I never loved meat. Since becoming a vegetarian, I never missed it. Smoky grills never appealed to me nor did chicken breast atop an otherwise filling salad. Meat was superfluous, I thought, munching on chickpeas. But over these past two years, I found that I would occasionally long for some things: the tastes that went along with the meat my mother and grandmothers made. The simple onion and basil that accompanied ground meat in ćevapčići was easily reclaimed in the sautéed mushrooms my Stanford dining hall served, but some entire meals became lost to me. More complex flavors, that relied on the interaction of many different—often hours-long—cooked parts, I no longer had access to in my meat-heavy house or restaurants which would never make the switch to serving a vegetarian clientele (the nearest restaurant that serves Yugoslavian cuisine has one non-meat option—dessert). Chicken broth, parsnips, carrots, tomato paste, bell peppers, fresh tomatoes, rice, onions, meat, and basil amidst a myriad of idiosyncratic spices wouldn't come together spontaneously for me.
At first, caught in the frenzy of learning new vegetarian dishes like black bean patties or crispy tofu, the loss of these national dishes wasn't all-consuming. Yet phone calls home as my mom prepared meat pies made my mouth water. So I resolved to updates these recipes past, substituting mushrooms, assorted vegetables, and lentils in for the ubiquitous ground meat common to nearly all of my favorite recipes. In doing so, I got to eat my favorite meals which is nothing groundbreaking or significant outside of my stomach's satisfaction. But there is also a sense in which I am updating something cultural, realigning Serbian food with my diet and lifestyle. And importantly, the meals I'm making are also gluten-free, in order to also accommodate the man I live with, which in no small way is a significant part of my realignment and negotiation with Serbian culture.
In many ways, I'm the clear, second generational legacy of my cultural background, able to stumble through Serbian sentences and acclimated to a palate that is heavy with crisp summery flavors, feta, and spiced meat. My first and last name emblazon this identity on my official documents and atop this webpage. And my earliest memories involve my grandmothers visiting me and reading Aesop's fables illustrated with cartoon lions and recorded in a Cyrillic script I hardly know. I'm firmly American in countless ways, but these elements of Serbian childhood are essential parts of my identity, which is why I sought to reclaim my Serbian food heritage.
As I cook, I'm reminded of these connections. And then I also remember ways that I'm precluded from participating fully in this culture: I'm not fluent in the language, Cyrillic (the script used alongside the Latin alphabet) is hard for me to read, and, most challenging to distant relatives and strangers, I'm queer. And vegetarian. The two are obviously not necessarily related or even remotely equally important, but I find myself thinking through the ways both stage difficult encounters with being "authentically" Serbian to many Serbians.
Cooking is often described nostalgically. Friends have told me about interviews they have recorded with grandparents, aunts, and uncles in order to remember the recipes as they made them. But this historic connection is lost to me. My recipe-descended lineage ends with my mother who pulls out old books when I call home. I hardly speak with my grandmothers and that's partially a consequence of language (they understand none of the English words I drop into my version of Serbian), but more than that, it's a consequence of queerness. What updates would I give her? There are so many unspoken truths between us, that calling to ask about a stew feels silly when my hidden boyfriend is in the room. My parents are wonderfully accepting and I'd anticipate my grandmothers would understand, but that outing for so long felt impossible.
So instead, the food itself is fostering the connection I feel has slipped away from me. It's strange to honor the memory of a living person, but food has become that. Like a communion in the kitchen, the raw ingredients of my culture's cuisine seems to summon the past. The tastes a Serbian-infused bite leaves in my mouth reminds me of the card games I played with my grandmother as I ate her gibanica. I remember the smell of flour on the table cloth when I cook bread in my own oven now. Recipes are a prescription for iterative events—they recur and stage ephemeral experiences, and I use each recipe as a chance to foster an environment to contemplate and build my new life. I bond with my boyfriend as we discuss our days each evening with the bubbling of stuffed peppers on the stove, I listen to a podcast and think about the world in 2017 while I finely chop parsley, and I remember a lot of disparate things I can't quite place as fiction or fact. But I like to also think, during the rhythmic almost ritualistic chopping, that my loved ones may be doing the same an ocean away, making breakfast with the same spices I'm using for dinner.
(Update: the weekend after I posted this, my father spoke to one grandmother about my boyfriend and she was accepting and happy and I hope to call her for another soup and its myriad of stories someday.)