Ride or Die Foods

Special Fried Rice and Me — An Intimate Memoir

A quick note before I start. I’m still avoiding news, and Twitter is a wasteland for the time being. I’d like to try to build more of a community here, so if there’s anybody you think might be interested in joining us, please let them know about this Substack.

---

One of the fascinating things about being human is how our senses don’t merely provide sensation during the moment of delivery, but also attach themselves to time.

A song may viscerally summon a moment from twenty years ago, for better or sometimes worse, and a flavor or smell can transport us back to childhood in an instant. This is a commonplace observation. But there’s another and less obvious level to the way sensations weave their way intimately into our lives, coming along for the whole ride. We’re perhaps more aware of visual and auditory examples: the picture we’ve always loved, for no obvious reason, and have had in a frame on the wall or our phone case or laptop wallpaper; that piece of music we play when we’re happy or sad or always put on playlists because listening to it has become a part of who we are.

Examples relating to taste are less obvious, perhaps because it’s one of the hardest sensations to describe (beyond simplistic terms like “sweet” or “spicy” or “ugh”). Despite (or perhaps because of) this, those taste-based connections are often the strongest. There are flavors and foods that are not just “things we like eating” but become a thread in our lives and existence — in a far deeper way, like friends.

I touched upon this in a stack I wrote a while back, about the mighty samosa. Here I’m going to introduce you to one of my very best pals, someone who’s been by my side and in my life for about as long as I can remember: Special Fried Rice.

How We Met

When I was young, we lived first in Carbondale, Illinois, and then in Florida. Quite soon after moving to the latter my mother’s father became ill, and died. I’m guessing I would have been about four at the time. My mother went back to England to assist her mother through the processes that death plummets into your life, taking my baby sister with her, thus leaving me alone for several weeks with my father. I’ve sometimes wondered whether this unusual period and circumstance is part of why he and I wound up having such an endlessly solid bond in all the decades after.

Just about the only thing he seemed able to cook was a workmanlike and studenty approximation of Special Fried Rice. There’d be peas in there, slices of celery, maybe a few bits of pineapple or ham, along with nuggets of thin, hard salami, like a Slim Jim — along with heroic quantities of soy sauce. We ate it a lot, and I loved it.

The Childhood Years

After further periods in South Africa (hence the samosas) and then Australia, the family finally moved back to England when I was coming up for eight years old. My mother was a great cook, and relentlessly put dinner on the table almost all the time. Every now and then, however, Dad would fire up the heavy old cast iron pot that was his weapon of choice — and make his signature Special Fried Rice.

Over time I didn’t only relish eating the rice, but also the way in which the remnants of soy sauce lingering in the pan (which was never washed, only wiped out, as it should be) would next day add an intriguing umami note to the English breakfasts he cooked for my sister and I before school every morning.

After College

So by the time I went to college, Special Fried Rice was confirmed as one of the core flavors of my childhood. I didn’t get much of it while at Cambridge — couldn’t afford to eat anywhere except in halls, and they didn’t provide it — but as soon as I left and started sharing a flat with my college pal Jane, it swung firmly back onto the menu.

I remember dark and rainy nights in Finsbury Park, North London, getting off the tube after work and stomping up the road… stopping to buy a huge and economical punnet of the stuff (with nothing else) and bringing it home to eat with lashings of soy sauce. Remember also nights spent waiting for it to be cooked as part of larger and more ornate orders by the time I was living with my wife, watching cooks in various take-out places in Camden and Kentish Town and Tufnell Park as they expertly flicked a wok over fearsome burners, adding a bit of this and a splash of that. Shrimp and chicken and egg were now part of the equation. One of the first things I scoped out whenever I moved to a new place — I lived in seven or eight flats before we finally bought our first house — was where the best local Chinese was.

Sure, I liked all the other dishes I’d tote home from these places, but it was the rice I was there for. Or course we sometimes/often had curry or pizza or fish and chips — and we did cook ourselves from time to time back then, don’t get me wrong — but it was Special Fried Rice that felt like a taste of home.

The Darkest Night

And then, well… I guess this is also about coming home. Over twenty years ago now.

My mother got sick. Spent two years in and out of hospitals. Eventually it became clear that if she went back in one more time then she wouldn’t be coming out again, and that’s not what she wanted, so arrangements were made for her final weeks to be spent at home.

As some of you will know, the last days are difficult to gauge. There are sudden dips but also unexpected rallies, and yet the final moment always feels sudden, as if it should have happened a day or even just an hour later. Luckily in the end we were all there together when the time came, and my mother died one evening in my father’s arms, with my sister and I each holding one of her hands. That moment, and my father’s shocked reaction to the idea that she’d actually gone, and how dismally stunned he was by the reality of it, is not something I’m ever going to forget: though I will always be glad it happened that way, if it had to happen, which it did.

Arrangements were made for the inevitable next steps which would have to take place. And then we remembered… there was Chinese food in the kitchen. My wife and my sister’s girlfriend had gone out to get it while my mother was alive, because we were all exhausted and somebody realized it’d be a good idea to get some food in. None of us could have guessed she’d no longer be with us when it was sitting unopened in a plastic bag in the kitchen, still warm.

The idea of it felt bizarre, inappropriate, alien and wrong. But none of us had eaten all day. And it was there. So we sat around the table in the kitchen, in silence, and slowly put forkfuls of food into our mouths, while my mother’s body gently cooled in the next room. Someone, I think it was La Rochefoucauld, wrote words to the effect that you’ve never truly tasted life until you’ve eaten with tears in your eyes.

Well, then I’ve tasted life.

The Distant Years

Several years later, I realized I hadn’t eaten Special Fried Rice in a long time. Simply hadn’t fancied it, and stopped including it in orders of Chinese food. Thought, in fact, that I’d somehow gone off it, though really I hadn’t even noticed the lack.

But that’s how emotions work, and grief in particular. They don’t stand in front of you and speak in declarative sentences, telling you what they’re up to. They don’t openly plead their case. Instead they covertly cause you to behave in ways you don’t even notice until you have the space and perspective to think: “Why am I doing that?”

One night I noticed what had happened, and the associative cause was blatantly obvious — along with the irony that the food which had come into my life as a result of one death (my grandfather, her father) had now left again as a result of my mother’s.

Next time we ordered Chinese, I made sure to include Special Fried Rice.

And Now…

We are friends again. Though my ability to eat large amounts of food has diminished with time, I can still put away Special Fried Rice in quantities that would debilitate the average ox. Should I ever run amok and slay a large number of people — which, to reassure you, remains only a slight possibility — then I would have no doubt over what to request as my Last Meal.

I want it when I’m up, as a celebration, and I especially want it when I’m down, or merely tired and wan, as the ultimate comfort food. It’s my ride or die.

I don’t think of my mother — or my father, now three years gone — while I’m eating it, but it’s there in the sense of it being one of very many good things they brought into my life, and for which I’m eternally grateful. Wherever I am in the world, if I’m hunched over a bowl of Special Fried Rice, with the soy sauce close by, I’m home.

So… how about you? What are the tastes that form the pillars of your world? Introduce me to your food friends.