The Proustian Nature of Shrimp Salad

So every week, I add a new dish to our menu. It starts out innocently enough, usually from what is particularly fresh in the market. This week, I decided to do a simple shrimp salad. Shit. All of a sudden, all of these memories I have from this dish -- smells, people, stories -- came flooding in. So strong that for a while, I simply couldn't do much of anything. I thought about my mom, who despite keeping a kosher home, adored shrimp salad outside the house. And then my mom['s mom,

Bobo, who used to say that God really didn't intend for these pretty creatures to be non-kosher. I channeled the famous African-American southern chef, Edna Lewis for the preparation of my salad (which calls for jerusalem artichokes, btw) -- and that brought on another wave of thoughts having to do with the BLM movement now and the profound influence she and others have had on southern cuisine. Who woulda thunk it? All I wanted to do was to make shrimp salad.