Mariana Duarte runs a community kitchen in Lisbon where migrant women cook for each other once a week. Yusuf Demir grew up above his parents’ bakery in Berlin-Neukölln. They met over a video call in August and talked for two hours. This is an edited part of that conversation.
Yusuf Demir: When people ask where I’m from, I never know what to say. But if they ask what we ate on Sundays, I can answer immediately.
Mariana Duarte: That is exactly why the kitchen works. Nobody has to explain their papers at the stove. You explain your grandmother’s hands instead.
Yusuf Demir: My father changed his bread recipe three times to sell it to Germans. The fourth version, the one we ate at home, he never sold. That was the one that stayed Turkish.
Mariana Duarte: Every woman in the kitchen has one of those. The public recipe and the private one. The private one is the only document my own grandmother ever gave me.
Yusuf Demir: Do you think food is how we belong, or how we remember we don’t?
Mariana Duarte: Both. That’s why it’s worth cooking.
