Food is cultural and so personal.
Tonight was a very special night in my mind...
We cooked bacalhau cakes for our hostel family. Bacalhau is the Portuguese name for salted, preserved codfish. The Portuguese say that you can make a different bacalhau recipe for every day that there is in the year! Funnily enough, bacalhau is the fish used in many Portuguese dishes that's mostly imported from Norway.
In India, when feeling like we were “home” got to be near impossible, what with the assault on the senses and the frustrations of daily life, we'd eat the foods from home that we loved to feel a little more “home.” For me, that was sometimes represented through the jar of peanut butter that cost 11 dollars at the fancy expat supermarket. Sometimes, it was a pastry made from taro (a purple root vegetable) that I brought with me on the way back to India from the Taiwan airport. For Nuno, it was bacalhau that he missed.
So when he went to Portugal, bacalhau came back stashed away in the suitcase. Bacalhau com natas (with cream), bacalhau a bras (with fried potato straws), and bacalhau a Gomes de Sa (with boiled egg, potato, and onion), these were all recipes that we tried on days we craved for “home.” Our best experiment turned party favor were the bacalhau cakes, beautifully pressed together into the shape of what I'd like to think of as golden teardrops. Set on 3 layers of paper towels to cool, the cakes were hard to resist for even just a few minutes.
Biting into one, feeling the fish pull itself apart against the potato, seasoned with parsley, onion, eggs, and garlic, I really could feel the comfort of the dish. I liken the bacalhau cake to the family-style comfort food of the Chinese dumpling, so when the hostel staff in Hong Kong asked us to make something Portuguese, we knew we had to make our infamous bacalhau cakes.
From the former Portuguese territory of nearby Macao, the bacalhau made its short journey through customs to Hong Kong.
The starter was a soup made from shiitake mushrooms, tofu, napa cabbage, rice noodles, and leftover dried, fried tofu skin. Very Portuguese.
Nuno started to feel the pressure of playing host when we were mashing the ingredients together. The patties felt quite most, slippery in fact. “Relax,” I said, “They're going to turn out awesome. Just have fun and add love to the cakes,” I demonstrated and gestured, lightly and playfully patting the ingredients together.
Finally, after mashing and mixing, we experimented frying one cake at the recommended temperature of 160 degrees Celsius on the hostel's electronic stove. Each person had a try. Mmmm... Not bad, but we upped the temperature to imitate the same effect as what it would have been on a gas burner. Up to 270...
I gently encouraged people to start eating as the soup started to cool. No need to be polite.
I sat on the stool near the window, frying cakes, while watching everyone enjoy the company of others. Only 5 cakes could be in the pan at a time, lest the heat of the electronic stove wane, so the food came staggered, but not the conversation.
We were 3 French, 1 Portuguese, 1 ABC (American-born Chinese), 1 Macanese, and 6 fabulous Hong Kong ladies. I got tipsy off of one Sombersby and the boys were already primed for greatness from the Superbocks they had in Big Waves Beach just a few hours ago. With each batch of cakes, the joyful atmosphere and laughter grew and grew. I looked out the open windows of the hostel lounge and felt the breeze on my cheeks, the warmth of the frying oil at my side.
How many nights again could you have, could you recreate like this? Friends from around the world. A hostel family sharing in each others' cultures. Good company and love to spare around the room, nights like this don't come that often, and to top it all off, someone's birthday. For Nikki, came a birthday cake made from pistachio.
A sight I never thought I'd see, bacalhau cakes on chopsticks.
But that wasn't the best part of the night. The best part of the night was when Nuno's face popped up below me while I was typing away on the top bunk of the hostel bed
“Thank you.”
“For what?” I said.
“When we were making those cakes, you helped me to realize that I just need to relax with life and to enjoy, be in the moment. Like you said, make the cakes with love.”
I couldn't do anything other than look at him and smile.
“Although those cakes are Portuguese, these cake tonight were not mine, they were yours,” he said.
With love, for everything you live, love, and make in life,
-Liv
