My Year in Other Women’s Kitchens: Some Insights into How Food Habits Change? Or Don’t?

When I was a child, my mother always cooked our meals. I did nearly all the cooking once she returned to university to finish her Ph.D., joking that I experimented in the kitchen out of self defense, having tired of creamed tuna on rice – which we kids called “barf on maggots” – or hamburgers in mushroom-soup gravy or an odd version of spaghetti featuring various cans of Campbell’s soups.

I did not understand until later that those dishes represented my mother’s food habits, and, to this day, she still prefers to cook a limited number of dishes, taking comfort, I guess, from the sameness and the predictability of her food, the only thing that she controls in her world, which has turned upside down in more ways than one.

Dissecting food habits and attempting to discern just how humans approach new foods, what foods they reject, what foods they accept – and why – would provide material for dozens or Ph.D. dissertations, not to mention articles and blog posts. (See The Anthropology of Food)

One year, between finishing university and the beginning of my stint in the Peace Corps in Paraguay, for the first time I found myself eating food cooked in other women’s kitchens. And absorbed a great deal of information about myself and what I liked to eat and what other people wanted to eat and how they managed it all. That experience taught me what it was to be in exile, or a form of it, surrounded by strange foods and struggling to eat in spite of longing for my own, more familiar food.

And that experience naturally has led me to question some of the many assumptions being made about the assimilation of strange and different foods as experienced by various groups throughout history. As many readers will have noted, my current focus is on the experience of the English in the New World. I arrived at this topic, ironically, through my reading of works by women who went out to India under the Raj and before. In account after account, cookbook after cookbook, the desire to eat familiar food and the rejection of local foods is very apparent. The memsahibs controlled the daily menus and did not often leave the choice of food to their cooks.

Although there are – alas – few similar written materials in colonial and antebellum America, human nature being what it is, I suspect that the same conditions existed in colonial and Southern households. Don’t forget that before the Revolutionary War, people thought of themselves as British. And even afterwards, the predominant culture remained British. Cooks followed the menus dictated by the lady of the house, who might not sully her hands with the soot of the fire, but who made sure that her family and guests ate foods in line with the dietary and culinary beliefs of the times. I honestly do not think that a lot of innovation would have been tolerated. So, again, I reiterate that the backbone of American cuisine was almost entirely English, and remained so even after the Civil War, in spite of obvious influences from parts of Africa, France, Germany, and other regions of the world. One has only to examine cookbooks dating from the times, as well as those in existence prior to that, to see the culinary patterns that took firm hold. This, as I have stated before, is not a topic that can be examined in depth in one, or even several blog posts, but does deserve some contemplation, questioning.

And so now, I begin with the stories, the ones that led to me to where I am today. Or nearly so.

Fried Vermicelli Soup with Tomato: Puebla, Mexico

I always sat near the end of the table, Pablo on my left, Pechugo across from me, Mr. Pérez ensconced – plump and grumpy – at the head of the table, his withered left arm reminding us all of his brush with fate, the day rebels hacked off his arm with a machete when he was eight years old and impaled his father on a large maguey plant. Or so the story went. Mr. Pérez disapproved of me. But he sure liked the $80 I gave him to buy the most run-down station wagon I’d ever seen, more rust showing than robin’s egg blue paint. After several prayers, and a few kicks, as well as tinkering under the hood, the thing ran and that was enough for him.

Meanwhile, tiny Mrs. Pérez darted in and out of her dim cinder-block walled kitchen, where her Indian maid patted out tortillas in the corner and plunked them down on the glowing comal. Every day we first ate a thick soup swimming with fried vermicelli, garlic, and grated tomatoes. Then came steaming tortillas, garlicky beans, and a fresh green salad more like coleslaw than not, and sometimes meat – usually pork – cooked in a piquant chile sauce, usually red. Sometimes a steaming casserole of chicken chilaquiles emerged from that smoky little kitchen, too. Or maybe there’d be fried chicken, tough, the only piece edible in my mind being the breast, ironically that’d given Pechugo his name, “pechuga” being the Spanish word for “breast.” Sadly, Montezuma’s revenge plagued me all the time I lived in Puebla, much to Mrs. Pérez’s dismay. I now attribute that to the tacos árabes I loved to eat in the centro, thanks to the al pastor method of cooking the meat on a revolving spit, unfortunately a hot bed of opportunity for nasty proliferating bacteria.

