Imperfect Fats
by Nadia Dasi Tamayo
My father’s side of the family has an overzealous kitchen relationship with ghee. Rather than olive oil, sunflower oil, or even regular butter, ghee was rife in the preparation of all our dishes, no matter the flavor — it worked its way into the salty, spicy, sour and sweet crevices of our plates and mouths. The reason why it was such a popular type of kitchen fat was because of
its existence as a staple within the religious diet my family partook. In the way that ghee exists as the purest form of butter, my father’s side of the family was dedicated to creating an existence lived as closely as possible to the ideal of religious purity held by leaders of the cult. Unlike butter, which can spoil quickly due to the additional lactose and liquid components, ghee
withstands many environmental tribulations, lasting longer and delivering a finer taste, rich in its curated clarity. I see my father’s family religion in the same way I see this highly concentrated fat — a wild attempt at perfection without all the burdens of material attachments and ingredients.
Cooking was an integral aspect of a woman’s life in our community. I never truly cooked in the past context because I was a child, but by watching the women in my family grow and live around me, it grew clear what my role in life would have been. Within that feminized social structure, I had such a concrete path laid out in front of me, and despite being a child, it was expected I would someday traverse this path to achieve the fullness of my identity as a woman and a follower of God. Having not truly reached puberty during my experience of religion, I matured with a sense of self that lacked what I once thought I required.
There was a specific rule of kitchen etiquette within that culinary world that acknowledged another kind of persistent selflessness. The rule made it so that every woman who cooked, cooked with the aim to serve the best flavors, the most perfect concoctions, the most mouthwatering creations — to God first. The finest part of the meal, the part that absorbed the most time and heat in the sticky, slippery, salty tile walls of my family kitchen, would always make its way to God’s imperceptible, imaginary tongue before it touched the reality of my mouth. The first taste was a special gift, and not one given to the ordinary woman.
My grandmother, a ghee lover and a devout follower of her religion and her beloved God, was and still is an amazing cook. She combined culinary skill with a pious desperation, attempting to season everything in her life with an attempt at salvation. She aspired to impart the familial gift of pilgrimage to the generations after her, with the hope that we would all help one another to gain a more clarified state of life that would eventually lead us to our natural place in God’s kingdom. She could not see any other goal — such was her loyalty to the cult. My grandmother viewed non-religious people as lost to the world’s sinful trap, a dirtied form of the human species, a consequence of their rejection of God, thereby their rejection of religious purity. Her inability to break free from the ways of her spiritual diet was perhaps why she was the most affected when it came to deviating from cult rules.
My mother represents a humorous opposition to my grandmother’s habits because my mother prefers to use butter in her cooking, and when there is none, she resorts to sunflower oil. This is an abnormality, and the example stretches farther than just the ingredient itself. My mother represents a conversion, a clarification process — she is classified as an attempt. Her religious identity was formed when she married my father, the first son of prestigious members of the community. By birthright, her children would be bound to a life surrounding God. In a way, my sister and I were closer to the ideal of the religion than she was, for we were born with spoons of ghee in our mouths.
My grandmother knew this, and she made the difference known. Unlike my father, sister and I, my mother was not cult-born. She was of the outside world before she was part of my world, granting her an additional identity, a different skill. It was difficult for my mother to adjust to a religious world that did not understand her, and she suffered greatly as a newly pregnant woman in my grandmother’s household. The primary sentiment filtering her first pregnancy — with me — was that of rejection. It screened every opportunity she had with food; she could not eat if an offering had not been made at the altar first, she could not prepare meals for herself with ingredients reserved for God’s menu, she could not break a fast just because she was pregnant, and if she was too weak to eat, nobody would have time to cook for her because they were too busy preparing food for idols at the altar. Even when she found time to cook, she would be criticized by my grandmother for her poor performance in the kitchen — my mother did not know how to cook when she first married my father. Steeped in a variety of jobs to prepare for my arrival, my father was too busy to indicate his alimentary preferences and guide my mother through the habits of his maternal household. Thus, my mother starved alone.
