food and memory

I’ve always been obsessed with the theoretical concept of what food can represent. The importance of sharing a meal with those you love, and tracing forever parts of yourself back to the nostalgia that floods your senses through the culinary experience. Part of my experience traveling across the United States has been associating specific meals with each city that I go to, drinks that when I taste again, I’m flooded with the exact location and timing that I last experienced them.

This is a curated list of food and drink and the cities that I associate them with, and the memories that they hold. At heart, an important cornerstone of my travels is the food that I eat in each city. Eating food is an experience for me - the ritual of sitting in a restaurant, on the curb, with my journal or a book or someone I love in front of me, and the laughter that we share. The act of sitting in a restaurant, and talking to the workers, ascertaining a location from the beating pulse of locals who care for their city and will willingly tell you all about it. But further, sentimentally, I can trace important meals to important conversations, important people, important moments that define who I am today and who I became in my time living and working in the US.

This isn’t, truly, an exhaustive list. I cut down from handwritten collections I put together in my journal that looked like an odd, slightly curated and expensive grocery list. It’s just a collection of memories brought together by how I recollect them when I taste the food that I associate with them. When I close my eyes, and the physicality of an entire year that has felt like a lifetime washes over me.

tajin and chamoy covered mango - san francisco, california

My first week in the US tastes like salt. Anyone who’s been to San Francisco knows the way that the air blankets and coats the city, layers itself on your tongue and your arms and fills you in all entirety. But it also tastes like early August sunlight. Sitting at the Golden Gate Lookout, hungover and colder than expected. Looking out at the city and being incapable of conceiving the sheer magnitude of streets that have never known any version of me other than this.

When Franka and I walked the path along the Golden Gate lookout, we stopped to buy a cup of mango to refuel, after which she confessed she didn’t like the tajin on it. I proceeded to lick each piece of mango clean of its coating to hand to her - which is probably disgusting, in hindsight, but it made both of us laugh.

We sat there with the cup of mango for hours, talking softly about our journeys to San Francisco, the work that it’d taken us to leave our hometowns. Franka from a small German town, the days I spent dreaming of leaving my childhood suburb when I was 19. It rooted our friendship in time, in our fingertips, sticky with mango juice, and the comforting lull of our accents mixing together, German and Australian voices entwining in the air.

rosemary’s west village, rigatoni alla arrabia - new york city, new york

When we first moved to New Jersey, Noah and I would spend hours on end in the West Village, walking around in the early Autumn evening light and having conversations that I would reflect on for months afterwards. Noah is someone that I’ll always look to as a beacon of light in my world; someone determined, and someone kind, who made everything he wanted to happen, happen. I learnt so much from the time that I spent with him on exchange. He taught me to be unafraid of going after things, and following your heart, and I don’t know many people who exist in the world with the charisma and love that he does.

In our early days at Rutgers, we’d both spend entire weekends in New York, and then meet for a meal at Rosemary’s where we would casually drop a sickening amount of money on a bowl of pasta. I’d get a glass of orange wine, and we’d eat outside, and talk about our lives in Melbourne, our lives in the United States, everything we wanted and planned for in the future. He would laugh at something I’d said that seemed so trivial in hindsight - and I would smile across the table, knowing this exact moment in our friendship was something I’d reflect on forever.

beef ragu - toronto, ontario

When I went to Toronto and Montreal at the end of November, the weather was just beginning to cool down, and this was my first real taste of what Northern hemisphere winters truly entail. I spent almost all of my time in Toronto alone, aside from the conversations that I snatched with strangers on the street.

The bitter cold, combined with the total lack of human interaction I was experiencing, made me sickeningly homesick. At that moment, I thought it was totally romantic - me, alone with my diary, sad and depressed in a foreign city. It became a tantalising experience that felt near hedonistic, that I just existed in a foreign city, where all I did was read and write and drink blue moon by myself, eat expensive meals after dark, listen to the rhythm of my own footsteps when I walked myself home. Now, I reflect on it as a collection of significant moments that I experienced in my travels where I was truly challenged, and pushed to realise who I was becoming. Every part of my travels has built on top of each other, all the moments where I was forced to swallow the fact that I’m not the smartest person the world has ever seen, and sometimes I’m just a foreigner who doesn’t feel like I’ll ever find words smart or witty or meaningful enough to be important to those that I meet while I’m traveling. The loud moments in life teach me who I am and who I want to become - and just as importantly the quiet, when I’m by myself, and I’m forced to reckon with who I am when I’m alone, not performing for anyone else.

