The following article is one of many final projects from Visiting Lecturer Denise Drower Swidey’s innovative spring 2020 food media course at Tufts University’s Experimental College called “An Insider’s Guide to the World of Food Media.” Drower Swidey generously shared some of her students’ work with us, and Edible Boston is publishing four of them online in their entirety, edited only for clarity and punctuation. For Drower Swidey’s introduction and links to the rest of the projects, click here.

Some foods remind you of home more than others. But what do you do if you can’t find them where you live?

By Nimish Ashikari

Nimish Adhikari is freshly graduated from Tufts University, and an incoming grad student at Boston University. He likes to cook, and sometimes write.

What tastes like home? Does the comfort of being in a place where you know you are safe and secure add to what you taste? Does the nostalgia that tinged your early years enhance your memory of those flavors? Food is much more than just taste, it’s the smells, the environment, the setting and most importantly the ingredients. Differences in how the vegetables are grown, where the grains come from, how the animals are raised provide subtle changes in the taste. 

And then there is the regional impact; how food has been prepared regionally and culturally. Maybe fermentation and sun-drying are popular in your community since people didn’t have refrigerators and wanted food to last longer. Maybe it is a dish that is enhanced by the region’s proximity to the ocean, or the region's abundance of a certain type of fruit or vegetable. But in this interconnected world, people tend to migrate and find themselves far away from their homes. And that is what happened to me.

When I came to America in 2016, I was certain that I would miss the food I was accustomed to. Once I moved out of the dorms and had my own kitchen, I could make some dishes that satiate my cravings. But there were specific dishes that I could find no replacement for, one of them being Masaura. Masaura is a dish made with minced vegetables and black lentils, which are then sun-dried. It can be made with any vegetable but the one native to the region I am from uses Karkalo, or Colocasia leaves as its primary vegetable. It has a distinctive tart taste, stays on shelves for longer, and makes a quick and easy soup that can be paired with rice. It’s not fancy and is what my mom pulls out of the shelves every time she is too bored to cook a more “full-fledged” meal.

On a more visual level, Masaura doesn’t look too appetizing. The only way I could get it in America is putting them in nondescript sealed plastic bags, which I realized too late is not the most ideal thing for a person to bring through airport security. So, I had to go through a security check with the customs and border patrol agent. I was dreading the moment he would pull out a suspicious sealed plastic bag, and I would have to explain that it’s a regional dish that I can’t get in America and how I really crave the taste so I brought some over, and the officer would listen to me, look me in the eye and throw it away. Instead, the officer then went on to pull out an entire rice cooker from my suitcase (which I didn’t know was there). My incredulous expression was enough for the customs agent, he broke into laughter and let me through with no questions asked. 

But the rice cooker suitcase incident was fitting; cooking Masaura was very much a similar gesture of love from my mom. My brother doesn’t care for it too much, my mom doesn’t like it too much. Every time she prepared or cooked the dish, it was for me. While cooking Masaura into a soup is quick and easy, preparing Masaura is a much more labor-intensive process. You need to let it dry for a while, and it is especially difficult during monsoon when the sun is not your best friend. Since we don’t have an electric grinder, we use a traditional mill that you rotate with your hands to grind up the black lentils. Colocasia leaves are itchy if not handled properly. It is a labor of love and I felt it every time she cooked it. Masaura keeps me in touch with my identity, and every time I’ve cooked it in America I’m transported. It gets lonely here sometimes. Even though I’m among friends, I feel like I’m slowly transforming into a different person the longer I stay here. But when I eat Masaura, I’m the same little Nepali boy.

For Mert Erden, originally from Turkey, that specific ingredient is sumac. Mert is a great cook; he is known to bring some fancy things to our potlucks. Sumac is a lemony spice that by itself is not so rare, especially in the present where Americans are in the process of experimenting with foreign cuisines. But it is used in a lot of Turkish dishes, like Manti, a Turkish dumpling, where it is used as a topping. 

Sumac is a versatile spice, useful for when you don’t want to introduce more liquid to a dish but still want a lemony zing. Mert moved to America in 2016, and his parents moved here shortly after, so quality sumac is a reminder of the place he grew up. And even though you could find sumac in some specialty grocery stores, fresh sumac is hard to find. According to Mert, most sumac you can find in grocery stores contain preservatives or have been sitting on shelves for a while. It works in a pinch, but the fragrance and mouth feel of a fresh Sumac can’t be beaten, says Mert. For now, he subsides on the sumac brought over by his mom whenever she visits from Turkey. Foreigners coming through airport security with nondescript packages are not so rare it seems.

On the other hand, Mateo Guaman misses ceviche. Mateo, who is originally from Ecuador, also came here in 2016 for college, and according to him, arrived here with limited cooking skills. I have lived with him for a while, and I can attest that his cooking is not too varied, though the things he does cook look delicious, with one of his specialties being ceviche. Mateo’s ceviche is famous—he cooked it once over the summer and my friends cannot stop talking about how good it was (one of my friends who is a picky eater swears that his ceviche is one of the best things he has ever tasted.) But Mateo disagrees. “Nah man,” he says, smiling and shaking his head, “It always feels a little off when I make it here.” 

I watched him make it, and when we were out shopping for the meal, he took a long time looking for the right ingredients. “The fish here are nice, but I don’t know if it’s the abundance of local fish and fresh limes, or just me missing home that makes it feel inferior,” he says. He still finishes the entirety of what he makes though. “Well, ceviche is starting from a baseline of good, so ceviche in America is good and in Quito it is great.” He hasn’t had ceviche at any restaurant yet, but he is down to try. His reason for not trying to get ceviche: “I feel like it’s kinda sad to go to a restaurant to eat something that is home food.”

I don’t know when I am going to go home again. I don’t think any of the people I talked to have an idea of whether they are going to go home any time soon. I am starting graduate school in the fall; Mateo is looking for work and Mert’s parents immigrated here so America is now his new home. Recently I have been feeling uncomfortable calling my parent’s house my home, yet just calling it my parent’s house seems so jarring. I technically have a home in Medford, I have spent holidays, birthdays and special events in Medford, and at the end of a long tiring day, I dream of my bed here and not in Kathmandu. 

Even though I’m graduating and will move out of this temporary apartment, it's not just about my physical accommodations. I’m here for the near future, and the friends, the community and the location all are familiar to me, whereas back in Kathmandu I would probably be shocked to see how it has changed. I guess this is a normal part of adulthood; I never gave conscious thought to moving out of home until I realized that I have lived outside of my home for longer than I did at home in the past six years. I feel sad about it, but I recognize that this is natural and that my memories of my home will not change and those experiences are what make me the person I am. And although I feel comfortable where I live now, I struggle to call it home still. But making Masaura and every other dish that I loved as a kid, emulating my mother’s cooking tricks, asking her for recipes when it's midnight in Nepal but I really want a good lunch, and every other little thing that I have learned and carried with me all those years, makes where I live feel more like home.

This story appeared as an online exclusive in September 2020 as part of a larger story on Tufts University’s course: “An Insider’s Guide to the World of Food Media.”