Pizza Night

On Saturday we served pizza to our nanny. We were running late and didn't have our dinner on the table until after she'd already arrived to babysit Anya for the evening. So, as probably would be natural not only in Tajikistan but in the US, too, we offered her some -- in Tajikistan the difference is, you set her up a plate and don't ask, since she will inevitably say "no thank you," yet to simply accept her refusal and not give her any would actually be pretty rude.

(Normally she doesn't eat meals at our house at all, neither food we've cooked nor food she's brought, partly because I actually try to schedule her hours so that they naturally stretch in between realistic mealtimes. I know some people here who provide food for nannies or others working for them, although my guess is that this is not typical in Tajikistan. Really I just don't want to feel guilty for not feeding her on any given routine day; the reason we hired her wasn't to have another mouth to worry about feeding!)

Anyway, this was the typical Walkenfeld pizza special: Bittman pizza crust with a touch of cornmeal for crunchiness, pepperoni, mozzarella (hey, in Dushanbe it is not a given), mushrooms, and artichoke hearts. As Surayo was feeding Anya her dinner (pelmeni!), she saw that Dan was very active in the cooking process -- in fact, my usual role in the pizza preparation is limited to making the dough and helping cut or grate the toppings, and then Dan takes over with the kneading and stretching of the dough, the actual construction, and the decision of when it is done.

Surayo commented that, in her family, she's never had a male relative cook anything for her -- which she has actually told me before (when I offered her a leftover scone that Dan had made), but it is still kind of surprising to me.

We were partly just trying to make conversation, I guess, but Dan and I started trying to explain or put into context the fact that Dan plays an active role in cooking this dish: we explained how he worked in a pizza parlor when he was in high school; how I had no idea when we started making pizza at home how to stretch and form the dough onto the pizza pan, so the default from the start had been for Dan to do it; how, when we started making pizza, we were both grad students, so it wasn't like one of us worked and the other tended house...

To some extent I think she understands all of these things. Her younger brother actually has lived and studied in the US for several years now, although she has never visited. But I also find it funny in such situations how little of some things can really be translated. It occurred to me later, of course, how in the Central Asian (or at least Tajik) context, the fact that a man is a student or not working or just plain out of work does not have any bearing on whether he cooks actual meals in the kitchen. Here, those are just completely unrelated aspects of life for most people, just like the idea of a couple building the elements of their life in relative equality, on equal footing, let's say, I think also really has no relevance or basis in reality.

There's nothing wrong with it, really -- it's just strikingly a subject on which it is really hard to find a bridge point; just one of those things that make you realize how far apart we are. (And probably we are the ones who are atypical from a global point of view, not the Tajiks.) I guess I'm a true Westerner: in the end I'm pretty glad that's the cultural context I grew up in, where Dan will do about 2/3 of the pizza-making, and everything that follows along with that.