Category Archives: Foodways

Abuela’s Black Beans and Rice

Nationality: Cuban
Age: 67
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Houston, TX
Performance Date: March 15, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Abuela’s Recipe for Cuban Black Beans and Rice

 

The following dialogue is from my dad explaining a Cuban recipe for black beans and rice that his mother, my grandmother, used to make. She passed it along to her three children—my dad, my uncle, and my aunt—along with her secret ingredient for the dish.

 

“Soak a bag of black beans overnight. Chop an onion and about three cloves of garlic and a teaspoon of cumin, and then you put two tablespoons of olive oil, the onion that you chopped, the garlic you minced, and the cumin, you sauté that in the oil until the onions get soft. Then you add eight cups of water and the black beans that you soaked overnight. And the secret ingredient is one teaspoon of sugar, and you cook that—you bring it to a boil, and you turn it down to simmer and then you cook it under low heat simmering for two hours ‘till the beans get soft. Then you’re done, and it can either be served as a soup or over white rice.”

 

I’ve grown up watching my dad, grandmother, and other family members make this dish, and everyone knows the recipe—or the version of the recipe they’ve altered and like the best—so well that they do not bother with any kind of instruments to measure the ingredients. Instead, they add in what they estimate to be the best amount of each ingredient. While they are cooking, they frequently take a spoonful of what they have so far to taste, and adjust what they add into it from there. I’m not sure exactly how long the recipe has been in our family, or if it has remained the same, since everyone cooks the dish based on how it tastes throughout the cooking process instead of anyone ever writing the recipe down. We all refer to it now though as “Abuela’s arroz con frijoles,” or “Grandma’s rice with beans,” but it could have originated earlier than her.

Pizzelle Recipe

Nationality: Cuban
Age: 56
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Florida
Performance Date: March 16, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The following is a continuation of the escaping Cuba story. It begins directly after the last story left off; however, I separated the two because in this portion, Lourdes describes a recipe for pizzelles, which she and her family learned shortly after settling in the United States.

 

“We settled in the suburbs of Chicago in the first years, sometimes in houses that the hospital would supply, or in our own homes. Abuelo, studied for his residency in Chicago, so he already had a position when we arrived. Our house was always full of smells of food. Mom was an excellent cook, and she was eager to teach neighbors about our food and learn about theirs. We had some Italian neighbors once, and at Christmas, they delivered a large box of wafer thin cookies that smelled like anise. They were great, covered in powdered sugar, really crispy, and big, like 4″ across. Mom was hooked, and so were we, she hunted down a pizzelle maker, and she tried a million recipes. Many of them stuck to the iron, which was a nightmare. You would have to heat the appliance up, grease it with butter, try your batter, and if it stuck, unplug it, let it cool, and try to clean the fine filigree plates. Ugh! Was it really worth it? Yup… Once you got a good recipe and a seasoned pizzelle plate, you needed a lot of space, and many hands to make these cookies.

 

I remember Carly, Mom and I in the house in Plantation, we had to clear off the counters, and two dining tables to have enough space to put the cookies when they came off the iron. The counters were set up with all of the wire cooling racks we had. Mom would pour the batter, close the iron, and if it was too much, it would pour out the sides, too little and you have a deformed cookie. It is always best to have a little more than less. Mom would burn her fingers lifting the cookies, and set them up on a nearby rack. Carly and I would take turns moving them to a rack that was further away so that Mom would always have a nearby rack for the next cookies to land on. The cookies have to cook enough to be crisp or they would get droopy. If that happened, you need to pop them in the oven at 200 degrees to dry out, then take them out and let them cool completely, otherwise they get soggy again.

 

Once the cookies are completely dry, we would snap off the excess dough leaving a perfectly round cookie and a huge pile of crumbs that are great on ice cream. The cookies are then transferred to a large tupperware box, and each one is sprinkled with powdered sugar. If you make them at Christmas, as we would, you could pick up little tins to pack them in, to give them as gifts. Each batch makes 50 cookies, and you could easily spend hours running around getting them perfect, and cleaning up afterwards. It’s one of my fondest memories, and if you remember, we made them together at Carly’s when you were here for Christmas one year.”