Pablo’s mother graciously welcomed me to her table every day for six months, bewildered by me, I am sure, a free-spirited American girl walking out with her son, no chaperone in sight, all this taking place in a time when old Mexican social customs were rapidly dying. Half Chinese, Mrs. Perez herself represented a different demographic in Mexico, that of immigrants. I see now her hospitality as a sign of openness born of being an outsider, embracing yet another outsider.

After my semester at the Universidad de las Américas ended, I said “Adiós” to Pablo, returned home, and never saw him or the rest of the Pérez family again. But I added a few of Mrs. Pérez’s recipe to my growing culinary repertoire, namely chilaquiles and that omnipresent soup.

I wish I could thank Mrs. Pérez in including me in her family meals and changing my tastes. I wish I’d been more curious and asked her for recipes, or at least insisted on watching her in the kitchen.

Sofrito-Infused Red Beans, Rice, and Pasteles: Ponce, Puerto Rico

I stood about two feet away from Mrs. González, because the sputtering lard in the skillet spit into the air as she poured in the sofrito, or seasoning mixture of onion, garlic, green pepper, culantro, and spices. She laughed, her curly reddish-brown hair shaking as she expertly stirred the bubbling sofrito. After several minutes, she pronounced it done and added some to the big pot of red beans sitting on the gas stovetop.

The chipped enamel signified that this was no brand-new stove, but rather a workhorse that fed Mrs. González’s brood of six children and a husband three times a day, seven days a week. I only ate breakfast in the kitchen, because the distance between the house and the training center in central Ponce kept me from getting back in time for lunch. To make things easy for her, I told Mrs. González that I only needed two hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, and that’s what I ate most days for the three months that I roomed with the family.

My room, if you want to call it that, was a former chicken coop in the backyard, and I soon learned not to keep any food in there. Ants the size of small beetles climbed everywhere if I did. And I dreaded taking a shower, for cockroaches lived in the drains and scuttled out in hordes when the water started flowing. A Florida girl, I thought I knew cockroaches, but these large palmetto bugs shocked me. Dozens of chickens lived in a hard-packed dirt enclosure nearby. Most mornings the roosters started up a cacophony, sounding like a troop of Harley-Davidsons, as the sun rose over the acres of plantain groves surrounding the barrio, shining hotly even at dawn on the cinder-block houses, painted every pastel color imaginable.

Once in a while, Mrs. González proudly offered me pasteles, tamale-like and filled with pork and raisins and capers, stuffed inside masa made not from corn but pounded roots such as malanga and yams. I never took to them for some reason, possibly because of the soft texture of the masa. Dinner occasionally consisted of some sort of chicken with white rice enriched with fried onion and sofrito-laden red beans, all of which I gobbled down quickly. Usually, though, Mrs. González just presented me with a plate of rice and beans and some bread, possibly some fruit, sometimes pineapple.

More or more, I started eating in town with other Peace Corps trainees, arriving at the house too late to eat, and, when I did eat there, I would often just take my plate of food to the chicken coop and eat alone. The rhythm of the González household seems to have been disrupted by my being there, their nineteen-daughter, “the Princess,” scowled at me, especially when her handsome boyfriend showed up in the evenings, talking to me as I stepped out of the taxis that the other volunteers who lived nearby and I shared.

To this day, it is only sofrito that I took away from my time on that island.

Boiled Manioc, Empanadas, and Bife à Caballo: Fram, Paraguay*

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 (similar to chicken-fried steak), or empanadas (turnovers) in frying grease, stuffed with ground beef and hard-cooked eggs, perfumed with a hint of cumin.

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

For one year of my life, some of 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. Partially, anyway.

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.

I still make empanadas from time to time and milanesa remains my son’s favorite meat dish.

*Fram is near Encarnación, slightly to the north east.

© 2015 C. Bertelsen