Making food is carrying home with us
A few weeks before we left Madrid, ARTE.tv came to our home to film my children and I making albóndigas.
At the time, the idea was to document a recipe.
But they ended documenting something more.
Our goodbye. To the apartment where we had shared hundreds of meals, to our neighbourhood, our local market. To a city that had become our home for nearly two decades.
I wasn’t aware of it then, but I chose to mark that moment the same way I have marked so many others: by cooking.
The American writer Michael Pollan writes in his book Cooked:
“Is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?”
The older I get, the more I understand what he meant.
When we cook with children, we're teaching patience.
We're teaching them that meals don't simply appear on a table. They're thought-out, prepared, shared.
We're creating memories that, years later, become part of what they think of as "home".
That's why I chose to make albóndigas (even though they won't win any beauty contest).
The word comes from the Arabic al-bunduqa, meaning "the little ball." The dish travelled across the Mediterranean during centuries of Arab influence in Spain before crossing the Atlantic, where it became part of Mexico's own culinary identity.
Albóndigas migrated. Just like many of us have.
Homes change. Cities change. Languages change. But the recipes we teach our children have an extraordinary way of travelling with them.
Making food is a way of carrying home with us, wherever life might take us.