The sun had well and truly melted out of the sky by the time I walked down a street I don’t even remember the name of to find a restaurant for dinner. I chose somewhere with a bar for the hope of finding someone to have a conversation with, and remember well trying to talk to the person sitting next to me, who turned away so he could focus on watching the ice hockey. In hindsight, this is hilarious, but in that moment, I shrunk into the comfort of a rich bowl of the pasta that I’d ordered, and a glass of red wine, and had what felt like a supercut of memories of home flashing in front of me. Writing in my diary about how wide the skies felt, when I had nothing else to focus on but the way the cold wind hit my face. Opened my phone when I walked out and called my dad just so somebody else had to listen to me cry.

swedish meatballs, espresso martinis - chicago, illinois

I booked my tickets back to Chicago for Christmas with a family that had so openly, so lovingly taken me in when I’d first entered the country in August far later than I meant to. My internship had been confirmed and I was staying in the US for another six months and walking through Chicago in the bitter cold of December felt far more poignant, more meaningful with the context of how deeply I’d come to love the city in the late summer heat of August.

While I was in Chicago I got involved in what in hindsight was a fairly insignificant, but at the time soul-destroying, battle with my soon-to-be employer and the global exchange department regarding the processing of my social security number. There was a period of maybe a week where I was absolutely convinced that I was going to have to go home, and my time in the US was done.

But I also experienced that particularly awful period in the comfort of a loving family home, the first I’d really existed in since I left my own, and to this day I’ll never be able to put into words how much that time period meant to me. That I was on my own, in a foreign hemisphere, missing my own family, and surrounded by the people that my mother lived with when she was sixteen, who showed me so much love and so much affection without any question to the matter. The long conversations I would have with Kristine in the morning, when we were both the only people awake, drinking iced oat lattes. When I told Kristine that I felt extremely lucky for the opportunity I’d received in my news writing internship, which was a life-changing thing I’d received, she looked me in my eyes and told me there was no luck involved at all - I was someone who worked hard, and my professors at Rutgers had recognised that. I always try to remind myself of that now when I express the gratitude that I feel at the writing opportunities I’ve had in the United States. Internships on both the East and West Coasts, studying under Joyce Carol Oates. There’s luck, and there’s hard work, and there’s a little bit of delusion, and sometimes they all come together.

The family dinners that we shared, and the laughter of sitting around a table with a home-cooked meal, buoyed me when I went back to New Jersey, the warmth of the love that I was privileged enough to experience in my Northern Hemisphere Christmas.

trader joe’s vanilla almond coconut creamer - new brunswick, new jersey

I deliberated for a long time whether to list this under San Francisco or New Brunswick. I decided on New Brunswick because of what it came to represent to me when I was in my college apartment, working my internship from our apartment kitchen table, and writing out by hand the edits my supervisor had made on my articles and drinking coffee that I brewed from grounds my mother had sent me from home as a special gift in the silver espresso pot I bought from Walmart.

But the origins of this are traced back to Kobbe Avenue, and Freya teaching me how to use her drip coffee machine. A dog pushing her wet nose into my leg in the early morning, and Freya and I taking turns to cook each other breakfast, as we always take turns taking care of each other. Let me buy you this coffee, let me overtip the barista, let me show you my city, and I want each of those things in turn with you too, because I love you. She showed me two bottles of creamer - one brown sugar, and one vanilla almond coconut - and got me hooked on the second almost instantaneously. I would wake up every morning and make myself an iced coffee from the machine, and sit in her beautiful sunroom, quietly journaling, reading Joan Didion, listening to Solange on broken headphones.

Months later, when I went back to New Jersey in January after my week in the Californian sunlight in San Diego, the gusts of wind on my face and the snow mounting on the pavement, bright white skies and hands red from frostbite, I was finding any way possible to romanticise the hardness of a winter I’d never experienced. I started drinking the creamer that Freya had hooked me on in the week I spent with her daily, because it reminded me of sunlight and California and my best friend. Now, I can’t taste it without my senses being flooded with the most bittersweet feeling of homesickness and love and care all wrapped into one.

smashed avocado toast - new york city, new york

The day before I left the East Coast, I fell asleep with the morning sun shining on my face in Gramercy Park, with the constative soothing of a girl talking me to sleep, and New York’s endless noise of the streets and the lights and the cars racing against each other pulsing through me. Woke up with a sore head, and an aching heart, and knew that I was counting in the taps of my own hand my last moments in a city that had changed me irrevocably.

When the girl next to me woke up, she almost wordlessly went through to her kitchen and started making us breakfast. Toasted sourdough she flipped by hand on the stove, avocado smash, and she passed me a plate and sat down next to me, our knees touching and the background hum of her friend’s conversations in the living room as we ate.

The sun was out, and my time on the East Coast was up, and I knew that there was a train that I needed to catch home and a plane to New Orleans that was calling my name - but in that moment, I had soft blue eyes studying mine as I ate, and my head had hit quiet. The physical sensation of sharing a meal with someone I’d just met, and the mental rumination that I had come to love New York the most only when I knew it was time to leave, and maybe you only truly can see and love a city for what it is in the bittersweet flood of hindsight.