Foreign Food

Recently, a good friend asked me to be a storyteller at an event at her apartment. I showed up, baked brie in hand, and took the stage (living room carpet) with four other storytellers to talk about foreign food:

Travel is a part of my life for which I am so incredibly grateful. So, it came as a surprise to me when I was presented with the theme of "Foreign Food" that what came to mind was not the still flopping fish presented to my brother in a literal desk drawer in the Athenian Plaka, or the sound of Shan tofu sizzling in peanut oil in a waterside market in Myanmar, or the fruit stealing monkeys that crossed the back porch of my vacation rental in Costa Rica. No, the first thing that popped into my head reached back beyond all of that -- to sitting in the backseat of my mother's Dodge Caravan, eating KFC.

I must have been about eleven, because I remember the cotton of my gym-issued tee shirt chafing my nipples during kick ball in a way that reminded me to ask my mom about going bra shopping that weekend. It was one of those terrible, awkward, in-between times, and my Nanny at the time, Tessa, decided to take me to lunch. We stopped at one of her favorite places, one of the many bright-signed road side stops all over Southern California. We ordered some concoction of chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, sweet corn, melty cheese, and gooey gravy that seems bizarre to me now but at the time was incredible. The most important part to me, though, the piece-de-resistance for my chubby little heart, was the biscuit and honey butter that came on the side.

You see, so much of this was a first for me. I had just recently moved to the well-dressed, well-paved world of Orange County, California from a rural town in Southern Idaho. In addition to the typical awkwardness of those pre-teen years I was leaving a childhood of building forts in the woods behind the house and riding bikes into town on the weekends to a looming adolescence of getting dropped off at the mall to try on makeup and wearing collared shirts to school every day. Beyond that, fast food existed essentially only in commercials to me. The only burger joint I knew was a McDonald's half an hour down the road that I got to go to occasionally when certain moms picked up the carpool from soccer practice. I had Burger King maybe once a year, when we made the hour and a half drive to the mall for back-to-school shopping. Even then, it was only because my mom was a sucker for their fried fish sandwich. So, eating KFC was beyond my imagination not only because it was fast food, but because it was Southern Food. I had no concept of what that was; I had never tried fried chicken. I certainly had never had a biscuit. Scones, yes. Definitely crescent rolls on some anonymous holiday table. But, at this point I was a biscuit virgin.

I'm sure that the fried-chicken-potato-cheese combination was wonderful (because, obviously), but all I remember about that meal is the biscuit. That thing was a revelation: flaky, doughy, steaming as I pulled apart the layers underneath the crisp exterior. I watched Tessa, a fast food native literate in KFC, to find out what to do with it. She slathered on honey butter from a little plastic cup, and passed it to me. Hesitant, I glopped a little bit onto a small bit of biscuit and took a tiny bite. Let me tell you, that was some good shit. We passed the butter back and forth, hot boxing the car with the sweet-creamy-salty scent of warm biscuits, and I was forever changed. I was hooked.

The confusing world of stucco and strip malls faded away, overshadowed by this concoction of butter, flour, salt, and more butter dripping onto my greasy fingertips. I felt like I had a secret. Tessa had let me into a club where we ate fast food in cars and didn't care if it was cool or on trend, just that is was delicious and that it fed our souls.

That biscuit, looking back, was surely dense and over mixed, too small and chalky and not very good, but it was perfection. For the first time in so long, I wasn't hung up on boys, or braces, or training bras, I was comforted. To this day, I look at biscuits in the spreads of Southern Living and hidden on diner menus, and I understand so deeply why we call it comfort food, as foreign -- or familiar -- as it may be.