My Mother Does Not Believe Arugula Exists

Arugula is the go-to leaf in most routine restaurant salads, often accompanied by a crowd-pleasing combo of endive, frisée, goat cheese, walnuts, and beets. Food snobs might see it as relatively plebeian—compared to the relatively exotic mizuna, tatsoi, and mâche, anyway—but in my mother's mouth arugula is always met with a joyous surprise. "Ohhh…I love this!" she says, every time upon this re­curring discovery, as if this enigmatic leaf could not be defined, traced, or procured by a mere mortal.

It's just arugula, I remind her. "Aluga­what?"

I offered to make her an arugula salad, but she said that the leaf was impossible to find. I told her that one could easily buy arugula at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, even Safeway (with the kind of snobbery with which one addresses Safeway). She looks at me like I was a child proposing daydreams gossiped by an imaginary friend, that in my campaign for adulthood I had formed the marketing term "arugula" to sell lies.

The word arugula was passed down from the Italian word rucola, which comes from arugula's botanical name, Eruca sativa. A native of Mediterranean regions and eastward, it gained popularity in the United States during the fusion movement of the '70s, in whose metaphorical "melting pot" of America chefs began tossing in disparate ingredients. That the British simply call it rocket might lyrically imply the explosive bite in each peppery leaf, as I had thought, but it actually comes from the French roquette. Its seeds may be used in flavoring oils and even as aphrodisiacs, as the ancient Greeks used to do. Bed a plate for pasta, toss it into soup, top of a pizza, or folded into rice. Its bite is pervasive, yet accommodating—a singular note.

"Aluga­what?"

"Mom."

I remember once, around the age of 6, my mom asked me to close my eyes and pray for what I most wanted to eat. I lowered my lids, immediately envisioning a pork shoulder laying in its own fat's reduction of orange, star anise, brown sugar, and ginger—the meat sagging off the bone in some shameless display of itself, stickily covered in glistening juices. "Ti pang," I told her. She told me to open my eyes and there it was, a manifested prayer clear as day. For the next decade or so, I believed in God for this very reason, in the foxhole of memory, until the more rational and adult part of me eventually worked out the logic: She knew what I would say. It was rhetorical question.

I will always be that child she feeds, never the other way around. We try to pay our debts with good intentions: a beef Wellington for my dad, a bougie arugula salad for my mom—folded in with fig and goat cheese, dressed with balsamic and currants, dusted with celery salt—or the countless backlog of dishes I perceive owing my aunts, uncles, and my best of friends. I guess I should be flattered, that love often moves in only one direction. That I have been on the receiving end of this deal is something I humbly swallow.

Recently, I stopped explaining every time my mom asks what arugula is, letting her fall into a self­-sustaining myth by not challenging her truth. Besides, in the encyclopedia of one's mouth, we find and settle on our own terms. Now I simply agree, digging my fork in to corroborate the moment. "Wow, this is good," I say, which isn't a lie anyway. She eyes me the affirmative, gathering a stray leaf into her mouth with the quick nibbling motions of a rabbit, as if transmitted to some redolent garden in a past she cannot remember, but always comes back to.