Doña Olga, La Cocinera Mágica

All it takes to reconstruct her magical cooking, in my mind anyway,  is the sight of an old-fashioned iron stove, and the smell of wood smoke, beef-steak milanesa, or empanadas in frying grease, stuffed with ground beef and hard-cooked eggs, perfumed with a hint of cumin.

Who is this cook, with the touch of Tita in Like Water for Chocolate?

For one year of my life, the best food in the world came to me from the hands of Doña Olga, the Ukrainian cook in the pension in my Peace Corps village of Fram, Paraguay.

And in  smelling those foods,  as I reconstruct them in my own modern kitchen, I remember a drizzly cold September day, when I first entered the small-but-bountiful world of Doña Olga and her down-to-earth cooking.  My one suitcase unceremoniously deposited with a dull thud on the wooden sidewalk in front of the pension, I walked in, my knee-high leather boots covered with thick red mud, my nerves humming like a tuning fork. My stomach growled, but as a stranger in a strange town I hungered for something more than food.

Inside the pension’s main entrance, Doña Olga gently led me to a rickety thatched chair in front of a none-too clean square table and bustled off down three short steps into the kitchen. Soon a steaming cup of yerba maté tea, my first nourishment from Doña Olga’s hands, warmed my cold trembling hands.

Pleased that I had taken to the warm tea, Doña Olga proudly placed in front of me three small turnover-like pastries on a small plate lined with a paper napkin and stepped back to observe my reaction to THAT. Tittering, she pushed a strand of blond hair out of her blue eyes, and shoved a cork-stoppered wine bottle full of pickled hot peppers in vinegar towards me, indicating that I should douse the turnovers with a drop or two of that liquid fire. My mouth then closed around the first empanada I ever ate, the flaky crust encasing a savory ground meat filling lightly scented with cumin, onions, a hint of garlic, black pepper, and warming hot pepper juice.

And so day after day, amidst chickens cackling at my feet and stray starveling dogs sniffing at my plates, I became a very partial observer of the wizardry emanating from that dark smoky kitchen.

No doubt some of the chickens clucking at my feet eventually arrived at my table on a plate and not on their feet. Not often, though. Cooking a chicken was usually akin to killing the goose that laid the golden egg. In that household, indeed in the entire town, where we never knew if there would be meat for sale in the local market, eggs lived up to their role as the perfect food. Many weeks often went by with no meat in that town.

But when meat hung bloody in the early morning market, the endless fried eggs and rice gave way to celebration and Doña Olga’s best creations: bife à caballo—beef steak done to perfection with a sunny-side-up egg perched on top or milanesa—beef steak flattened with a mallet and fried in bread crumbs until golden brown in color.

Unfortunately, meat on the menu also meant menudo — tripe stew — with noisome whitish chunks of flesh floating in broth, along with a few carrot and potato chunks.

Knowing my intense dislike of tripe, Doña Olga made up for it by fabricating her version of pain au chocolat, thick cake-like chunks of sweet white bread with a bit of a chocolate bar buried in the center of the dough balls before baking. Like a child, I would break open the bread and eat the chocolate first. Bliss it was! Or the next day, she might turn her hand to a rustic version of pissaladière, spread with a tomato jam and an onion confit-like mixture, dotted with a half a black olive on each square piece; this “pizza” satisfied the longings of my pizza-deprived American soul.

Insulated by the ignorance and arrogance of youth, it never occurred to me to ask Doña Olga for a single recipe. I hope that she is still cooking and creating taste memories for all those who pass through her small dining room. For that year of my life, her food saved me and nourished me and gave me strength.

EMPANADAS: To make empanadas, follow this link with step-by-step photos.

© 2009 C. Bertelsen