Summer Food Series
Although I ended the Summer Food Series two weeks ago, I received one more essay from Julia Andrade Rocha, a student in my colleague Jennifer Cognard-Black’s Books that Cook class. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Jennifer assigned such “foodie novels” as Secrets of the Tsil Café, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Like Water like Chocolate, all of which center on the dynamics of food and family. She notes that the novels “consider how foodways that arise from distinct cultures–Italy and the Americas, Mexico and the United States, traditional Southern cruisine vs. fast-food Coke-and-candy culture–offer distinct ways of nurturing both bodies and souls.”
The final assignment of the course was to write a personal experience with food that was inspired by the novels. As Jennifer points out, Julia’s essay, “with its strong sense of culinary inheritance and the bringing together of disparate foodways within her own experience at college (away from home), is directly tied to these other narratives–to the tension, nostalgia, longing, and healing these novels offer.”
By Julia Andrade Rocha ’11, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
I have never considered myself strictly “from Brazil,” even though both my parents are from there. A lot of times I don’t even feel as though I’m Brazilian—that is, unless I’m cooking. I’m not a person who is big on pride, but I can’t help but feel proud of the dishes I make when they’re ones I’ve inherited from my mother—dishes that she herself inherited from Brazil. Making chicken curry, say, I feel a strange pride because onions and garlic sautéing in oil will always seem “Brazilian” to me. My mother taught me that—how to know when to add the garlic so that it doesn’t burn while the onion softens. No matter what dish the onions and garlic become, I’m more Brazilian for knowing how to cook them.
Even so, I wouldn’t say that most of my cooking is traditional “Brazilian cuisine.” I cannot make frango caipira (actually, I don’t even really like it that much); I would have no idea where to start if I wanted some fried mandioca; I don’t know the main components of a pamonha; and the one time my sisters and I attempted to make pao de queijo, instead of the small and soft, slightly cheesy bread my mom manages to bake every time, we ended up with some freakishly hard potato-looking blobs that grew to the size of my fist. No—I am not skilled when it comes to Brazilian cuisine. But there’s one dish beyond sautéing onions and garlic that is so completely, integrally Brazilian that I simply had no choice but to learn how to cook it.
A common scene when I was younger began with the question, “What’s for dinner?” Each evening as he came into the kitchen, my dad would ask this question, and my mother hated it, even though—or more likely because—she’d heard it every single night for the greater part of their marriage. At that point, Mom usually stirred some food in one of the many pots more vigorously than it deserved. No matter the day of the week or the season of the year, an everyday dinner at our house would always be—and had always been—basically the same thing: something plus rice and beans.
“Rice and beans” is very much a singular—a combination of components that seem to have always gone together, despite the fact that rice was not introduced to the Americas until after Columbus. Only together are rice and beans complete.
I have science to back me up on this assertion: rice and beans aren’t as good for you apart as they are together. If you want all nine essential amino acids to create a complete protein, rice and beans is the way to go. They are integral. It’s integral. So much so that if my family was granted a reprieve from rice and beans and instead were having, say, spaghetti for dinner, my dad would undoubtedly sit down, look around the table for a few seconds, and then ask, “But where’s the rice and beans?”
A perennial side dish, I never considered a bowl of rice and beans as my favorite meal. It simply sat in the fridge, ready to be eaten when my sisters and I complained of there being “nothing” to eat. I mean, really, what childhood friend would look at you and say, “Ahh, I love that too!” if you were to admit your favorite food was rice and beans? Kids don’t care about complete proteins, fiber, having an excellent digestive tract and feeling more in tune with one’s heritage. Now, go forward a few years to when I left home for college, and I’m sure you have already guessed what happened. All of a sudden, nothing tasted right.
The food in the school’s dining hall was great, I suppose, but it was never right: never enough garlic, in need of a bit more salt; and the chefs served this slightly undercooked rice all by itself, never with beans to tempt me. After a few months at college, my homesickness became a desire for rice and beans. Home, longing, the smell of garlic and onions—all encapsulated into this one bowl I imagined sitting patiently in the fridge back home. But I couldn’t go home every weekend. There had to be other options.
“Mae, I need your help.” Two months into my first semester of college, and I told my mom that I wanted to learn properly how to make rice and beans. And even though she had shown me more than once, I still called to make sure I didn’t screw up.
The first time I tried to make rice and beans at the College’s co-operative kitchen was nothing short of a disaster. “Do you have a panela de pressao?” Mae asked. The co-op had a clutter of cast irons, woks and rice steamers mixed in with the recycled jars-for-glasses and mismatched plates, but I didn’t even bother looking for the pressure cooker; I knew we weren’t so well stocked. “Well, you’re going to have to soak the beans overnight, then.”
Of course I hadn’t even opened the bag of dried beans and already I was set back a whole day. It didn’t help that the next day, Mae said I would need to boil the beans for three hours. “Tres horas?” I asked. Well if I didn’t want to serve raw beans, then it would sort of be necessary.
Even so, with an all-night soak and a three-hour hot bubble bath, the beans came out too toothy, and I didn’t have the necessary cilantro. Also, despite the cornucopia of spices and herbs, the co-op’s pantry wasn’t stocked with sazon, a Brazilian spice that gives the beans an almost meaty savoriness. And I managed to make rice that was both sticky and undercooked at the top as well as straight-up burnt on the bottom. When I finally microwaved the salvageable rice, I realized that there is such thing as too much garlic—especially when you forget to add the salt.
So it took a while for me to master rice and beans. Eventually I got a small pressure cooker and the right spices; I learned the different sounds of boiling rice so that it didn’t come out both undercooked and burnt. I then found out that, even though I think and operate in English, when I’m following my mother’s steps and making rice and beans, everything’s in Portuguese. Black pepper, garlic, salt, an envelope of sazon—I’m surprised to find my voice, my mother’s voice, my family’s voices repeating back: pimenta do reino, colherada de alho, sal, um pacote de sazon.
And that is what rice and beans means to me—to us. It means family, Portuguese sprinkled with Americanisms, half-joking arguments, heated debates. At the risk of sounding corny, rice and beans is my family. Unpretentious, quick in its slowness, and, as much as you love it, something you don’t introduce to first dates.
In the end, no matter how perfectly I imitate her steps, I don’t think making rice and beans away from home will ever have the same effect as eating that first bite of Mom’s leftovers on a weekend back, fresh out of the fridge. But even in my campus kitchen, it still feels right; I make these foods come together the way I know how, the way that I was taught. And though the fullness at the end doesn’t mean the homesickness is gone, it means that I’ve gotten somewhat closer to being okay with it. I don’t think we ever completely shake that feeling, that thought of being gone from home made visceral—we only just get more and more okay with its presence. And that’s what rice and beans is for—finding a way to be both far and close, wistful and okay. Together.
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