Heart(h)

It was January of 2019 when I first walked into the Bedrossian’s kitchen. I was coming to study Armenian home cooking with Zarouhie, affectionately known as “Zee.” Little did I know how much I would learn about food, and life itself, from her beloved Raffi.

Now it is June. We are halfway into our Apprenticeship, and I am virtually family, which goes to show how the hearth brings people together. Zee helps us care for my mom. She carries such a strain with Raffi’s sickness, but I see her face light up with that unmistakable, curious delight when she starts cooking. Raffi is the sarcastic one, always quick with a joke. He loves lentils and grape leaves. You can tell when we’re making one of his favorites because he appears more often in the kitchen to snag bites here and there, under the guise of giving me some mission-critical piece of advice.

Zee and Raffi had been planning a rare excursion to the coast, and I was excited for them. With Zee’s arduous work schedule and Raffi’s illness, they don’t travel much. But instead of going away, Raffi ended up in the hospital. I learned about it from my mom. Ironically, the woman with Alzheimer’s who started this whole chain of events – us meeting Zee, Zee teaching me – is the one who remembered that Raffi was sick again.

I tried to postpone my next cooking lesson, directly after Raffi returned home, but Zee wouldn’t have it. “What am I going to do honey? My mind will go crazy if I don’t keep busy,” she insisted. So we ambled into the kitchen and she fed me coffee and cookies before our lesson began. While I ate, she finished up a white bean stew and bulgur pilaf for my parents, then we got to work on the fattoush lesson I’d requested.

First, she showed me the herbs she’d picked from her garden: parsley, mint, and verdura. The latter is from Lebanan and also grows in South America. It’s a requisite to traditional fattoush, she says, so you cannot make the salad the traditional way until June at the earliest, when verdura is abundant.

While we cooked, Raffi pulled up a chair and perched beside us. He had lost so much weight in the 2 weeks since I saw him last. But most surprising, there were tears in his eyes. He spoke of his illness, a lifetime of suffering for which he had “no more taste.” He spoke of funeral plans and his DNR. When I started to weep, he quickly told a joke to lighten the mood. Then he shared memories of sitting around his family’s hearth in Lebanon. Everything important happened there, he said.

And so it was that we made our salad. By the end of my lesson, Zee’s wondrous smile had returned. When we were all done, she walked me to car, laden as always with food. We hugged and promised to stay in one another’s hearts even if we cannot speak every day. Raffi passed away a few months later.

The word “heart” lives in the word “hearth.” Zee taught me to cook Armenian food, and Raffi showed me where the important things in life happen.