When I Chop Onions, I Think of My Female Ancestors

When I turned 30, I decided that I was finally going to learn how to cook. 

That decision changed my life in unexpected ways. One wonderful thing that happened was that cooking became a conduit for connecting with my female ancestors.

My family belongs to a small ethnic group called the Mountain Jews who lived in the Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan for hundreds of years. Around 1920, our family moved to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where my parents and I were born. When I was a child, we moved to the US, and I was raised in Brooklyn. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved learning about my family history—all of the joys, dramas, tragedies, and everyday stories that shape our family to this day. Understanding where I come from has always given me a certain grounding and an immense sense of pride. When life is particularly overwhelming, I turn to these stories and these people for perspective and wisdom and a reminder that the only thing that we all know for certain is that life goes on. 

One way that I stayed connected with my heritage is by being in the kitchen with my mom and helping her make traditional recipes, especially for holidays. As a kid, I would be on prep duty, in charge of things like cutting potatoes, eggs, and pickles for Olivier salad (eaten across the former Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan). 

One of the first things I learned how to do in the kitchen was chop onions for my mom when she was making a dish called gorma (also known as korma). This is a dish eaten in Azerbaijan with variations made across multiple ethnic groups in that part of the world. The onions would be caramelized and combined into a rich beef stew, which also included dried apricots and prunes. Then, everything would be served over turmeric-flavored rice and eaten with pickled vegetables. It's a mainstay on our holiday tables. 

I felt like all the women in my family were in the kitchen with me

When I was in college, I felt confident enough to start cooking on my own. I would make simple things: bean and cheese quesadillas, eggs, and boiled potatoes with smoked fish. But more complicated recipes like the ones my mom made felt intimidating to make on my own and required the kind of time that I didn’t feel like I had as a soon-to-be med student. 

After graduating from med school, I left medicine and started a new career in biotech communications. I had to learn about a whole new industry, so I felt like I couldn’t devote the time that I needed to properly learn how to cook. But just before I turned 30, I started to get tired of making the same basic recipes and ordering takeout. I decided to sign up for a meal kit delivery service because I figured this would be the easiest way for me to learn how to cook while working my full-time corporate job.

And then, something unexpected happened. When I started to make the recipes from the meal kits, I felt like all the women in my family were in the kitchen with me—my mom, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, etc. The kitchen felt like a portal to them in a way that it never had before. I don’t exactly know how it happened, but it’s funny how your ancestors find ways to connect with you, especially when you need them the most. 

So there I would be chopping onions, the pungent odor bringing back old memories, my eyes tearing up from the propanethial S-oxide (that’s the gas that causes your eyes to tear up)—and the ghosts would come to say hello. 

I’ve heard many professional cooks from all kinds of backgrounds talk about connecting with their family history through cooking. I think many of our foremothers choose the kitchen as their “portal” because that was their domain—the one place that was entirely their own. 

When the women in my family were living in the mountains, they had quite a different life than I do. They weren’t taught how to read, they were married off as teenagers to men their fathers found for them, and they couldn't work outside the home. They spent their lives dedicated to their families with many hours spent in the kitchen making elaborate, delicious meals. That was their pride and joy. And so, it’s no accident that they come to “visit” me while I’m cooking.

Eventually, I started to try to make some of the traditional recipes that I grew up with by inviting my mom over on the weekends and being her sous chef, watching as she added a bit of this and a bit of that to make something fabulous. Besides learning the recipes, I also valued this uninterrupted time that we had together, when we got to catch up and laugh and share stories. And of course, the “ghosts” were with us too. 

Ghosts in the Kitchen

Speaking of cooking ghosts, my mom has this great story that feels like it’s straight out of the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate. When she was in the kitchen many years ago, she was cooking with a pan of hot oil that accidentally tipped in her direction, and she saw her grandmother’s ghost move it away from her, preventing a terrible burn. I’ve had similar experiences where I could have burned or cut myself, and felt like someone was watching and keeping me safe. 

A thread through all my experiences on this cooking journey is trying to preserve what would otherwise be lost. The Mountain Jewish community is not as big as most other Jewish communities, and most of our traditions, including recipes, have been passed down orally. This has resulted in a lot being lost over time, and I’m making an effort to document whatever history I’m learning, whether it’s my mom’s recipes or my dad’s stories about his grandfathers. 

In these turbulent and divisive times, many of us are worried about the future. I find comfort in looking backward. It’s there that I find strength and solace in knowing that my ancestors lived through some unimaginably difficult times and survived them, cooking and crying and laughing through it all. And this is how I know we’ll find our way too.