Cooking

Yesterday I had tea with one of my neighbors. Masala chai, really, which is mostly hot milk flavored with tea, sugar, cardamom, cinnamon; yes, I was a chai virgin. Really delicious; like a good partisan, she disdains the product dispensed by Starbucks and that ilk. She’s Indian; her husband works in IT for one of the global finance-capital empires, but she’s here on a no-work visa. Theirs’ was an arranged marriage. There was a time I when I was young when I would have poo-pooed such a notion, but no more. It works for some people, and since the love marriage of the modern bourgeois West often becomes a companionate marriage anyway (albeit still a system wrapped up in property relations and ideological reproduction), I say more power to ‘em. I’m showing these two how to cook a couple of American dishes this weekend. Mashed potatoes and chicken cacciatore (damn right that’s American, as American as “that’s amore,” baby) with molten chocolate cakes to finish.