Free Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi

with a full black beard and those same thick bifocals. He’d come to America to get an MA in engineering administration. He’d ended up at Montana Tech mostly by accident. He liked the name of the state and the fact that it was close to Canada, a country that he associated with skiing and glaciers and massive, marauding polar bears. He liked the idea of winter; he’d never seen snow. All of this information I gathered surreptitiously, piecemeal, over the course of two decades. I listened whenever anyone told stories about my dad, and I tended to write them down in my journal as soon as I got home.
    Matchmaking is, I think, every Egyptian’s favorite hobby. One night in November 1977, my mother and father found themselves invited to Wada’s apartment for
koubeiba
. The three of them cooked the meal together. My father loved to cook Egyptian food; he was in an ebullient mood; he told stories of going to the horse races in Cairo as a boy, of climbing wrought-iron fences to steal mangoes off of giant mango trees, of the city under Nasser, of his early memories of going to the Dar el-Obra el-Masreyya, the Cairo Opera House on Gezira Island.
    Thinking of that night they met, I imagined the scent of the sizzling lamb. The rich taste of the pine nuts. I’d eaten that meal fifty times, and yet there was always something so elusive about it, an aftertaste of mystery and pure longing. I imagined my mother making the filling, imagined her hands curling around the long handlesof Wada’s cast-iron cookware. I imagined the sound of Wada tenderizing the lamb, stripping it off the bone with a carving knife and then pounding it with a square meat mallet, holding it up to the light to see if the membrane of the muscle had become translucent, just like I’d seen her do a hundred times myself. Then I could hear her turning the handle of the meat grinder.
    Koubeiba
is like a lot of the dishes of the Middle East: claimed by every culture, lauded by every society as the food of its own people, of its own masses, of the Syrian or Egyptian or Algerian street. The Lebanese will tell you that their
koubeiba
is the real
koubeiba
, that Beirut is in fact where the dish originated, and that it should really be called
kibbe
—which is its proper name. Cypriots will educate you about the ancient way to make
koubes
, and will tell you how that dish voyaged from their small island out into the world long before the days of the Mediterranean empires, before the Phoenicians or the Achaemenids or the Greeks or even the Romans. And a Turk? Never ask a Turk who invented
içli köfte
. You are disparaging his honor by even thinking of the question.
    My mother did something that was almost unbelievable. Immediately before they made the fritters, she looked at the mixture and smelled it. Then she dipped a finger into the raw ground meat. And she tasted it. And then she turned to my father and Wada and said: “Star anise. Maybe half a teaspoon.”
    “My heart,” Wada said, clutching her chest and staggering backward. “It is broken.”
    “You’ve broken her heart,” my father echoed, eyes full of mock indignation. “I can see its pieces there, on the floor.”
    “I cannot breathe,” Tante Wada said.
    “Breathe, Wada, breathe,” my father said. “She may need CPR! Wada? Do you need CPR?”
    “I don’t know,” Wada said. “I see light. I see heaven.”
    “Wada, how about this: Why not let her change the recipe?” my father suggested. “This is America—anything’s possible. This beautiful young lady deserves a chance to add to the recipe, no?”
    “My grandmother,” Wada said, “is frowning down on us, God rest her soul.”
    But after dinner, after the perfect
koubeiba
, after the addition (in pencil) of
star anise, 1/4 teaspoon
to the recipe card, after the tiny cups of esophagus-stripping Turkish coffee, the three of them sat in the living room and listened to a record. My father had brought it: Mozart’s
Magic Flute
. As the music