Bint Rhoda's Kitchen: Everybody Cooks Rice

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Everybody Cooks Rice

Not long ago, I shared an article on Indian food with my Facebook friends. What ensued was a lively discussion about Indian and Middle Eastern food - which spices are used, why they are so delicious. There may have been just a teensy little bit of good-natured rivalry between me and a dear college friend, who hails from India. In the end, there was only one way to end the discussion: take it to the table. So, a few weeks ago, we gathered up our families, and converged on one home to enjoy a potluck luncheon of food from all of our cultures.

As I ran out the door to the luncheon, balancing platters of food, I grabbed a children's book that I had picked up at the last library book sale a few weeks earlier.

Everybody Cooks Rice, said the book.

Yes, I had thought. Of course, they do.

It was the perfect book to bring to such a luncheon, for child and adult alike to peruse.

Everybody Cooks Rice is a gentle story about a little girl who lives in a very diverse urban neighborhood. Her mother asks her to run outside and find her brother; dinner is ready. So, off this little girl runs to find her brother, and in doing so, pops her head into many of her neighbors' homes. In each home, someone is cooking a pot of rice - from Creole-style Haitian rice to fancy Indian biryani. As the girl flits from home to home, we, the reader, get to peek into each pot, each family and each culture. The book ends with recipes for all of the rice dishes described.

It was a simple story, but a sweet one. To my surprise, my friends were already familiar with the theme of the book, for they had a copy of a similar book, Everybody Bakes Bread. Still, as we lunched on kofta and coconut rice, mnezzali and allspice and cinnamon rice, and laughed and proclaimed that these dishes were absolutely delicious, I chewed on the words: everybody cooks rice.

I thought about our own little multicultural gathering, and my own multicultural street, and all of the pots of rice served in each house.

I thought about the way rice sustains entire populations around the globe.

I thought about how my mother taught me how to make rice. How to do it, just so: soak, rinse, spice, simmer.

Are we the same? Are we different? Can we ever really be both? When we hold a bowl of rice, are we holding the universal or the specific? Or are universality and specificity are not two ends of the spectrum, but two entangled wrestlers, bound together in an eternal match, with limbs so wrapped together that at moments the death match becomes a dance?

In the land of immigrant food, where we stir pots of rice that belong to another world, where it matters that Arabs Make Rice This Way and that This Rice Belongs To Us, it is good to sometimes stop, take a deep breath and feel the delicate, silky strands that connect us, to stare hard at the lines that we draw on this globe, thick and permanent-like and ask: why not just make rice?

So, we did.

And it was good.