It is odd to me how the past qualities of a pious life now simply seem like methods of deprivation. There was an immorality associated with excess, and to be fully indoctrinated with the pinnacles of religious fervor, one had to experience an initiation ritual of reduction, removal, loss.
Similarly, ghee undergoes a heating process to remove its liquid and milk components — two things that give butter a distinct flavor — and through this intense process of removal, the
ghee is then allowed a greater tolerance for heat during cooking. Because it is created through heat, it makes sense that it can withstand the same, or higher, temperatures during creation of other things, such as food. Inside this ball of heat and fat, one expects something special and rich to result, though not everyone desires the purest form of a product. My mother understood the intentionality of the initiation process, how it was designed to purify, perfect and produce a version of her relationship to religion that best fit the community requirements. But she could not parallel the attempt of purification with that of fulfillment, and this disparity confused her.
My mother cooked for comfort, for experimentation, and for her family to have the first spoonful of whatever whimsical dish she was cobbling together. Her joy lay in cooking as a form of love, not of worship. Despite my grandmother’s critiques, she was content with the variety of edible material she created, for salvation was not her goal. While she did push herself to harsh measures to fit into the mold that my father’s family had set for her, my mother knew that true spiritual connection did not have to exclude attention to one’s self and needs — as the cult did to her. Prone to experimentation rather than perfection, my mother must have known she could never distort herself to fulfill the virtuous ideal so preciously cradled by the religion that shaped our tongues.
Disregarding the selective nature of food preparation within religious confines, she attempted to shift the obligatory role that women like her — outsiders — would have to adopt if they wanted a place in the coveted land of God. Rather than orienting her portions of food, made with ghee, butter, or neither, to a figure of Godhead not fully visible to her, she delivered the servings to the plates of her husband or daughters. In rooting her proximity to the hearth to a material anchor of her immediate family — a tangible peninsula of belief surrounded by the imperceptible ravings of my grandmother’s God — my mother established a sense of belonging despite being primarily viewed as a foreign creature. This trait was what kept her sane when God finally spit us out.
My grandmother could not understand my mother’s decisive nature regarding a disconnect from the cult. She could not understand our external methods for survival while being so radically opposed to the rules dictating who would be most eligible to rest at God’s feet after spending an entire lifetime gifting Him offerings of food. The gradual loss of importance surrounding our ideal of religious fervor, of religious purity, shocked my grandmother. Perhaps that is why her heart broke when my father, mother, sister and I permanently abandoned the
restrictive sphere of our community, realizing that its rules meant absolutely nothing to us as people. Those rules meant nothing to many people, particularly men, in that community, whose religious recipe for salvation was nothing more than a coverup for their lies and shameful misdeeds against women. My mother’s experience with the feminization of religious rejection surrounding provisions exemplified this type of abuse in her life. The pain in early motherhood constantly served to remind her that she was truly only a woman second to everything — worthy of food only when God had been served first. Within this hierarchical structure where only women seemed to be packed down into the lowest levels, men in the cult could, and would, access taste to a diversity of options. These options did not always pertain to food.
It was within this saturated illusion of religion that my mother understood our community to be centered around men, perpetually uplifting them and their definitions of salvation and purity. These men with their meals and their tongues were not at all catered to a refined, religious taste. Their excessive emphasis on the purification of a food in the name of God did not truly exist as a form of worship, but to my mother, existed as a specific, concentrated attempt to repress the woman’s ability to create perfection for herself.
Leaving the cult due to a blitz of truths about the nature of piety and dietary selflessness led us to believe that we had truly just been starving ourselves for nothing, throwing ourselves into the kitchen fire for unjust expectations. While my father seemed completely unable to cope with the loss of his religious identity and the heartbreak at being erased from his entire life’s journey — whose goal was promised to him from a young age had he kept to the guidelines of piety and purity — my mother understood the return to her previous existence. Outside the cult had always been inside her normal life. I suspect my mother felt, deep down, she would be placed back into the sinful, filthy world she had been rigorously trained to repel through various methods of purification. Perhaps she recognized the lack of care surrounding our abandonment of the religion when my grandmother’s only agony was that her grandchildren would no longer be devout followers and therefore would not be allowed to lay peacefully at the feet of God.
