Soul Food

I read the other day that my baby is practicing swallowing. He or she is sipping away on his or her amniotic fluid (yum) and, most interesting to me, while working out all those developing esophagus muscles he or she is also getting a tasty sampling of everything I am eating. That’s right. Baby is tasting everything I am tasting (albeit with a distinct hint of amniotic fluid flavor I suspect). This thought amused me the other day as I reflected on the assortment of culinary oddities I have been passing on.

One of the few items in our house that treads the fine line between luxury and necessity, thus earning it a place between layers of underwear in our 15-kilo bags on bush planes carrying us back from East Africa, is nam-pla, a fishy sauce from Thailand that pervaded the kitchen of my Bangkok-raised mother throughout my childhood. And now, even though I have spent no more than a week or so in Thailand in the course of my own life, at least once a week my own little kitchen in the middle of arid North Africa is filled with the balmy smells of limes, hot peppers, garlic, coconut milk and onions all delicately strung together with salty nam-pla rationed out greedily from a tall glass bottle. And when I sit down to a steaming bowl of neu-pat-prik tumbling over a mountain of white rice, I imagine my unborn child smacking his or her lips and daydreaming about the summers he or she will spend savoring curries at his maternal grandmother’s kitchen table.

But my mother-in-law has been here with us for the past couple of weeks and the smells emanating from my little kitchen have plucked me right out of tropical Asia and plopped me into the heart of the humid antebellum South. The mouth watering stench of turnip greens bubbles from a huge pot on my gas stove supported gently by the buttery warm scent of baking cornbread. Black-eyed peas are soaking in a pot on the floor nearbye. And when I sit down to a glass off ice-cold sweet tea and a bowl of salty wet boiled peanuts (“bolled” I’ve been informed, not “boi-led”) I imagine my baby savoring that taste of Georgia and daydreaming of the Easter Sundays he or she will spend at his paternal grandmother’s house stealing spoonfuls of purple-hull peas.

When I eat these foods I feel like I am doing more than just getting full. I feel like am ingesting memories and emotions and traditions. I am eating a heritage. And I wonder if my baby can taste those things too - the complex beauty of one, the warm comfort of the other. Bitefuls of the people who already love him or her so much.

Yesterday afternoon I felt the baby kick for the first time. Not just a suspicious swish or a vague bubble-burst like I have been. I felt an all-out kick, a tiny heel shoved into the palm of my hand resting just right of my belly button. And it made me smile. Which one was it, Baby? The green guava dipped in sugar and hot pepper or the leftover piece of pecan pie?