Burma Charlotte

When I was a kid, we did take those Sunday drives during which I often saw those Burma Shave signs. Of course I loved them, reading them aloud with great enthusiasm and anticipation for the concluding rhyme, then getting to sing out "Burma Shave!" But I never understood why the product was called Burma Shave. What did Burma have to do with it?

Decades later, as I pursued my love of adventure and exploration, particularly through food and cooking, I again discovered Burma. In my first Burmese restaurant experience, I tasted a fried rice with chopped bits of dried exotic (papaya and coconut) and ordinary (currants) fruits and a back bite of heat, probably from Tabasco Sauce. Wow! Then came the green papaya and green tea salads with the crunchy lentils, dried shrimp, and crisp fried garlic slices. Those had a back bite of vinegar--a favorite! And fish ball soup and garlic oil noodles. I still remember less of the entrees than the side dishes, the ordinary fare that accompanied any Burmese meal. Those dishes that "held" the main dishes in place were amazing and intriguing. Unique and enduring.

Shortly after several visits to Burmese restaurants around the Bay Area, I reached the point when I had to learn more. So off I went in search of Burmese cookbooks, old and new, with and without pictures, family produced or big publishing house extravaganzas. Instead of curling up with a good book, I would curl over a variety of books opened out on the dining room table, reading page after page of recipes and stories of Burma. And the stories or filler were the most amazing part of the experience.

Do you know the various countries that border Burma? The big three are Thailand, China, and India, each with magnificent cuisines of their own, original to their own historic events and tempered by the invasions or attempted invasions of their many rivals. Yet Burma has an innate, original and vital cuisine all its own. Yes, bits of influence have infiltrated, mostly because ingredients exist as "natives" of all four countries. But still Burma's vibrant cuisine is sustained and unique because of its strength of character. Just as the big three can invade another culture for the same reason--strength of character--these cultures could not dominate or really influence the destiny of indigenous, centuries-old Burmese cooking. Impressive and totally understandable to anyone familiar with all four cuisines.

And therein lies the reason for this first post.

I grew up in a family where the food of my immigrant parents was central to our household "culture." My mother was a trained cook--not chef--from different European traditions, historical moments, and cultural experiences. She was born to a large Ashkenazi Jewish family from Russia living in a Polish shtetl outside Lublin who was abandoned as child to a Catholic convent hospital in the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, between the great wars. Then as she survived the illness that had previously been thought to be her demise, she was taught to cook the "peasant" or middle-class cuisines of Austria and Vienna, as well as to rekindle the recipes of her shtetl life. Finally she was brought into the home of a large and rich German family in Hamburg, Germany, where she cooked and cared for the children. There she was expected to add the family favorites of not only a German Jewish family, my father's family, but one whose own heritage included generations pre-Inquisition in Spain. Her cooking skills and art were legendary throughout my childhood, where she added new recipes of a growing "American" sensibility toward food and dishes. Of course her cooking would be the centerpiece of such a family and of my childhood experiences.

But I also grew up in the East Bay of California, that eastern area across the bay from San Francisco. And San Francisco, an enormous treat and special city when I was small, was only a Greyhound ride away, maybe forty minutes with a stopover in the Oakland terminal. So I was also exposed to all the immigrant populations of this thriving Bay Area from the Chinese and Japanese, to the Italians, the Russians, the Greeks, and of course the Black communities as well as Mexican Americans and Filipino Americans in my own hometown. Everywhere I turned there came the fragrances of different foods cooking, different peoples asserting their cultural heritage. I in effect was Burma, surrounded on my borders by a vast array of extraordinary and vibrant cultures and cooking traditions.

I'm grateful for my heritage with food. My experiences and relationships with people often grow and develop around a table and a meal. But it's not just the ingesting of nutrients--I think of that saying "Eat to Live, Rather Than Live to Eat" and realize that those who say it don't mean what I mean. I live by the food I eat because it's so often the catalyst or answer to who are we, why are we this way, what will become of us, and how are we doing. All that is "Eating to Live" to me.

So, yes, I see myself as Burma Charlotte.