By Janaea Eads
If you are what you eat, I am dhal and rice and fried chicken with gravy. Adopted by the daughter of Punjabi immigrant parents and the born-and-raised-in-Kansas son of a World War II veteran, I developed a complex American identity with a love of Indian food and dancing to Bollywood songs, along with mucking out horse stalls and driving a pick-up truck. Because of the many transitions in my life, my memories of life preadoption are hazy. At three years old, I was abandoned at a train station in Pune, India, and brought to a nearby orphanage where I lived for two years. After meeting my adoptive parents in 1999, I moved from a flat in India to Maryland after an arduous five-month journey to complete the adoption process. Since moving to Maryland, I’ve gone to college on Long Island, moved to Kansas, taught high schoolers on a Pacific island, moved to Massachusetts, got married, and bought a house in Massachusetts, where I now live with my husband and dog. Every step of the way, I needed to reinvent myself, building on an unknown foundation.
Although many people go through transitions, I found myself constantly renegotiating my identity as a transnational adoptee. Instead of belonging to all the places I have inhabited, I belonged to none of them. I found clarity reading ethnographer Sarah Pink’s theory of seeing physical places as unbounded, rather than fixed. Places from our past are fluid. Like a river, once you step into it, it changes and it changes you. It becomes a part of you. Before reading Pink’s theory, I had not recognized how accessible my past is, especially through food. Through the power of Maryland blue crabs (with Old Bay!), Kansas chicken fried chicken, Long Island bagels with cream cheese and lox, and Massachusetts bar pizza, I remain connected to all the places I have lived and can access my memories of where and who I have been.
While the orphanage in Pune, India, is harder to access due to the time and distance in between, one recipe anchors me to it: Sabudana Kichidi, a savory dish of tapioca pearls, a staple in Maharashtrian cuisine. At the orphanage, I called it “Chocolatey Kichidi” because of its brown color caused by crushed peanuts and spices. I loved Chocolatey Kichidi so much it became synonymous with my name; the two times I visited the orphanage while growing up, the cook would make the dish for me, feeding it to me as she did when I lived there.
To reconnect with my orphanage and my adoptee identity, I recreated Chocolatey Kichidi. To do this, I drew from Jennifer Brady’s ethnographical “Cooking as Inquiry” methodology, which centers food and the body as sites of knowledge that help in exploring identity. From the woman who makes masala peas to remember her mother, a father who is young-at-heart when he barbeques, to the elaborate, ritualistic dessert that one friend loves to make, food and the body while cooking can transport us to a place where we can sense who we are and how we got here. However, Brady’s methodology goes beyond just cooking, so I also talked to my parents about their memories of the orphanage and revisited a photo album the caretakers put together for me. The album has pictures of me with friends as well as notes from the caretakers themselves, wishing me a happy life with my new family. I also went through miscellaneous items my mom collected over the years: letters to camp, a favorite t-shirt, and so much more. Through the gathering of ingredients and memories, I entered the mindset I had as a child, filled with wonder, curiosity, and the fear of inevitable change. Chocolatey Kichidi became a portal that transported me to a place where I could connect my past senses, my evolving identity, and my current wisdom to embrace who I am today.
Chocolatey Kichidi is a simple recipe but requires some preparation in advance. The necessary ingredients are tapioca pearls, potatoes, peanuts, ginger, green chilis, cumin, curry leaves, and garam masala. The night before cooking the kichidi, I soaked the tapioca pearls until they doubled in size and peeled and parboiled my potatoes. I also toasted and ground the peanuts, leaving some chunky for texture. When the peanuts are added to the tapioca, they coat each pearl and turn them “chocolatey.” The next day, in a skillet, I added cumin seeds, minced ginger, green chilies, and curry leaves. Once all the spices were aromatic, I added the parboiled potatoes and fried them, followed by the peanuts and garam masala. I toasted everything together and added the tapioca to cook until the pearls became translucent.
My recreation of Chocolatey Kichidi was delicious; however, the process of cooking was the most enlightening. I imagined the cook crushing peanuts and washing the tapioca pearls like I did, mincing the green chili and ginger while I used my microplane grater. She must have heard the sizzle of the cumin and ginger. And had she also coughed as the green chilis sputtered in the pan? Repeating these actions brought me back to the kitchen of the orphanage. Through mimicking the actions the cook might have taken, I stepped into her body, seeing the dish and myself from her perspective. She put so much effort into feeding us every single day; it truly was a labor of love. It is heartbreaking I do not remember her name. While my intention with recreating Chocolatey Kichidi was to revisit a time and place from my past, I did not anticipate revisiting the people I once knew. With the love and support of the cook and caretakers at the orphanage, I found my adoptive parents. Through them, and Chocolatey Kichidi, I found myself. We are not only what we eat. We are also the places we have been to and the people we meet along the way.
Works Cited
Brady, Jennifer. 2011. “Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir up Prevailing Ways of Knowing
Food, Body, and Identity.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 10 (4): 321–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691101000402.
Pink, Sarah. 2015. “Principles for Sensory Ethnography : Perception, Place, Knowing, Memory
and Imagination.” Doing Sensory Ethnography, 25–50. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473917057.n2.
Janaea Eads is a master’s candidate in Boston University’s Gastronomy program. Her research interests include the intersections between adoption, food, and identity. She is also represented by Starling Literary + Media Agency and is currently working on young adult books that center adoptee narratives. When she isn’t writing, cooking, or thinking about food, she is being outsmarted by her pit-mix rescue.