Scenes From A Mexican Kitchen
I wanted Mama Nona to teach me how to cook Fugi’s favorite Mexican foods, but it wasn’t that easy. Our cooking dates required elaborate pantomimes and long strings of instructions; as soon as I thought I understood just one word, she was already on the next sentence. Half the ingredients were completely new to me and even when I learned how to say “¿Qué es eso?” I didn’t understand her identification of the object anyway. And I learned to my dismay what trouble we could get into if I seemed to be engaging her in conversation.
I also learned that she generally didn’t measure anything. I know, I know, this is a measure of master cookmanship, but when you’re new to all of this, trying to estimate whether her hand held a half cup or a third was pretty difficult. The daughters used to say things like, “No one makes frijoles like Mama,” and of course they didn’t – they were using different-sized measuring equipment.
She did have very small hands, but a lifetime of cooking and cleaning did not roughen them. They seemed to always be as soft and warm as the dough rising for flour tortillas. Once she rolled out this dough, she could fearlessly flip the tortillas back and forth on a dry griddle. I always burned my fingers and I asked her how she could flip them without burning herself. “I do get burned,” her translator said. “It just doesn’t bother me anymore.”
Though she came from a hot country, the kitchen heat was often too much in an un-airconditioned old house. She wore thin housedresses sewn from old bed sheets and curtains. When it got too hot, she’d lift the hem slightly and flap it around her knees. She always had a towel nearby to dab her face.
The family came from the central plains of Mexico, from the state of Guanajuato; Fugi was one of the first family members to be born in the U.S. Most days they ate plain, poor-folks food heavy on beans, soups, corn, and peppers. On special occasions, all the women would gather to make Mole or tamales. When they ate meat, they ate everything. Once they ordered a whole pig roast from a Mexican store (the pig was obviously too big to cook at home). The raw internal organs were wrapped for later meals, and the children fought over the tail, feet, and eyes. Later that week, I came home from a job search and found a pot boiling on the stove. There was a brain in the pot. I convinced Fugi to eat at Burger King that night.
Growing up in rural America, I just didn’t have exposure to a variety of foods and cultures. My Mom, like many others, cooked quasi-ethnic foods that actual ethnic groups would never be able to identify. She used to make something called “Spanish pork chops” which were chops topped with rice, onion, bell pepper, and tomato. Her Chinese food came from a can of La Choy. We never even heard of “soft tacos”. So I was unprepared for menudo (soup with beef intestines), cow tongue tacos, and agua de arroz (sweet rice water). I wasn’t used to the two plastic margarine containers on each family’s table – one containing pickled jalapenos with carrots, the other containing the salsa of the week. These were eaten at almost every meal.
Mama Nona was Queen of the kitchen, so I didn’t discover a secret about her kitchen until she was gone on vacation. Fugi came home late one night and I went down to find something for him to eat. As soon as I flicked on the light, I saw brown blobs skittering everywhere – walls, floor, ceiling. I shrieked.
He came running down and I repeated the light trick.
“Yeah, cockroaches,” He said.
“The kitchen has cockroaches?” I hissed. “I don’t think that’s very sanitary!”
He shrugged. “It’s an old house. They have bugs.”
“No, no, no, huh-uh. There’s people who get rid of them.”
“Mami had an exterminator out, but he wanted too much money. All she’s got is Social Security.”
The next day, I had him drive me to pick up bug bombs. We used two rather than one, and avoided the house for the entire day. That night we came home to an unbearable chemical stink and piles of dead bugs on the kitchen floor. When we finished sweeping them up, we filled 2/3 of a tall kitchen garbage bag. Then we scrubbed every single thing in the kitchen.
Three days later, the cockroaches started coming back.
Published by angelawd on August 15th, 2008 tagged My Ex-Life
August 16th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
This story is amazing. Reading that pary of your life and now … you’re a suburban mom of teens?? Keep up the incredible story telling. I can’t wait for the next one.