In my dreams I travel. I’m in an indeterminate airport, trying to catch a flight. I’m in Vegas with friends, discussing where we should eat. I’m in Paris or Tokyo. I’m on the subway so often I feel like I owe dream taxes to New York. It has been a long time since I went anywhere, but I’m going everywhere in my sleep.
It seems my unconscious mind is in line, for once, with my conscious one. I crave a change of scenery the way I might usually crave Thai food or ice cream. This time of year, we’d sometimes convene with my parents and my sister’s family in Florida; instead I’m streaming a relaxation video called “Calming Seas” at my desk. “Send warmth porn,” I beg via text to friends who are spending the month in Mexico. The images roll in: Dinner by the water, sun setting in the background. Oysters and beer on the beach. Ceviche and beer on the beach. A display of tostadas beneath bright signage. More water. Ahem. Is it getting a little steamy in here? (No. Sorry, it’s not.)
I would never list travel as a hobby. I have mixed feelings about the ways money and culture can intersect when I land somewhere as an American tourist. But I love exploring. I love meeting people and hearing their stories. I love feeling what it’s like to exist somewhere else. And I’ve been lucky to lead a life rich in venue changes, by circumstance and design. With the arrival of COVID, that, along with so much else, changed. Maybe someday soon I’ll be excited to head out again, feeling the freedom of the open road rather than wondering what restrictions and challenges it will present. But I’m not there yet. And the freedom is the thing, really.
That and the food.
Gourmet magazine used to have a column called “You Asked For It.” Readers would write in to request recipes — that soup from a favorite restaurant, those scones enjoyed at a charming B&B — and the magazine would track them down. It was a delight, living vicariously through others’ experiences, pondering what recipes one might request from one’s own. These past few months, I feel like I’ve turned into my own “You Asked For It” column. What better way to relive past travels, and fantasize about future ones, than to create the tastes we remember and hope to experience one day?
It started with seed cake. Years ago, my husband and I traveled to the United Kingdom to visit one of my stepdaughters, who was studying there at the time. Just as we were getting ready to come home, the volcano erupted. Eyjafjallajökull! We were stuck in London. Worse things have happened. We drank leisurely coffees and debated whether the gent at the nearby table was or was not a Fine Young Cannibal. We grazed our way through Borough Market. Wandering through Spitalfields one day, in need of a snack, we ducked into St. John Bread and Wine for elevenses: a fat slice of buttery, eggy, caraway-studded seed cake and a glass of madeira.
That seed cake popped into my head recently, out of the blue. I had forgotten all about it until suddenly there it was, just when I needed it. It was time for elevenses somewhere. I checked out chef Fergus Henderson’s “Beyond Nose to Tail” cookbook from the library, delivered it to my Kindle, and got baking. (The recipe is also online.) I didn’t have caster sugar so I used granulated, an easy swap. I approximated some version of self-rising flour, adding baking powder and salt to all-purpose flour. Were the proportions right? Who knew.
When the toothpick was clean, I pulled her from the oven: a gorgeous, towering, golden loaf. The kitchen smelled wonderful. I waited a bit, then cut myself a fat slice. And the loaf collapsed, somehow still runny at the middle. It was the worst baking disaster I’ve had since … ever. I called it molten seed cake and ate it anyway. The edges, at least, were as I remembered them. Anyway, it seemed right, like memory itself, clear and perfect in spots, muddied and eclipsed in others. You can’t go back again, not exactly.
After that, I was cooking. At the start of the pandemic, I was scheduled to meet a friend who lives in Sicily in the convenient middle ground of Mexico City. (It made sense at the time.) I had never been and had been wanting to; she had lived there and knew the city well. We had previously spent a few days in the Mexican wine region of Valle de Guadalupe with another friend, and the time was deeply memorable, despite the local bottles and the mezcal. I can almost see us, driving back up the coast on our last day together, sharing one last taco after one last dip of our feet in the waves. I asked the woman who owned the stand if I could buy a dozen of her fresh-made tortillas: “I want to take them back to Boston,” I explained. She grinned, refused my money, and handed me a warm, fragrant stack.
I still haven’t been to Mexico City. But I have been dreaming of the food there and beyond, via Pati Jinich’s excellent “Treasures of the Mexican Table,” one of my favorite cookbooks from last year. The host of PBS’s “Pati’s Mexican Table” traverses the country, finding and replicating its best regional recipes. When I cracked the book and it opened right to the page for vuelve a la vida, a seafood cocktail served along the Gulf and Pacific coasts, it seemed meant to be. The dish is called “come back to life” for its hangover-curing powers, but I knew it would work for New England winter blues, too. It’s a zesty combination of fish and shrimp with lime, chiles, tomato, cilantro, olives, capers, and more, spicy and restorative. I ate it with saltines and sliced avocados, and I could almost feel the warm waves lapping at my toes.
I made them all: Onigiri filled with shiso and plum, my favorite breakfast when I lived in Japan teaching English, grabbed in haste from the convenience store Lawson as I rode my red granny bike to one of the local middle schools. An egg dosa, studded with chiles and ginger, like the one my father and I once shared at a Delhi hotel. Lemon tart from Lindsey Shere’s indispensable “Chez Panisse Desserts,” to remind me that California still exists. A version of le grand aioli, a giant platter of vegetables cooked and raw then dipped in garlicky mayonnaise, via Rebekah Peppler — whose book “Apéritif: Cocktail Hour the French Way” is my surest route to feeling like an expat living a cool girl life in Paris. (Disclosure: I am not, nor have I ever been, a cool girl in any city.) The tagine my brother-in-law’s friends cooked for us at their home in Sefrou, Morocco, when he was in the Peace Corps. A re-creation of the vegetarian tom kha soup I ate in my early 20s in Chiang Mai. It was complex, rich with coconut milk, spicy. Wait, not just spicy. Wait! Incinerating. Wait! Obliterating. Wait!
I lay on my back on the wooden bench in a grove of trees, tears running down my face and landing in the dirt below. I had ingested whole one of the tiny red chiles that infused the entire pot of soup with heat. I tipped my head and saw them, blurrily: The women who had cooked that soup, unable to stop themselves from laughing.
What can you do. I laughed with them, through the tears.
Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Instagram @devra_first.