Memoir of fatherless life shows how Sasha Martin found her way in the world

“Life From Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness” by Sasha Martin (National Geographic, 352 pages, $25)

“There is no father listed on my birth certificate – just a blank spot underscored.” Food blogger, Sasha Martin (“Global Table Adventures”) has penned a memoir of a fatherless existence, a rough and tumble childhood, and years spent trying to find her way.

The author’s mother plays the largest role in her life saga, even when they are separated for years at a time. Her mother, who is half Italian and half Hungarian, exposes Martin and her older brother Michael to extended family in the Boston area and to their half-siblings in New Jersey, but makes sure they never know their father. Her parents’ early relationship is described as “explosive and like a postcard of the seventies, riddled with drugs and chaos.” Martin doesn’t even discover her father’s name or see a picture of him until she is an adult and he has already died.

The single mother and two children live in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain in an apartment with very little to recommend it. On food stamps and with only wages as a seamstress, their mother is frequently forced to improvise to keep the household together, but she never seems to lack imagination. When there is juice but no milk in the house, Mom informs the kids that milk is boring and pours cranberry juice over their Cheerios.

Mom’s imagination extended to the author’s name that was legally changed multiple times before her 10th birthday. “Each time the Boston courts awarded my foiled and stamped name-change documents, Mom sent out calligraphic announcements to everyone she knew in purple marker on scraps of card stock. She treated each reinvention like a festive occasion…”

Mom is also an adventurous cook as evidenced by her cinnamon raisin pizza that incorporates marinara sauce, mozzarella, olive oil, paprika, and her much-loved cinnamon atop toasted raisin bread. The children are enlisted to help with some of her creations. Saving for months, she was able to gather the ingredients for a marzipan and chocolate German Tree Cake of 21 crepe-like layers, carefully broiled layer by layer. This creation was best accomplished as a two-day endeavor and yielded memorable results. Martin commented about this favorite of her family recipes, “No one needs to make a cake this difficult or fancy but it’s a metaphor for perseverance – for keeping going, one step at a time, against all odds.” Martin includes recipes throughout the book, from unforgettable favorites of her childhood and personal heritage to the international dishes she discovered as an adult.

People outside the family sometimes describe the author’s eccentric, passionate mother as a “troublemaker.” When her unconventional attitudes and view of the world eventually lead a school official to report her to the Department of Social Services as an unstable mother, the two children are sent to what would be the first of many foster homes. In time, friends of their mother from years gone by, Pierre and Patricia Dumont, agree to be legal guardians for the two siblings and take them along with their own three children to live in Atlanta and in subsequent years in Paris and Luxembourg. Pierre is the first father figure in the children’s lives and they begin to call him Papa. Patricia is just called Patricia. This family situation is complicated further for Martin because Patricia appropriates all the cooking duties and doesn’t let her young ward into the kitchen. Martin has warm memories of cooking with her mother back in the Jamaica Plain kitchen that also served as a closet, sewing room, and living room. But the Dumonts’ gleaming, well-appointed kitchen is off limits to Martin. As she desperately seeks to rekindle the memory of a mother she hasn’t seen in years or to at least make a connection with Patricia, who should be her mother figure now, she feels an unassuaged, aching need to cook.

Michael’s deep-seated behavior problems bring the family to grief and Martin in turn acts out in anti-social ways that further alienate her from the Dumonts. Emotionally adrift, she decides to go to a college close to Boston and eventually reconnects with her mother, goes to culinary school, moves to Tulsa for a summer internship, and ends up staying there to build a new life. It is only after falling in love, marrying and having a baby that she decides to set a goal for herself to “cook the world” and blog about her culinary adventures.

She starts alphabetically with Afghanistan, cooking one meal per country, one country per week for a projected 195 countries. The endeavor is not without incident. One recipe leaves her incapacitated with a toxic reaction to a foreign ingredient she knows too little about. She is surprised by seemingly coincidental connections with countries as she cooks their native dishes. The night she is cooking Bulgarian, a student selling books rings the doorbell. He is from Bulgaria.

As she cooks, blogs, and slowly begins to let other people into her insular life, she comes to realize the value and personal peace to be found in community. She concludes her world cooking adventure by organizing a huge community dinner incorporating dishes from all 195 countries, enlisting the help of chefs, cooking schools, and caterers from all over the city. When her mother and siblings come to join in, the celebration is complete.

Throughout the chaos of her childhood, the grief and anger of her teen years, and the neediness of her early adulthood, food and cooking provided a constant anchor, a touchstone giving her the much-needed stability to build her life from scratch.

This story was originally published June 21, 2015 at 10:40 AM with the headline "Memoir of fatherless life shows how Sasha Martin found her way in the world."