Cooking My Mother’s Recipes

My mother writes her recipes in a notebook she has had since 1987. The pages are stained with turmeric and oil, the handwriting shifts between French and Arabic, the measurements are approximate in the way that only experienced cooks can afford to be: “enough oil,” “a little more cumin,” “you’ll know when it’s ready.”

She photographed every page before I left Algiers for Paris. I told her I wouldn’t need them — I was twenty-nine, I knew how to cook, Paris had every ingredient imaginable. She photographed them anyway.

Six weeks into life in Paris, living alone in a studio apartment in the 18th arrondissement, I opened those photos for the first time. I made harira — the thick, spiced soup she made every Ramadan. I burned the first batch. The second batch was better. The third was close enough that I cried a little, which I had not expected.

There is something about the act of cooking that collapses distance. My hands were doing what her hands had done, with the same spices, in a different city. The smell filled my small kitchen and for a few minutes, I was not in Paris. I was somewhere larger and more familiar.

I started cooking every Sunday. It became a ritual. Friends came. Colleagues came. A few neighbours from the building came. The food became a kind of conversation — about where I was from, about what home means, about the particular way smell carries memory more reliably than anything else.

My mother’s recipes have fed more people in Paris than she will ever know. I think she would like that.