Harry Pagancoss · Narrative nonfiction
The Foods
They Carry
War, migration, memory, and the people who keep a place alive through its food.
War scatters.But food gathers.
The book
Find the dish.
Follow the rupture.
From markets in Cusco and kitchens in Sorrento to a ramen bowl in the North Georgia mountains, The Foods They Carry follows the people, ingredients, and recipes that move through a world shaped by war, colonization, trade, and migration.
The method stays close to the people carrying the food, so that history arrives through their hands. A family keeps cooking. An ingredient becomes familiar in a new country. A daughter remembers a dish she can no longer find the ingredients to make.
Conflict carries a human cost. The creativity that follows belongs to the people who refuse to let it erase them. This book follows what survives.
Inside the book
Three threads to follow.
A glimpse into the book’s exploration of power, belonging, and the food that survives.
When Conquest Becomes Cuisine
The ingredients that traveled inside the machinery of domination, and the histories of dispossession behind familiar pleasures.
The Kitchen as Refuge
The substitutions, remembered gestures, and surviving details through which cooks rebuild a place they have left behind.
The Myth of Purity
Markets, kitchens, and tables that challenge the idea of a cuisine belonging wholly to one people or one place.
From the manuscript
Two kitchens.
A passage from “The Myth of Purity”
Jackie grew up with two kitchens.
The inside one was for everyday. The outside one was for everything that mattered.
It sat behind the house, open to the air, a corrugated roof over a concrete floor, the jungle pressing green against the edges of the property. A gas burner blackened from years of use. Iron grates supporting pots large enough to feed thirty people without strain. When her father cooked out there, the smell carried across the yard—red rice, fried fish, soy sauce, smoke from the grill tucked close enough to the trees that the leaves caught the heat.
She watched him and helped when he let her. That was how it moved. There were no recipes, no measurements, just standing beside someone long enough that your hands learned what to do, when the watching became the doing.
Her father is gone now.
The outside kitchen in Guam is still there.
Jackie lives in the Pacific Northwest. She makes Beef Tinaktak on the stove in a regular kitchen: ground beef browned and drained, onion and garlic, green beans, coconut milk, salt, pepper, lemon juice, served over white rice.
It tastes the same as it always did, she says.
Exactly the same.
What she cannot make is Gollai Appa'n Lemmai. Breadfruit doesn't grow there. It is hard to find.
That dish remains where she learned it, in an outdoor kitchen that smells of smoke and soy sauce and her father moving between the pots.
The author
A life between kitchens.
Harry Pagancoss is a restaurateur, former television chef, and travel host. He hosted Guided by Flavors, filmed in South America, and created Caravaca Market, an international food hall in Atlanta.
His culinary work has taken him through Peru, Italy, and Spain. He brings to this book a life spent moving between cuisines, cultures, and kitchens, returning to his own table changed by the journey.
About HarryThe work underway
Listening comes first.
Fieldwork is underway, including primary interviews with subjects from Guam, Peru, and the broader diaspora. Further domestic and international reporting is planned.
The book is being developed for publication. Agents and editors can contact Harry about the proposal and sample material.
Publishing enquiriesHarry intends to direct a portion of future royalties from this project toward refugee aid initiatives.