My grandmother mourned the disappearance of existential rules in our lives, because in her eyes, the loss reflected her weakness. Had she been more persistent in turning my mother into herself, she could have saved us. My grandmother’s goal, whether in the kitchen or in the spiritual broadness of her time alive, has always been to return to her purest form, her future as a figure of eternal servitude — the result of sacrificing every taste for God’s approval of the food made in His name.
Once our life began outside, it became clear my mother did not fully believe in this sacrificial form of life. Often now she will recount the pain she felt at being abandoned during times at which she simply wanted to eat — without the offering rituals or the need to ask for permission. She displays a very different reaction from my father, who is now too lost and confused to even understand what doctrine we had been blindly consuming. He has learned to lean heavily on my mother, who has become a spiritual force of her own. She perforated the screen that once prevented her from cooking and living with things deemed impure, unfit, and unholy — and has shown through many forms of quickly digestible evidence, the ecstatic possibilities of a diet swimming with plain, old butter. My mother was able to find a semblance of fulfillment in the life around her when she chose what to create.
However, reaching a point of maturity in my own womanhood outside of the cult placed me in an existential realm excluding my mother or father. As a girl in the kitchen under a swirl of busy bodies — women all churning, frying, seasoning, and stewing — I had a future role set in place. My hands were made to curate food served beyond me, a reality which my grandmother and mother probably believed in the past. With that role revoked, I am now often burdened with a sense of loss that is not the same kind associated with the clarification of butter as it transforms into ghee. What my mother had once endured as a form of reduction for a proposed higher meaning now just reflects dimly in my life as a confusing absence of character, a spoiled idea of what I could have been.
Since having grown into the age that my mother once was when she was thrust into the oven of my father’s family, absence has often been my most heavily frequented state of existence. Though the term is interpreted as the nonexistence of something, absence carries the most weight within my current memory record — pulsating in its abnormality within me. I exist in the absence of religion constantly, drowning in its lonely flavor yet still searching for a meaning behind the taste. I often ask myself, how does a process of purification become meaningless when you exist outside of the heat that causes it to occur?
When I attempt to externalize my questions to other people it falls flat. It muddies itself through the attempt of clarified exposure — for them and me — as they don’t comprehend the complete encompassing of the religious loss and ideal I speak of. The perception of what I could have been as a woman, as God’s servant, is now foreign, and the woman I have to be is unknown to me.
Now that I can acknowledge my capability to discover the many internal hollows religion’s past leaves in my own concrete memory, trapping me in an uncomfortable heated pressure to find my own personal form of salvation — I feel unsure of what is left in my life to be full. If religious fervor once managed the treasured purity of one’s diet, clothing, music consumption, hobbies, social life, education, and daily routine — all aspects of human activity that contribute to a life experience — how much valuable living quality exists when the fervor leaves? My mother dove deep into all the aspects of religious saturation necessary to being a woman fit for the community, fit for God’s kingdom when the time came.
I grew up after her rejection of this idea, pulling me in the opposite of everything religious and required to steep in its perceived benefits. The final question that percolates through my system is this one: if religion was my life then, what is my life now without it? What can life become after such a radical change?
I like imagining the shift in an explosive sense, as a volcanic eruption. With the pressures of realization comes the release of action, what to do with what you now know. It is a depiction of the kitchen counter, of a wave of ingredients splayed and halved with their hearts open to the knife. It precedes the flare of a blue flame embracing the pan and swaying to the dance of cubes of melting butter — sunflower oil, olive oil. There is a comfort in knowing that the possibilities in these actions lead to endless concoctions, but you have the freedom to figure them out.
In my mother’s volcanic shift of life, she has created the impetus for a timeline of consumption free of a watchful hand denoting a right or wrong time to eat. Rather than waiting for the promise of God’s permission, she gifts herself with the first taste. Alongside her at the table, there are no requirements of purity necessary to share a bite with her — nor do I have to dedicate my life to upholding those requirements through feeding the flame enriched by the purest, most clarified form of butter most suited to holy meals. I still do not even know how to cook.