Last week, she sent a voice message. “I’m coming home for two weeks in December,” she said. “But I’m not cooking. You are. I’m teaching you how to make my Singapore laksa from scratch. We’re going to make so much noise in that kitchen that the neighbors call the cops.”
I have already bought the coconut milk. I have sourced fresh turmeric. I have cleared our calendar.
Because here is the truth about the taste of a sister-in-law who traveled abroad: it is not a eulogy for what was lost. It is a map for what can still be shared. Distance changes the recipe, but it cannot kill the appetite for connection.
So tonight, I will toast the belachan. I will debone the chicken. I will cry a little into the sambal—because it’s spicy, and because love, when translated across oceans, always brings a tear to the eye.
And when Elena walks through the door in December, smelling of jet fuel and jasmine rice, I will hand her a spoon. No words. Just the taste of home, remade to include the world.
Final Note to the Reader:
If you have a sister-in-law, a brother, a cousin, or a friend who has taken their recipes—and their heart—to a foreign land, do not mourn the meals you no longer share. Ask for their new favorites. Cook them badly at first. Burn the rice. Cry over the chili. Because the taste of someone who has traveled abroad is not the taste of absence. It is the taste of growth, of courage, and of the endless human ability to say:
“I have changed. But I still want you to know me.”
Now, go preheat your oven. And send that text message. Taste of My Sister in law Who Traveled Abroad -...
Last week, I tried to make her Tom Kha Gai for the first time alone. I burned the lemongrass. I added too much chili. My brother ate it anyway, smiling with his eyes wet.
“It tastes like her,” he said.
And he was right. Not because I’d matched her skill, but because I’d finally understood what she’d been teaching us all along: food isn’t just about flavor. It’s about presence. Memory. The taste of someone who loves you from across the world.
Dish: Cá Kho Tộ (caramelized catfish in a clay pot) Flavor notes: Salty-sweet, pungent, sticky, with black pepper biting at the end. What it taught us: That caramel can be savory. That patience (simmering for two hours) is an ingredient.
By J.M. Costa
There is a specific kind of hunger that has nothing to do with an empty stomach. It is a hollow ache that lodges itself just behind the sternum, triggered not by the sight of a sizzling steak or a warm loaf of bread, but by the absence of a person. For me, that hunger has a name: Elena. And it has a flavor profile that defies the logic of geography.
Elena is my sister-in-law. Two years ago, she packed two suitcases, kissed her brother (my husband, Marco) on the forehead, hugged me so tightly I felt my ribs creak, and boarded a one-way flight to Singapore. She left behind a quiet suburb in Ohio to chase a corporate promotion halfway around the world. What she also left behind was her kitchen—a chaotic, fragrant laboratory where she had spent years perfecting the alchemy of family recipes and global fusion.
This article is not merely about food. It is about the taste of a person who is no longer at your table. It is about how distance distills memory into flavor, and how a single spoonful can make an ocean disappear. Last week, she sent a voice message
Cooking Elena’s Singaporean recipe was an act of translation. She had written the instructions with the precision of a cartographer mapping an unknown land. “Debone the chicken. Save the bones. Never apologize for using too much ginger.”
When I finally sat down to eat—delicate poached chicken, fragrant rice cooked in the rendered fat and pandan leaves, a side of cucumber slices, and that volcanic sambal—I understood. This was not the Elena of empanadas. This was the Elena who had learned to find heat in the tropics, who had argued with a wet market vendor over the freshness of blue prawns, who had learned that “spicy” means something entirely different at the equator.
The taste had changed. It was bolder, more complex, tinged with a loneliness that only comes from eating alone in a foreign country. There was a sharpness—the sting of chili—that hadn’t been there before. But beneath it, the same warmth. The same heart.
I called her immediately. “It tastes like you,” I said. “But a new you.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Food is a diary,” she finally replied. “You read me.”
Three months ago, a cardboard box arrived at our doorstep. It was battered, stamped with Singaporean customs stickers, and smelled faintly of dried shrimp and lemongrass. Inside, Elena had orchestrated a symphony.
There were vacuum-sealed packets of kaya (coconut jam), a jar of sambal belacan so pungent it made my eyes water, and a handwritten, laminated recipe card for Hainanese chicken rice. But the centerpiece was a small, unassuming Ziploc bag filled with a dark, crumbly powder.
A sticky note attached read: “This is belachan (dried shrimp paste). Toast it. Grind it. Add it to anything. This is the taste of my new home. Now it’s yours.” Final Note to the Reader: If you have
That weekend, I attempted her recipe. As the belachan hit a hot, dry pan, the kitchen filled with a smell that defied easy description—funky, oceanic, smoky, and alarmingly animalistic. Marco walked in and coughed. “What died in here?”
“Elena,” I said, smiling.
There are some people who leave a mark not through grand speeches or dramatic gestures, but through the quiet, lingering memory of a single shared meal. For me, that person is my sister-in-law — and her mark tastes like lemongrass, coconut milk, and the slight burn of bird’s eye chili.
When she first told us she was moving abroad for work, my brother joked that we’d miss her cooking more than her company. We laughed. But after she left, the kitchen felt different — quieter, less fragrant, almost shy.
Before she left, she had spent a decade traveling through Southeast Asia, Europe, and South America. She wasn’t a chef by profession, but she collected recipes the way others collect souvenirs: with stories attached, with mistakes folded in, with love stirred slowly into simmering pots.
What made her cooking special wasn’t exotic ingredients or technical flair. It was the way she translated her travels into flavors we could understand. A pesto from Genoa became our summer pasta salad. Shakshuka from Tel Aviv turned sleepy Sunday mornings into celebrations. Mochi from Tokyo appeared during winter holidays, dusted with roasted soybean powder.
Each dish came with a story: the elderly vendor in Chiang Mai who taught her to pound curry paste, the landlord in Lisbon who shared his grandmother’s caldo verde, the night market in Ho Chi Minh City where she ate bánh xèo sitting on a plastic stool.
Through her, we traveled without leaving our dining table.
