My parents’ social existence in Bosnia (and therefore their youngsters) frequently featured a group of their pals getting together for plenty of meals and drinking and making a song and laughing. Nobody might ever call that endeavor “dinner,” the activity revolved around food, but ought to by no means be reduced to it.
In Bosnian, the verb that describes such an interest is credit. This is because of this to sit down, as the whole operation consists of sitting across the desk, consuming, consuming, and being together for the functions of well-earned satisfaction. If I need to invoke an image of my parents being unconditionally glad (now not an easy project), I envision them with their friends at a desk, roaring with laughter between bites of scrumptious fare and sips of slivovitz (damson or plum brandy) or grappa.
This might now and then be ultimate for an entire weekend: now and again we’d visit Boračko jezero, a modest mountain-lake resort, to enroll in my mother and father’s buddies and their families for 1 May, the socialist Labour Day. The inextricable part of the fun and pleasure has been the’ presence, and the spirit of abandon reigned from morn to midnight and past.
But the critical, inescapable bonding ritual turned into spit-roasting a lamb that would then be shared using all. There, as anywhere we lived, meals become supposed to be shared, which is why it is in no way permissible to consume even as someone else is watching and not ingesting. Food is different for human beings. We hate eating alone, just as we hate being alone.
There aren’t any data or memories of my mother and father ever going out on a dinner date, earlier than or after they got married. There truly changed into no restaurant lifestyle within the Sarajevo of our preceding existence, even earlier than the battle. The eating places have been both luxurious and not good, usually both.
Not even in Canada, where they moved in 1993 as refugees, did my mother and father develop a dependency on going out for a meal? While Hamilton is not quite a culinary mecca, the primary reason for this reluctance is that traveling and eating place may cause my parents might give away their quarter of hard-won dietary comfort to stumble upon an international range of meals not going to fulfill their strict requirements.
Spending cash on a meal in an unknown gastronomic territory, and all that in English, while Mama’s cooking is axiomatically satisfactory globally. Their numerous refrigerators are full of dependable meals, including the already proven leftovers, which might be silly and irresponsible. In my relatives’ circle, eating is not meant to be an exploration or diffusion of cultural experience.
Part of the meal’s satisfaction is in assembling the set expectancies, whilst its indelible application is in providing electricity for labor, and therefore for survival. Food is an existential necessity, an irreplaceable element inside the structure of each day’s lifestyle. It should never be fucked around within a few high-priced vicinities that also occur to be devoid of pals and own family.
The best Hamilton area where the two of them may go for a meal is the Mandarin, a Chinese eating place featuring mounds of fried things and stewed stuff, plus a very un-Chinese multilayered cake with industrial-power frosting. The enchantment of the Mandarin is essentially a result of its all-you-can-eat surprise buffet, in which the utopian concept of reasonably-priced and endless abundance, dreamed of using generations of Slavic peasantry, is sooner or later fulfilled.
When my dad and mom were growing up, there was little food, in no way, bottomless buffets. As adults, they reached a comfort level once they had sufficient, and then there was even more, so they took out a loan to shop for a freezer that allows them to stock up. Their poor-human beings’ food ethos, wherein nothing should ever be wasted, aligned perfectly with the fact that unchecked consumption became prohibitive in socialism, every person getting in keeping with their needs, and all that.
