Bex O’Brian

Word Count 745

My mother’s favourite weekend breakfast was kippers. With dread, I’d hear her bodging around the kitchen, and soon the house would begin to fill with a pungent, salty, fishy smell. No matter how much I flailed about, she had no sympathy for my exaggerated pantomime of a dying daughter. “Go sit on the front steps if it so bothers you.” But it was winter in Canada and cold. If I made the mistake of touching something that had come in contact with the fish and then began to rub my eye, it would swell shut, and each breath I took sounded like a squeezebox. I felt like ripping my skin off. 

I was born allergic to fish, nuts, some fresh fruit, mould, trees, grass, dust, wool, and cats. With terrible eczema thrown in just for flair. Growing up, there were no concessions made to my allergies, so much so that my mother and father seemed to subsist entirely on fish. I was often scratching, wheezing, snotty, and swollen. This annoyed my father. Who likes to sit opposite a child covered in weeping sores, their eyes swollen shut, while trying to enjoy their fish and chips? But Mother maintained that if she never served another piece of mackerel or fried smelts, something else would have set me off. Which was true. On any particular day, a myriad of devils might be bedeviling me. 

So many mysteries. Why could I have apple pie but not a candied apple? Peach cobbler but not a peach? Banana bread (no nuts) but not a banana split? Why could I down handfuls of blueberries but not blackberries or raspberries?

The answer, which came late in life, is that cooking kills the pollens on fruit. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with trees, wool, or cats, for that matter.

I don’t know the moment I discovered the burn, though logic dictates that an itch, with its incredible will, has to be manhandled by something with greater tenacity. I wish I could say that I mistakenly rubbed my eyes after chopping jalapeños. But this was Canada during the sixties. There were no hot peppers. The revelation must have come from my parent’s omnipresent glass of whiskey. Kid fingers get in everything. I remember perfectly the feeling, the raw joy of pain killing the itch. 

It would be many years before the burn turned into a culinary obsession. Like all love affairs, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when heat became the driving force of my life. My husband once brought a hot sauce home from a Caribbean trip, and we treated it as if it was plutonium. But I was still regularly dousing my eyeballs with whiskey, so perhaps my mind, always scouting around for new sensations, thought, if the burn feels that good in the eyes, imagine what fun your mouth could be having. 

The world of heat is a big and wondrous place. Hatch, Szechuan, Indian chilli pickle. I love them all. Even better is knowing, as I’m cutting up some serranos, or smashing dried chillis to ignite my concoction and turn it a lovely red, that my eyes were a mere rub away from adding to the experience. Yes, there have been hairy moments when I think I might have gone too far and blinded myself or overloaded my taste buds to the point they can’t register one more bomb of salt, heat, and fat. But time heals, heat abates. And truthfully, my constant quest is for sensation. I’m not looking to immolate myself.

The burn gave me something else as well. It unleashed me from all constraints of culinary rules.  With my palate severely limited, I go to absurd lengths to create a combination of flavours and textures that are worthy of the heat. I also think being dyslexic helps. My brain is used to thinking around what it can’t think of. It is not unusual for me to have a roll-up consisting of rice paper with a heavy smear of Indian chilli pickle, cabbage, jerk chicken (make my own jerk), pea soup (make that too, so it really like a pea paté) stewed serranos, and feta cheese. A taste sensation! And that’s my breakfast. Because heat has also taught me, of the four or five times we get to eat in a day, that not one morsel should be wasted on the bland, the subtle, or on mere convenience. 

Heat is my art, if a little hard on the gut. 

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Bex lives mostly in France with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, The Last Lover. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.