2005年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-Cooking to Keep Memories of Egypt Alive

Commentator 1 Yasmine Noujaim enjoys keeping her Egyptian heritage alive. She just doesn't like to do it in the kitchen. But, she's afraid that her mother's old recipes may one day disappear. So she took out a frying pan and decided 2 to try to give one of them a shot.

My mother came to the United States from Cairo Egypt more than 20 years ago. She carried with her in the lining 3 of her luggage, the recipes of her childhood. I should have acquired my mother's most-cherished cooking secrets by observing her, but while I enjoying eating her dishes, I was never really interested in preparing them, now she claims that all her recipes will die with her one day if I don't start to learn. Had we been living in Egypt, this would have been a great embarrassment 4 to my family. My grandmother reminds me every time she visits us that cooking should be second nature for an Egyptian woman, like belly 5 dancing or knowing the words to the songs of the famous Egyptian singer W. The other day, I decided, I wanted to learn how to cook, I asked my mother if she knew of any simple recipe she could share with me. She chose a vegetarian 6 dish, needing little more than one eggplant, to some olive oil and, of course, garlic, the most common ingredient in middle eastern dishes.

Kitchens in Egyptian apartments reek 7 of garlic all the time; the stench ingrained in the floors, the cabinets and the ceiling from years of cooking with it. The recipe, BM, calls for frying the eggplant slices in some olive oil. Many of the recipes my mother cooked in our kitchen at home required frying, as I dropped my eggplant slices into my pan, the oil sizzled, cracking and popping with the presence of the vegetable. The eggplant sucked up the oil quickly. Its middle turning from a pale white to a darker green as the fluid absorbed. While flipping 8 the pieces over, the flesh was softening 9, the skin turning a golden brown. My eggplant was coming along nicely. It had turned to crisp brown on top and when I poked 10 a fork inside, it cut right through like it was supposed to do. I sprinkled a bit of garlic on top and took a bite. As I put the piece in my mouth, none of the flavorful taste of my mother's cooking rushed to my senses. The taste of my eggplant was waydown by too much salt and grease,the oil dripping in big drops from my fork. My mother's reaction to my kitchen mishap 11, however, was surprising . She told me that in fact, she didn't really learn how to cook until she was married, making many mistakes of her own and usually using my father as the guinea pig. She said at some point in my life, I would crave 12 one of her dishes so badly that I would find a way to make it, do it well and pass it on for future generations.