Issue 7: Sesame, poppyseed and everything bagels + The Namesake

A novel that follows a family through decades, and an iconic food from the city where the main character has formative experiences.

Apr 01, 2022

Welcome to Good Book/Good Bread! Every two weeks, I recommend a book I love, and bake a delicious bread that fits with an aspect of the story. Haven’t subscribed yet? Get on the list here!

This week: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and chewy, seed-topped bagels.

Part 1: Good Book

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Setting the tone

(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Redding, released in 1968, the year we meet the Ganguli family.

In a nutshell

The Namesake is a 2003 book that follows a Bengali family who move from Calcutta to Massachusetts in the late 60’s. Shortly after arriving, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli welcome their first child, a son. Ashima, honouring tradition, awaits a letter from her grandmother in Calcutta instructing her what to name the baby. She remains patient as the months pass with no letter, until eventually sad news comes that there will never be a letter. Ashima and her husband Ashoke, reluctantly decide to continue calling the boy Gogol, an informal nickname they had used as they waited for word of his “real” name. This sets in motion a series of confusing and tangled events related to Gogol’s name and how he envisions himself in relation to it. The Namesake follows Gogol through the decades, as he navigates identity, the power names can confer on self image, and the diverging experiences of immigrants and their first generation children. The Namesake author Jhumpa Lahiri is an elegant and understated writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies.

Three things I loved about The Namesake

1. The way food is consistently used to illustrate connection

I always find it more enjoyable to read a book with vivid descriptions of food, and The Namesake never misses an opportunity to include the textures, cooking methods and aromas of a meal. The descriptions of food are also used to signify connection in a really beautiful way. When we meet Ashima on the first page of the book, she’s standing in her kitchen on a humid August day, “combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones.” Through food, Lahiri shows us the longing Ashima feels for her home right before she begins a family in a new place, one she feels unattached to.

We see the mirror image of this two decades later, when Gogol dates a woman in New York. He finds himself strongly drawn into her family through the elaborate and thoughtful meals they eat together every evening. A lot of the food they carefully prepare is new to him, things never eaten in his home growing up. This new family welcomes him to their table without a thought, allowing him to experiment with a new connection to family through food.

2. Shows the power of long-held family secrets

Gogol’s name, one his parents never intended to be his permanent one, comes from Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, who was a Russian novelist, short story writer and playwright. He was also one of Ashoke’s favourite writers, and had special significance to him because of an incident when he was as a young man in India. We see in The Namesake that despite Ashoke’s strong devotion to his family, he struggles sharing his inner life with them. By inadvertently concealing the origins and importance of Gogol’s name, he misses out on a real opportunity to grow closer to his son. I found it really moving as the reader to see the slow fallout of a family secret over decades, and how it rendered Gogol compass-less.

3. I developed a real attachment to the Ganguli family

The Namesake is my favourite kind of fiction book. It follows a family over decades, slowly building a layered and meaningful picture of their experiences and how they relate throughout generations. Lahiri lets the reader observe the very different trajectories and emotional landscapes of the different family members. By contrasting the challenges and longing the Ganguli parents feel with the tension and identity turmoil their son endures, I felt a lot of empathy for each of them. Reading The Namesake, you spend so much time with just a few characters from this one family, and at different stages in their lives. Through this, I found myself attached to them and surprisingly emotionally affected when major events took place in their family.

Notable passage

“For by now, he’s come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hates having constantly to explain. He hates having to tell people it doesn’t mean anything ‘in Indian.’ He hates having to wear a nametag on his sweater at Model United Nations Day at school. He even hates signing his name at the bottom of his drawings in art class. He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. He hates having to live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second.”

If you like The Namesake, read this:

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Part 2: Good Bread

Seed-Topped Bagels

Why this bread for this book?

I chose bagels for this book because they are a daily staple of life in New York, the city where Gogol experiences some of his most fundamental explorations of identity. Gogol is drawn to many aspects of the city, from the architecture to the new people to the anonymity. Notably though, he loves it precisely because his parents do not.

“He prefers New York, a place which his parents do not know well, whose beauty they are blind to, which they fear,” writes Lahiri. The city is important in his exploration of who he wants to be, and the quiet, passive rejection of his parents’ lives. I also thought the circular shape of bagels was a great representation of the path Gogol takes in his romantic relationships, reaching far from the familiar before landing close to home.

Recipe

I used Claire Saffitz’s guide to making bagels in The New York Times, which you can view here. Saffitz’s guide is really clear and straightforward, and she also has a great video which is really helpful for some of the techniques, like how to roll the bagels dough and connect the ends. The recipe has a lot of little steps, but it isn’t very difficult. It calls for barley malt syrup both in the dough and for boiling, but I couldn’t find any in my town, so I used Saffitz’s substitution suggestion of molasses. I think it worked fine, but she does say it is the barley malt syrup that gives these bagels their distinctive crusty, malty flavour.

I’ve made bagels a handful of times, and find they consistently turn out great, which is a real confidence boost given the emotional rollercoaster of sourdough bread making I’ve been riding for years (think spending a full day on bread, uncovering a Dutch oven lid and finding a fermented frisbee).

The most fun part of this recipe is boiling the bagels and watching them puff up, and then rolling them in seeds. I used poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and an everything bagel mix I got at the grocery store, with the latter being my favourite variety. The bagels stored well for a few days in a sealed container, and then I pre-sliced the remaining and froze them.

Works well with:

Tuna salad
Smoked salmon, cream cheese, red onion, fresh dill
Fried egg and cheddar

On my list:

A new release I’m looking forward to reading:

That Noodle Life by Stephanie Le and Mike Le, creators of the James Beard Award-winning I am a food blog, here.

A bread recipe I can’t wait to bake:

Japanese Milk Bread from King Arthur Baking, here.