Immigrant Notes on Emigrant Impressions
On teeth, smoked fish, and coming home
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Recovering Line Cook.
If you’re new here, let me recap: my newsletter features a bit of a rotation of recipe essays, opinion pieces, and, the form I started this newsletter with, memoir.
This week it’s something of a memoir/non-fiction personal essay exploring food, memory and home in the context of my life as an immigrant.
The very early idea for this essay started from a fascinating comment on this piece from one of my paid supporters . Thank you for the inspiration.
And as ever, thank you for subscribing,
Wil
PS
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Immigrant Notes on Emigrant Impressions
“Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration.”
John Berger - And Our Faces My Heart Brief as Photos
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between
You wouldn’t think the 13-year-old who cried himself to sleep at military school, longing for his mother, would likely move to the other side of the continent one day. But, since that little boy was me, frequent readers of this newsletter will know he eventually did.
Whereas other junior cadets at Pangbourne College spent their free time bartering for packets of noodles, throwing boxes full of maybugs into each others’ rooms, and, most importantly, begging older boys to share their “special collection” of suspiciously unlabeled DVDs, I was likely found in the phone booth calling home.
It’s funny what 20 years can do to a mummy’s boy, I suppose.
But I’d always been that way. At pre-school, my teacher reserved a little extra motherly love for the ever so delicate and curly-haired William Reidie. Her name was Ziggy. Her hair was short and grey and immaculately combed into a style that would, I think, be called “pixie cut” nowadays. She would give me bites of her smoked mackerel lunch as we sat together during the afternoon lunch break. The long golden fillets, oozing grease onto her fingers as she took them from their tight plastic wrapping, were thickly coated in black pepper. The flecks big enough to crunch as I bit them, small enough to get stuck between my teeth. The pepper I often brushed off, but I loved how smooth and creamy the flesh was. So much better than that slimy, chewy smoked salmon my mother tried to get me to eat occasionally. Smoked mackerel tasted and felt the way I imagined butter would if my mother ever let me take an entire spoonful.
That was almost 35 years ago now.
There were more tears a few years later when my parents tried to get me and my sisters to stay with our Grandad for the night. He had made a stew for us, as he often did, in a beige and brown and orange casserole pot decorated with beige and brown and orange flowers that, thinking of it now, was as beige and brown and orange as everything else in his seventies-styled house.
My mother likes to tell me the stew wasn’t a one off and that he liked to cook. Maybe I get it from him, she once said. But what I remember of him most isn’t the cooking. Most of all I remember the mole on his forehead, the video of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men he had recorded for us and put in the VHS when we visited, and the way we’d play a game, me and him, that consisted of me squeezing in behind his back when he was sat on the sofa so he could trap me behind him.
He died 30 years ago this month 1000 miles from where I write this now. He lived most of his life near Heathrow Airport outside of London. And he lived there because that’s where he spent his life working. In fact, unless it’s an elaborate family lie covering up how he spent the War hiding up a tree in Windsor Great Park or something, he worked fixing planes near there from ‘39 to ’45.
He was a good man. An honest one, too.
Though I do remember that honesty had limits.
Just plain cooked mackerel, by comparison, has never failed to disappoint me. Simultaneously dry yet excessively watery, missing the unctuous deliverance of fat that its smoked alternative offers. Even worse is something I was subjected to during culinary school, a thing called “tea-smoked” mackerel. For this recipe we students were tasked with lining a large saucepan with foil, on which we placed uncooked rice mixed with the innards of a few PG Tips tea bags. On top of this went a colander that suspended a few mackerel fillets. We lit the tea with a crème brulée torch, turned on the stove to low, and covered the entire enterprise with a lid of tightly-wrapped foil. The result was nothing like Ziggy’s rich and fatty smoked fish. Rather, it tasted as though someone had tried to cook a fish over a lit cigarette in a South London petrol station.
I say my Grandad’s honesty had limits because of something that happened when he was babysitting my sisters and me one night.
I’d always had trouble sleeping when my parents were out for the night and I wanted to ask him when they would be home. I could hear the television as I walked down the stairs. The sound of Big Ben told me the news was about to begin. This being how the news was introduced back in the nineties on British television. I suppose it might still be the way the news is introduced. I quietly poked my head around the door to the room where he sat and my eyes immediately went to the inexplicable, fleshy pile of matter that sat beside him on the arm of the sofa. The only way my young mind could make sense of what I was looking at was to think of that fleshy pile as an entire set of someone else’s teeth. Then he caught sight of me, grasped the disembodied, toothy grin in his hands, and somehow made them disintegrate into his own face.
“Are you able to… take your teeth out, Grandad?” I said.
“What do you think?” he said, getting up and moving toward me. “Can you take yours out?”
I brought my fingers to my mouth and gave my front teeth a pull. He had already started ushering me back to the stairs.
“No,” I said.
“Well, there you go.”
I do love the Great British petrol station though. I mean, where else can you get a good pie, sack of charcoal, Dutch tulips, and anti-freeze?
Petrol stations, convenience stores, even the most basic places I can browse and buy food, I can get lost in for ages. My wife can’t make sense of this. She will always be confused whenever I pop into a store for milk and come out a full 15 minutes later with Hungarian hot pepper paste and frozen dumpling wrappers. It’s just how much I love shopping for food. I don’t care about gadgets or shoes or shirts, but things to eat? Well, goodness, that is where I find some genuine retail therapy.
