Bring a Plate

The chickpeas have been sitting in their bowl since last night, fat and smug, and the kitchen window is open because it's November and Auckland has finally decided to commit to spring. Somebody down the road is burning sausages. That smell does what it always does to me. It sends me back fourteen years, to a backyard I couldn't find again if you paid me.

I'd been in the country about six weeks. I shared a house with two flatmates, and one Friday the quieter of the two, Liam, said his aunt was having people round on Saturday and I should come. "Just bring a plate," he said.

So I brought a plate.

I mean I found one. A clean white dinner plate, the good one, and I was standing at the front door holding it in both hands like a waiter who'd lost his restaurant when Liam came down the hall and stopped.

"What's that for?"

"You said bring a plate."

He looked at the plate. He looked at me. To his credit he didn't laugh for at least three seconds. Then he explained that a plate, here, means food on the plate, something to share, and that if I turned up holding crockery his aunt would assume I was either a comedian or in trouble.

We had ninety minutes. I made what my mum made, in a panic. Chana masala, from tinned chickpeas because there was no time to soak, in the biggest pot in the house. Enough for a wedding. And because I was nervous I put in the chilli I'd have used at home, plus a bit more for courage.

* * *

The backyard was long and green and slightly damp, with plastic chairs in four colours. Cicadas were going in the hedge like a faulty fridge. At the far end a barbecue the size of a small car was smoking away, tended by three men who stood around it the way men stand around an open bonnet.

Liam's aunt met us at the back step. Sixties, sunhat, reading glasses on a cord. She looked at the pot in my arms with the expression of a woman being handed a live animal.

"Oh," she said. "Lovely. What is it?"

"Chickpea curry."

"Is it hot?"

"A little," I said, which was the first lie I told in New Zealand.

She put it on the trestle table between a pavlova and a bowl of something beige, and gave it a wide berth.

The beige thing was where I went wrong, or right. It sat beside a big open bag of plain salted chips, and people kept wandering past, dragging a chip through it and wandering off looking peaceful. "Onion dip," Liam said when I asked, as if I'd asked him what the sky was.

My face must have done exactly what hers had done at my pot. The stuff was the colour of a rental wall. I took one chip and a cautious smear, to be polite.

And then another. Salty and sour and cold, with that sweet cooked onion flavour underneath, and the chip snapping in the middle of it. I stood by that bowl for twenty minutes. I'm not proud.

Somewhere in there one of the barbecue men called out "Snag?" and Liam showed me the ritual. A single slice of white bread, a sausage laid across it corner to corner, a heap of fried onions, a line of tomato sauce, and the whole thing folded round like a nappy. "Standing up," he said. "Don't sit down with it. That's weird."

I ate it on the wet grass with sauce running down my wrist and onion falling on my shoes, and I thought, these people have been hiding this.

Around six, the aunt finally went to the pot. I watched her from the dip, where I had more or less moved in. A small spoonful, with some rice. She chewed. She went pink, and then a colour I associate with post boxes. Then she took a second spoonful, which is the moment I loved her.

Over she came, with tears at the corners of her eyes. "That," she said, "is wicked. How do you make it?"

"How do you make this?" I said, pointing at the dip.

She laughed and dug in her handbag, came out with a receipt and a pen, and wrote on the back of it against the fence. One tin reduced cream. One packet onion soup. Stir. Squeeze of lemon, more than you think. Fridge for an hour if you can wait, which you can't.

"That's it?"

"That's it. Your turn."

So I talked and she wrote on a second receipt. Soak them overnight, properly, none of today's tins. Boil them soft and keep the water. Onion goes into the hot oil and stays there until it's brown, really brown, not golden and not shy, which takes longer than you want. That's the whole secret, honestly, and most people rush it. Ginger and garlic. Then the powders: cumin, coriander, turmeric, chilli (here she gave me a look and I said "less"). Tomatoes, cooked down until the oil comes away at the sides and the whole thing stops tasting of tomato and starts tasting of itself. Chickpeas in, a splash of their water, squash a few against the pot. Garam masala at the end. Lemon right before you eat.

"Lemon," she said, pleased. "Same as mine."

That night I sent my mum a voice note describing the dip. Her reply opened with a long silence and then, "Cream from a tin? And soup powder?" in the voice she saves for a son who has bought a second-hand scooter without asking. Two days later another note arrived. "What kind of onion soup."

* * *

Mr. Mummu lives two doors up from me now, a round, kind man with a notebook labelled Urgent that holds mostly shopping lists. Last summer I told him about the dip. Mummu nodded gravely and said it needed help.

He took his version to a street barbecue in January. He'd added garam masala, then green chilli, then curry leaves fried with mustard seeds, then a fistful of coriander, and by the time he'd finished it was yellow and smelled like his mother's kitchen. He set it down beside the chips, proud as a bridegroom.

Nobody touched it. Around eight a boy of about seven tugged his sleeve and asked, very politely, if he had any of the normal dip.

Mummu told me this on his front step, turning the notebook over in his hands.

"I gave them my curry," he said, "and called it their dip. You can swap recipes. You can't swap who's eating."

* * *

Tonight the onion has gone properly brown and the tomatoes are getting there, the oil just beginning to show at the edges as if it's thinking about it. On the bench beside the stove, in a glass bowl, the dip is waiting for its lemon.

The receipt is propped against the salt jar. It went through the wash once and it's soft as cloth now, the ink faded to the grey of old pencil, a crease worn white down the middle. I don't need to read it any more. I keep it out anyway.

My mum still asks, every few months, whether I've "made the soup dip". I always say yes. She always says "hm", which in her language means she's thinking about trying it and will deny this.

A lemon, cut in half. One half goes over the bowl, the other over the pot, and I leave the two squeezed halves face down on the bench, side by side, leaking a little onto the wood.