For as long as I can remember, no celebration, picnic or birthday spread has been complete without an enormous serving of one of mum’s home-cooked vegetarian meals.
To Mum, any event can turn into a spontaneous pot luck. Her idea of bringing a plate to a family gathering is to show up lugging a vat of one of her signature dishes. One day it might be Cambodian red curry; another, braised caramelised tofu. Her most famous dish, perhaps, is a stew of potato, carrots, tomatoes and baked beans, which she calls La Goo. We’re not quite sure what the origin of La Goo is (we have Googled), except that it might be our mum’s version of French ragout, minus the bouquet garni and chunks of slow-cooked beef.
Given the fact that she’s now in her 70s, my siblings and I have begun to fret about her health and have politely banned her from hands-on work.
The author’s mum with a dish of delicious vegetarian food. Source: Supplied
Her idea of bringing a plate to a family gathering is to show up lugging a vat of one of her signature dishes
Still, no matter how much we reassure her we can take care of ourselves, without fail she will show up to one of our homes for dinner bearing a collection of casserole dishes, carefully wrapped in plastic bags to avoid spillage.
“Mum, there’s too much food!” we exclaim.
“Well, if everyone takes some it’ll all be gone soon,” she replies, before unpacking enough sticky rice cakes and tea eggs to feed two football teams.
While serving up everything, she adds: “You know, Dr Tran loves my tea eggs,” hinting that none of her offspring are sufficiently appreciative of her culinary talents.
From her comments, I realise she has been potlucking not just at ours, but at her GP appointments, with her neighbours and with that nice lady at our local fruit shop.
Before coming to Australia, Mum lived through the cruelty and deprivation of the Khmer Rouge era and former Cambodian prime minister Pol Pot’s genocidal communist regime. By the time she arrived in Sydney in the early ’80s with my father after sheltering in a refugee camp, she’d been separated from her entire family, and had to rebuild her support network.
The author’s mum on holiday. Source: Supplied
Mum eventually found a new community in her Buddhist group and adopted vegetarianism. Every week for years, she would tirelessly shuttle temple members to and from meetings and prepare huge pots of congee and noodle soup to make sure everyone was well fed after their dharma classes.
While we kids were busy figuring out where we belonged, so was she.
Eating together communicates care and kinship – both within the relationships we’re born into, and the ones we build for ourselves
Even though my siblings and I maintained our connection to our South-East Asian roots, I realise we’ve long defaulted to Australian customs when it comes to social gatherings. This includes what to bring when invited to someone’s home for a meal: a bottle of wine, chocolates, flowers or dessert. Things you’ve discussed with your host. Definitely not an enormous quantity of La Goo.
On the other hand, Mum’s ideas about food are much more relaxed than ours. In Chinese-Cambodian culture, mealtimes often involve large gatherings with extended family. Eating together communicates care and kinship – both within the relationships we’re born into, and the ones we build for ourselves, like Mum’s Buddhist family.
Gifts of home-cooked dishes aren’t obligatory, but they aren’t considered out of the ordinary. To Mum, there’s no such thing as “too much food”. In fact, the biggest faux pas is not bringing enough for everyone.
Travelling together. Source: Supplied
Like many Buddhist vegetarians, Mum doesn’t cook with aromatics such as onions or chives. These ingredients are believed to stimulate strong emotions like anger or desire, and are seen as a hindrance to the equanimity that Buddhists strive for. Although her food may be missing a clove of garlic or two, what it never lacks is heart.
As we got older, became independent and started our own families, we realised that Mum’s insistence on feeding us large amounts of home-cooked vegetarian food is her way of sharing comfort – a gesture to ensure we’ll never know the scarcity she’s had to live through herself.
These days, instead of getting exasperated at the leftovers or worried that Mum hasn’t been resting enough, we remind ourselves that this is her way of showing us love. “It’s chnang (delicious),” we say in between mouthfuls of La Goo, sprinkling our Aussie English with Khmer words as we often do. “Thanks, Mum.”
