Tag Archives: immigrant

“It Tastes/Smells like Home!”: Memory, Food Nostalgia & the Immigrant Experience

By Annima Bahukhandi
British-Iranian food writer, Yasmin Khan, opens her recipe book, “The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen” (2016), with a frank admission of her lifelong obsession with pomegranates. She fondly recalls the multi-sensory pleasure of eating pomegranates—from the visceral feel of the fruit’s leathery skin, to the crunch of the pomegranate pearls, to the deep red color that stains hands, tongue, fingers, and even clothes. For her, pomegranates transport her back to the warmth of Iranian culture and cooking, a stark contrast to the negative portrayal of Iran in the British culture she grew up in.

Ripe pomegranate. Image Credits: Pexels
Ripe pomegranate. Image Credits: Pexels

Cooking and consuming food is not only a subjective sensory experience but also a cultural and political assertion of diverse ways of living. In this piece, I explore food ingredients as powerful signifiers of gastro-nostalgia and as sites for the construction and reconstruction of immigrant, intergenerational cultural identities. The 21st century is witnessing more people moving away from their natal homes and regions than ever before. For many refugees and exiles, their migration is a question of survival, while others move away for better lifestyles or work aspirations. Despite untethering from their geographic homelands, individuals keep the psychological representation of home alive through cultural practices like food habits, language, and everyday lifestyle. Food, in particular, plays a crucial role in evoking cultural identity due to its multi-sensory impact, imbued with intrapsychic and interpersonal meanings. 

David E. Sutton, in his seminal work “Remembrance of Repasts” (2001), argues that food and memory are perfectly intertwined when exploring identity, as both encode powerful hidden meanings. Food evokes strong gustatory and olfactory memories, nourishing us both visceral and intra-psychically. For members of diaspora communities, even a single food item can evoke a deep connection to one’s homeland. For example, many Koreans go to great lengths to carry their mother’s homemade kimchi, regardless of its pungent smell. 

For many Indians traveling abroad, carrying homemade pickles and ghee (clarified butter) helps them stay rooted in their home culture. For Tibetan refugees exiled from their homeland for decades, eating tsampa (roasted barley flour) with salted butter tea maintains their connection with their homeland.

Tibetan butter tea served with tsampa cakes. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Tibetan butter tea served with tsampa cakes. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons

Social media is a powerful site where diaspora identity and cultural reproduction are consolidated through the popularization of food networks, food bloggers, and channels celebrating indigenous, local, and lesser-known cuisines. Indian food representation is a prime example, as Indians form one of the largest and most diverse diasporas globally. For decades, the global representation of Indian cuisine has been limited to a narrow Northern Indian scope, with dishes like butter chicken, naan, and dals synonymous with Indian food. Yet, for most Indians in the southern, eastern, and western parts of the country, these dishes are far from their everyday home meals.

Fresh kokum flower. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Fresh kokum flower. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Kokum drink which is sweet and tangy and usually served cold. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Kokum drink which is sweet and tangy and usually served cold. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

It is heartening to see a widening space where regional cuisines thrive online, emboldened by diaspora desiring the visual and gustatory appeal of their ancestral foods. Much like regional cookbooks, social media sites like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube have become powerful visual cookbooks preserving and spreading cultural cuisines while also creating communities of succor through gastro-nostalgia. 

For the Indian diaspora which has diverse food histories linked to their specific regional identities, social media has allowed for many under-represented dishes and ingredients to find a larger audience. Many home cooks and chefs in India and abroad now emphasize their regional identity and bring hyper-local ingredients to the fore—kokum (garcinia flower) in Konkani cuisine, sattu (roasted gram flour) in Bihari cuisine, bamboo shoots in Naga cuisine, and kulith (horsegram lentil) in Garhwali cuisine.  While many of these ingredients are often shared across multiple cuisines, yet it is their unique usage or over-presence in one’s own cuisine that strongly connects these ingredients to one’s geographic and psychological sense of rootedness.  

Kulith lentils. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Kulith lentils. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Sutton recounts the nostalgia for “patridha” (greek for homeland) that the fragrance of a basil plant evokes in many Greek immigrants living away from their homeland. He argues that objects can become more powerfully loaded with identity when experienced in new or different contexts, crossing boundaries of nation-states and cultures. In a similar view, in this piece I talk about ghee making as a gastro-nostalgic exercise for me, recalling subjective memories of my grandmother’s cooking as well as evoking larger cultural imagery of my under-represented Garhwali identity.  

Homemade Ghee. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Homemade Ghee. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

For many of us, uprooted or not yet fully rooted, familiar food ingredients operate like transitional objects, soothing our anxieties and giving us a sense of safety as we navigate unfamiliar experiences. Basking in the fragrance, touch, and taste of familiar ingredients often creates a sense of wholeness in an increasingly alienating world. Sometimes, the waft of basil, the taste of ghee, the crunch of pomegranates, and the spiciness of kimchi added to any dish are enough to maintain and creatively reconstitute one’s memories of one’s homeland and remind us that we are safe indeed. 

REFERENCES
Khan, Yasmin. The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen. Bloomsbury USA, 2016.

Sutton, David E. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Berg Publishers, 2001.

