In Her Footsteps
Kwame Onwuachi
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My earliest memory is not inscribed in my mind in words, but as flavors. I was a toddler, in the kitchen of my apartment in the Bronx. It was just after Christmas—the tree was still up—and my mom served my sister and me shrimp étouffée for dinner. Shrimp stock that had simmered in a well-worn soup pot on the stove infused the dish, along with crawfish tails and crawfish fat. I hadn't been to the sea, but I could taste the sea in it. I didn't know what the trinity was—the onion, celery, and pepper that form the base of so much Creole food—but I could taste the trinity in it. Those flavors—buttery, silky, rich, deep, multileveled—were set into me like scrawls on wet cement. Today, they still mean one thing to me: home.