that cooking and eating was really the only way I was going to learn much about what it was like to be Russian. We weren’t really allowed or encouraged to mingle with Russians, didn’t go to school with them when I was little, didn’t shop next to them in the stores. The closest we got to them were the people who worked for us at home – drivers, housekeepers, tutors, translators. And the only reason we were allowed to fraternize with them was because they were most likely working for the KGB and spying on us….under the guise of being household help. Understanding none of the complexities of life behind the Iron Curtain, I adored the housekeepers we had, learning to help them in the kitchen a bit, learning some Russian along the way, learning their recipes. Some days our jolly drivers brought my sisters and me chocolates wrapped in brightly illustrated papers for the ride to school as we sat in the back of our red Zhiguli station wagon, snowsuit clad arms so fat they could barely bring the sweets to our mouths. 

Then, just slightly older, we moved to Ankara Turkey. I attended British school and suddenly there was warm sun and dappled forests that I spent my days with friends running through. Here we ate an entirely different kind of food. Coban salad, farmers salad, with fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, red onions. There was almost no end to the fresh fruits and vegetables, gorgeous yogurt, honey, fresh cheese, grilled fish from the Mediterranean, and lots of lamb. Abundance. Here though I was taken by a different kind of unfamiliarity as the call to prayer echoed through our neighbourhood several times a day and I vividly remember walking up the hill to school one day only to witness a sheep being slaughtered for the Eid holiday on the sidewalk in front of us. The street’s gutters rushed full of blood as I tried to shield my younger sister from the scene and step around the sacrifice.

Although Turkey wasn’t as inaccessible as the Soviet Union, it was again through Taiba, our housekeeper who wore bright scarves tied around her head and had a mouth full of gold teeth, that I felt the most attachment to the local population. Her rough hands rolled delicious borek filled with salty white cheese or ground meat and parsley. Stews and rice, sesame bread, my first fresh fig, and a perfect peach that I still remember, it’s juice running down my chin.  When we visited the sea (which was often) I saw octopus being bashed on rocks to tenderize them and baby fish scooped up out of the sea with nets, dusted with flour, and then dumped in the fryer. Young boys herded sheep through abandoned ancient ruins on cliffs above the sea. Turkey was as of yet, untouched by hordes of European tourists looking for the sun and sea. My parents enjoyed leisurely lunches with grilled fish and mezze and little glasses filled with cloudy liquid while my sisters and me ran through the village square.

All too swiftly, the color was drained from everything again when we moved back north to Moscow, where we would bounce back and forth from over the next 8 years. During a stint in London in 1986, I made my best effort to eat all the junk food I was convinced had been kept from me all those years in Moscow; McDonald’s French fries after school and salt and vinegar crisps with a side of Malteeser’s for breakfast. Fried mushrooms and stodgy pizza at the Hampstead pizza parlor near our muse apartment with my father. Minced beef chewy with gristle in the shepherd’s pie. Britain was still awaiting its food renaissance.

Throughout college and graduate school back in the United States, I cooked like I’d been raised, making pasta salad out of a box, soup out of a can, an occasional tuna helper, grilled cheese made with Kraft singles, and lots of taco meals. I remember baking frozen fish fingers and eating them with mayonnaise I’d mixed with curry powder, thinking I was so clever. I worked as a hostess at the Signature Room at the 95th in Chicago after college and took note of what was happening behind the swinging doors in their enormous kitchen. I watched from the sidelines, enamoured with the whole atmosphere and stress and camaraderie, that created beautiful plates of food. Meanwhile, I applied to Columbia University’s MFA program in non-fiction writing, never thinking I’d be accepted. My backup plan was culinary school. Shockingly, Columbia accepted me. My mother told me she had been hoping I wouldn’t get in, that I'd go to Culinary school instead.

While studying at Columbia in New York City, I started eating out and eating really, really good food. Not fancy, but delicious. I threw dinner parties and cocktail parties and started devouring cookbooks. In the early 2000’s I lived in San Francisco and began catering on the side with a good friend who’d been professionally trained. I spent Saturday mornings at the Ferry Building Farmers’ Market admiring the heirloom stone fruits and soft rind local cheeses from the Cowgirl Creamery. Miette Bakery’s perfect French pastries tempted from under their pink awning and I learned all about different oyster varieties. I explored olive farms and the outstanding restaurants mixed in among the vines of wine country. Finally, hoping to formalize my hobby, I moved back to New York in 2005 to attend the French Culinary Institute.

In culinary school I’d learn to make everything from scratch, the opposite of how I’d been brought up to cook, just as it seemed cooks everywhere were heading away from convenient, industrial food in favor of a less preservative-filled repertoire. And while the techniques at culinary school were paramount, the recipes we learned to cook didn’t resonate with me, but an internship in the kitchen at Public in Soho gave me faith that I could take my skills and really do whatever I chose with them. There was something in particular about the Australian insouciance at mixing flavours and cultures in that kitchen that appealed to my sensibilities, perhaps an early glimmer of wanting to somehow harness the flavours I remembered so fondly from growing up overseas, and putting them on a plate.

Back in London in the naughties, the food renaissance firmly underway, I was browsing in a bookshop one afternoon and happened upon Ottolenghi’s first cookbook, his only book at the time. As I flipped through the recipes I could taste his food in my mind’s eye and it was sparkling and clever and full of combinations that beguiled me. I went home, stopping on my way at the green grocers, and bought eggplants to make his charred eggplant soup. It was smoky and rich and lemony. It reminded me of the smell of lamb grilling when I was a girl in Turkey. I could feel the sun, taste the sea.

My husband is Circassian Jordanian, a journalist like my father, and soon we left dreary Britain and moved to the Middle East where eating every day was a bit like an Ottolenghi cookbook (OK, not that good, but the flavours! The sunshine!) Beirut's Souk el Tayeb farmers’ market brightened my Saturday mornings, where the produce is better than anywhere I ever lived because of the huge variety of climates in that postage stamp-sized country. I found producers and farmers so proud of their food and as I began to consult for new restaurants opening in Beirut, I tried my best to champion local farm-to-table cooking, to showcase the beauty and bounty Lebanon has to offer. While women have been cooking seasonally for centuries in the Levant, by and large restaurant cooking had devolved into a mishmash of mediocre “international” cuisine, or your standard mezze and kebab joints, which have little to do with how people eat at home.