Annima Bahukhandi is a psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher with a profound interest in psycho-social research. She holds a Master’s degree in Psychology and an MPhil in Sociology. She has taught psychology at the University of Delhi and B. R. Ambedkar University, India. Her primary areas of interest include memory, migration, and psychoanalytic theory. She has published work on the silenced exile in Burma and the Tibetan refugee community in India. Currently, she practices as a psychologist, and in her free time, she enjoys exploring the cultural and historical roots of both popular and lesser-known cuisines. Writing about food and culture allows her to blend her passion for diverse cuisines with her academic pursuits, providing a rich, conceptual anchor for her gustatory explorations.

A Roti by Any Other Name Would Taste Like Home: Food Culture in the Punjabi-Mexican Communities of the Early 20th Century United States

By Haritha Govind

The South Asian diaspora has made its way throughout many parts of the world –bringing along cuisines, opening restaurants, and familiarizing the world with dishes like naan and lassi. These are immigrant stories that have a strong continuity even today. But what about Indian immigrant stories that were a snapshot in time, creating a unique culinary culture in a community that, unfortunately, did not sustain the same continuity? This post introduces the fleeting Punjabi-Mexican community of the early 20th century in California. It explores how a unique set of socio-political circumstances created an environment for two cultures that unknowingly shared similar food to forge a distinct culinary history.

How did these two communities meet in California? In the mid-19th century, farming families in the Punjab region of India started sending their sons abroad, including to the United States, to help supplement their family incomes. These men were accustomed to physical labor, and many found themselves being hired at mines and farms throughout California and other southwestern states. Meanwhile, many Mexican women from migrant laborer families found themselves working on Californian farms after being displaced by the Mexican Revolution. With the Immigration Act of 1917, Indians and other Asians were restricted from entering the United States, and those who were already in the country could not leave easily. This created a unique situation where Punjabi men found it comforting and legally advantageous to build family units by marrying Mexican women. Interracial marriages were illegal in California at the time, but both communities could circumvent this issue by identifying as “Brown.”

A Punjabi-Mexican American couple, Valentina Alarez and Rullia Singh, posing for their wedding photo in 1917.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
http://www.sikhnet.com/news/punjabi-sikh-mexican-american-community-fading-history

One might assume that, in these Punjabi-Mexican households, the dinner table was awash in fusion food. Afterall, there are many similarities between Punjabi and Mexican cuisine: the use of spices such as cumin and red chili, the practice of eating flatbread or rice with a broiled stew or curry, and the importance of flavor boosters like onion, garlic, lime, and cilantro. Punjabi men found the corn tortilla to be unfamiliar to their palate, but its resemblance to the roti, an Indian whole-wheat flatbread, was not lost on them. Although children in these families had a mixed cultural identity, and their names, such as Kishen Singh, often reflected their unique cultural disposition, food in the home did not see the same hybrid transformation. Mexican wives learned to expertly prepare Punjabi dishes and would feature them at the dinner table, but Mexican foods were never Indianized, or vice versa. The two culinary traditions remained separate and intact in their serving bowls: a dish of butter chicken could sit next to a plate of tamales at the dinner table, for example, but one would be hard-pressed to find a butter chicken tamale.

Cumin seeds
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cumin_Seeds.jpg

In this sense, the Punjabi-Mexican community disrupts the conventional expectation that diasporas naturally create hybridized or creolized cuisine in the home. Why might this be? Within these multiethnic families, the language spoken at home was usually a mix of Spanish and English, as the mothers would teach their children their native language. Punjabi fathers, by contrast, shared their culture, history, and religion but were more intent on their children easily integrating into Californian society, thus sparing them from the racial and cultural discrimination that came with being mixed race. It is in this childrearing phenomenon that the lack of culinary fusion begins to make socio-cultural sense: the mother’s influence on food and culture was dominant in the family. This line of argument is intertwined not only with the role of women in the early 20th century but also with the role of women of color: would creolization have occurred if both men and women immigrated from Punjab to California, or would this hybridized community never have emerged?

Hypothetical questions aside, there was one setting outside the home where fusion cuisine was indeed featured for a short period of time: Punjabi-Mexican-owned restaurants. The Rasul family’s restaurant “El Ranchero” opened in 1954 in Yuba City, frequently advertised in the Appeal Democrat newspaper for its roti quesadilla. This was the main fusion dish on the menu: it had melted cheese, onions, and shredded beef inside a paratha (whole wheat flatbread), and it came served with a chicken curry dipping sauce, as well as salad or rice and beans. The restaurant successfully served the Punjabi-Mexican community for four decades, providing a place where Punjabi men and their families could share a taste of home with each other. This suggests that fusion was more prominent as a business venture than as an element of everyday lifestyle.

More recently, Punjabi-Mexican fusion cuisine has become a popular phenomenon in modern food truck culture and among food content creators. Its impetus, however, does not come directly from the Punjabi-Mexican community that existed in the early 20th century but rather from increasing connectivity through travel and social media. The roti taco or quesadilla, which some Indian children are familiar with eating, is one such example of a culinary coincidence across time rather than a direct nod to the Rasul Family and their restaurant menu at El Ranchero. Despite this historical tension between hybridization and preservation, modern culinary fusion has fostered a new interest in exploring multiethnic cuisines of the past to investigate how food and community interacted.