FOOD | WRITING

Comfort Food: An Immigrant’s Take

And how it is intrinsically linked to the concept of home

Persepolis in Peckham, south London. One of my “homes”. Left to right: Khoresht or hot pot served with rice, salad and yoghurt, glass of mango smoothie with tamarind and ginger, and Persepolitan Moussaka served with Greek salad and the best feta cheese my partner and I have ever had. (photos by author)

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. (Maya Angelou)”

Ever since I came across that Maya Angelou quote in the fifth instalment of her autobiography, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, I’ve felt a great debt of gratitude to the late African-American poet for voicing my thoughts in such an eloquent and clear way. And that was before I became an immigrant.

My book, Cuban, Immigrant, and Londoner, detailed how life, culture, and the English language shaped my positive-thinking, albeit non-blinkered, attitude towards my host nation. Missing from this account, however, was food. There was very little mention of a subject on which I’ve written extensively.

Food plays an important role in an immigrant’s process of settling in a new country. There’s the recipes we leave behind and which we actively seek out when we first arrive in the new land. In my case, I still remember Cuban-themed lunches on my days off when I used to work at the travel agency and my children were little.

These midday light refreshments took the form of rice, egg (either fried or scrambled), ketchup, salad…