When Traveling Abroad Alone, I Cooked for Strangers
To date, it was one of my favorite dinner parties
Solo travel is a delicate balance of living in the depths of your mind, in places of shadow and light, and outside of yourself, watching with an acute awareness of how you move in the world. It’s a state I’m intimately familiar with. Most of my friends are partnered and starting families, while I’m still looking. In recent years, I decided to stop waiting for a travel companion.
Still, before a mostly solo seven-week trip around the Black Sea last summer, I worried about feeling lonely and disconnected from my life at home. I was only taking a small suitcase, so there was little room for tokens of home. One I made space for was a small cotton bag my grandmother had sewn that I found in my mother’s closet after she died. It was stocked with twist ties, a neatly folded plastic bag, and a petite stout bronze pepper mill. I don’t recall my mom using it and neither does my father. But I imagined her carrying it to picnics, knowing one of cooking’s most essential truths: a crack or two of fresh pepper can make a dish.
In June, I replaced the ancient peppercorns with fresh ones, added a wine key and a small jar of sea salt to the bag, and tucked it in my suitcase. Perhaps cooking the cuisines of the places I was traveling to…
