My mother's letters

Before I moved from Romania to the United States, nearly three decades ago, I spent two months in my mother's kitchen. Every single day we cooked a different Romanian recipe together. It was her idea. She knew that once I was on my own, far from home, I would need a way to reach back. "If your hands remember how to make it," she told me, "you will never be completely away." So we cooked. Sarmale one day, ciorbă the next, then mămăligă, then a fish she would buy fresh and fold into a stew with the windows open. I did not understand it fully then. I thought she was teaching me to feed myself. She was teaching me how to carry home in my hands.

For many years after I left, back when people still wrote letters, my mother wrote to me every week. She would tell me the small news — who had married, what the garden on the balcony was doing, how the winter was settling into the city. And at the bottom of every letter, without fail, she would write out a recipe of whatever she had cooked that week. A few lines, her handwriting slanting, sometimes a smudge of something from the stove on the corner of the page.

I still have those letters. I keep them in a recipe book that she gave me before I left home. And I still make those foods.

This is the thread that runs through everything we pour at Dor de Casă™. The wines are chosen to sit beside a plate that means something, and more often than not, that plate comes from one of my mother's letters.

At Dor de Casă™ we are setting a table. Every bottle we carry is here because it belongs beside food that someone, somewhere, made out of love and longing, and many of those dishes are my mother's, copied out in her own hand on paper I will never throw away.

That is what dor is. The tender ache of loving a place you cannot return to, and the quiet joy of finding it again in a smell, a taste, a glass shared with someone at your table. Pour something. Cook something that matters to you. And if you are lucky enough to still get letters from someone who loves you, save them.

More of the recipes and the regions behind them are in Curated Pairings