I suppose, now I live so far from the supermarket aisles I grew up walking down, this is more true than ever. Where once I would expect to see Marmite, Porkinson Bangers, Tunnock’s Wafers, Dairy Milk, and scotch eggs, now I would question the absence of Karelian pies, lihapiirakka (a kind of meat donut if you can imagine it), Fazer Blue chocolate, and the infinitely delicious hot smoked salmon. So much like the mackerel I would eat with Ziggy as a boy, but the salmon’s thick, fatty flakes of flesh even richer and creamier.
Marmite, however, now exists only as a specialty item. If at all, only found at an excessive price on the imported foods shelf next to other out of place novelty items like Hershey’s chocolate, boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese, and Super Mario-branded packets of chewy candy.
I was introduced to hot smoked salmon when visiting Finland for the first time. It was 2013 and I was going to see a girl I barely knew called Silja who I’d met in a filthy London pub the previous Good Friday.
The four of us, Silja, her mother, father and I, sat around the table, only interrupting the silence to politely ask one another to pass the salad, potatoes, or that beautiful, almost treacle-coloured, salmon that bled blushing orange oil across the angel-white serving plate.
The silence terrified me. Why wasn’t anyone talking? Could they have had an argument that I’d stumbled into the middle of? Everyone seemed miserable. No one had even complimented the food. Not once. My mother would be severely disappointed if no one had complimented her food by now. Maybe they’d been expecting someone taller? Better looking? The mother did her part, helping to maintain the occasional item of chat. Sometimes even laughing at a self-deprecating joke I had excavated from somewhere. Meanwhile, the father remained silent. I was potentially getting somewhere with the mother. Silja still seemed keen. But Daddy was clearly not a fan.
It would take many more visits before I slowly started to understand that this behaviour that so disturbed me, a lack of small talk, of compliments and extraneous pleasantries, was just them being typically Finnish.
Almost a decade on from that first visit to Finland and a city called Pori, I will be living there myself with Silja and our 2 children. My mother will call us on Skype and attempt to speak a few words of Finnish herself. Having done so, she will ask me whether she got it right. I will correct the one or two mistakes she made, and she will respond with a disappointed little harrumph.
“Not very supportive, are you?” she will say. “I suppose you’re becoming all Finnish, now, aren’t you.”
I’m lucky to still have both my parents around that they can be a part of my children’s lives. I say “around”, though I’m quite sure that’s not how my dear mother would describe my abandonment of her. But my parents visit often, and my two little ones are always so excited when Nanna and Grandpa are in town.
I suppose any regret for family members who never were able to know and love my kids is reserved for my Grandad. And he would have so loved them. My son, Sam, even spontaneously started playing that silly crawling behind my back on the sofa game a few years ago.
What I like to think, when considering this, is that love is not something we are born with. It is not an identical verb or doing thing we all do the same. Rather, I like to think the way we love is shaped by the love shown to us. And, this being so, my love is a patchwork of my father’s love, my mother’s, my sisters’, and, yes, even my Grandad’s.
Like the mole I have on my forehead, that love has been passed on through generations. A gene for loving. I like to think this because, in some way, through the love I show my little ones, a portion of my Grandad’s love finds its way to them as well.
That’s how I like to think.
For the vast majority of my life the only chocolate I had any interest in was Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Specifically, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Whole Nut which, in addition to the excessively sweet and creamy milk chocolate, had big pieces of hazelnut in it. If food can be a type of language, with different ingredients and products meaning specific things to us, then Dairy Milk Whole Nut meant deliciousness. It meant perfection and comfort and everything good about the world. And when I moved to Finland, and had to make do with an alternative, the local favourite called Fazer Blue, it never quite meant the same thing to me. Fazer Blue was too angular in flavour. Too chocolatey, frankly, not enough round creaminess.
Fazer was good, but it just wasn’t Whole Nut good.
Not all those who leave are lucky enough to go back. I’m lucky that I can. And it was on a recent visit that, for what must have been the first time in years and many hundreds of bites of Fazer Blue, I bought a large bar of the real deal. Some Cadbury’s Whole Nut. To hold that shiny, metallic purple wrapper was to see in my hands the definition of deliciousness and home. And then it crossed my lips. The flabby creaminess, the stubbornly subtle cocoa flavour compared to the more aromatic Fazer Blue, a graininess I hadn’t appreciated before. It was good, it just didn’t mean what I used to think it meant. The memory had overtaken the thing itself. Like finding out the smoked mackerel you were being served was, in fact, smoked over a couple of cheap tea bags. Like watching your mummy’s boy leave for Finland.
But there it is, either you leave, or you never return.
Thanks for spending some time with me here today. If you enjoy my essays, be they my recipes, opinion pieces or occasional memoir work, please consider being a paid subscriber to receive all my writing and support my work as an independent writer.
Oh Wil as always your words are good, but this time wow. You are so right with the way we experience love or lack of it and how we then share and show our love. You’ve given me ideas for a substack piece of my own sometime. Thank you as ever.
The odors and tastes are always sharp and dear in memory.