Evoking Memories that Feed and Sustain Ancestry

It has been eleven years since my mother died in 2014 and it still feels as recent as the day she left. On her birthday and on the anniversary of her death, I ritually cook some of her favourite dishes.

In Chinese culture, food embodies love, medicine, and healing; it’s a joyous occasion to share the blessings of belonging to something that, for many Asian cultures, adorned our hunger and our senses. My mother especially loved ox tail stew, a practice that also had our people making variations of the same dish during the winter to help furnish the fatigue of cold with instinctual warm instruction.

The traditional Chinese five-spice blend is a caravan of star anise, cloves, cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, and fennel which embellishes the recipe's elements. Each spice parades in the alchemical, while elegant allure of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent flavours - at best - a suitably apt metaphor for the rich consternations and blessings given to my mother by this wondrous world.

In traditional Chinese medicine the five spice blend is also based on the five element principles assigned to benefit and balance an internal organ with its specific flavours: Sour to the liver which govern the tendons, pungent to the lungs which govern the qi, bitter to the heart which govern the blood, salt to the kidneys which govern the bones, sweet to the spleen which govern the flesh. Who knew that one tantalizing complex dish could confer so much benefit in its gift?

My mother also loved a hearty, brazen bone broth, and she passed it down to me. In Asian culture, bone broth is liquid gold royalty. Its praises make other dishes at the table complimentary, balancing the umami love bomb explosion of intensive liquid protein that could soothe and comfort the troubles of a drug lord on the run. Broth is - a fundament - a way of life that’s steeped in the DNA of our ancestry, a unifying messenger of love, high fiving you from the dark night of the soul and swimming merrily in that celestial soup is all the ingredients made from the vast ancient ground we walk upon.

If ever there was a crest, a coat of arms for bone broth that heralds its promise and savoring ways, something that delivers you from the slashings of life, why would you say no? Asian bone broth is a definitive art and if I could, I would travel the world in search of its exquisite allure like the holy grail.

To set things straight, a good bone broth for the generations is an elixir that sets giants apart on their way to greatness, an ambrosia for a queen ready to risk everything. Residing at a Buddhist forest monastery in the late 1980s I remember a rich, plant-based broth that restored our wanton senses, a brew of nectar made by the unsettled, stirring gods that wanted nothing less. Its making of sorts is the making of love, an alchemical attraction partying in the viscera long after its been eaten. There’s no second guessing what I would take with me if cast alone on a deserted island.

When I make these dishes on my mother’s anniversaries I am once more hosting her presence, setting a place for her at the table as she takes her seat at the throne to which she murmurs an appetite of delight and remembrance - her wishful, whispering personage is all but mine if only for a while - her deftly spirit, an aspired glow of tenderness.

I sense she knows the door is always open by invitation and that she will always be - my heart, my beloved adoration, my greatest admiration, my remembering of her, my ebullient gratitude - an eternal goddess that comes and goes.

In celebration of your own beloved people who have died, what are their favourite dishes?

What recipes tether you once more to their presence, their beauty, their memory?

When could you prepare their favourite dishes, which might help you remember them?

Who could you invite to share in the making and eating of the meal together? What songs, music, poetry or prayers might accompany the event? What particular dishware, China, table cloths might be used on these occasions? How might the table setting be arranged? In the end it is the intentional coming together that feeds and sustains those who have left us. And for those who partake in the gathering of observance and memory.

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