Recipe for Pesto

Nationality: Cuban
Age: 67
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Houston, TX
Performance Date: April 10, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Recipe for Pesto

 

The following dialogue is my dad explaining a recipe he has learned over the years for pesto, one of my family’s favorite foods. When they immigrated from Cuba, my family moved into a Chicago neighborhood where they had Italian neighbors they became close with through cooking. My family would cook for and share Cuban recipes with them, and they would do the same with their Italian recipes. My dad, who has loved to cook since a young age, picked up some of his Italian neighbors’ recipes, even though he was about eleven years old when they became neighbors. This is his recipe for pesto today, as it has changed and evolved through the years.

 

Pesto:

 

“First, you buy flat Italian parsley, pine nuts, garlic, of course, and olive oil.

 

Then, you take about a cup of fresh Italian parsley, and you put it in the food processor to chop it all up nicely. And then you chop about two garlic cloves—you peel them and put them into the food processor.

 

So, you’ve put the Italian parsley and garlic in and chopped it all up, then you take about two tablespoons of pine nuts, and you add that to the garlic and the parsley.

 

Then you put salt and pepper to taste, and then you put a cup of olive oil, which turns it into a liquid, and then you put about a quarter cup of parmesan cheese—all in the food processor, all of this stuff you just keep adding on—and then it basically becomes a think like liquid paste, and you serve it with pasta.”

Capirotada

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 74
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Sunnyside, WA
Performance Date: 3/20/17
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

LW is a retired 74-year-old woman who lives with her husband in Sunnyside, WA. She was born and raised there and came from an immigrant mother and father who came from Guadalajara, Mexico. She never went to college but became a mother to three children and a grandmother to several grandchildren. She was remarried twice and worked two minimum wage jobs to support her family. Her primary language is Spanish but her English is perfect as well.

Are there any holiday traditions or rituals that you have?

LW: I used to make this Mexican pudding on Easter called Capirotada. It is similar to bread pudding and it was made with cheese and raisins and my mother taught me how to make it. It was fairly easy to make and it was a fun thing to do for Easter with my kids. When my oldest daughter got, old enough I tried to teach her, but I don’t think she makes it anymore and neither do I.

Is there an importance to the dish and why its associated with Easter?

LW: It was a reminder of Christ’s suffering on good Friday and the ingredients have something to do with the passion of Christ. I am not sure how but that is what my mother told me when she taught me how to make it. I just know the bread in it symbolizes the body of Christ, as they say in the bible ‘broken and shared so we might live’.

Is there a reason this tradition has become more lost to your family?

LW: I think it was something we just started to forget about. We used to celebrate Easter every year with family, including my grandkids when they were born. But now we live so far and I have gotten older so I don’t spend Easter with them as a family as much anymore.

Analysis:

This dish is common as a Mexican tradition during Easter. As LW explained, it is symbolic of the passion of Christ as the bread of life who suffered to forgive the sins of mankind. The other ingredients stand for the passion as well such as the cinnamon sticks that represent the wood of the cross he died on, the cloves for the nails on the cross, and the cheese for the holy shroud. The dish still continues to be served and has many variations and other recipes as well.

Mexican Recipe

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 35
Occupation: Nanny
Performance Date: 4-26-17
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Main Piece: Beer Battered Fish Tacos

 

For this piece, I asked my nanny of 18 years, Mirna, for a recipe, and being native to Mexico, she delivered. She prepared beer battered fish tacos, which consists of frying a white fish meat in a batter made from bread crumbs and beer (Corona, of course). It is put into a taco with a chipotle sauce, cabbage, and salsa. I asked if there was a set recipe she followed but there was not, she just cooked based off how she had done it in the past. The entire time she was cooking she was adding little bits of ingredients here and there according to taste, and nothing was perfectly measured. Once the fish was battered it was fried in a pan with vegetable oil, not a traditional deep fryer. There was no set time to cook or anything of the sort, just judging based on the look of the food and feel based on the cook.

 

Background:

 

This is a traditional recipe from my nanny’s home in Mexico, and she has been using it for as long as I can remember at home. It was a traditional recipe used when a successful fishing trip returned and would be cooked right away.

She learned it from her mother, who would generally cook for all of her brothers and sisters, of which there were 6 of them. She had many recipes she could’ve chosen from, having grown up in this large family and also having cooking as a big part of life for them. There was never really much take out or dinners out, so it was typically home cooked meals from her mother.

 

Context:

 

This time she cooked the meal for me, it was just one night for dinner, and did not have much contextual meaning. I used to fish a lot during the summer, and fresh fish was my favorite food for that span of time. I used to call my nanny as we were unloading the boat telling her what we had caught and she would prepare to cook it for me, and this became one of my favorite preparations of fish. She cooked a very large portion as it would serve as our family dinner that night, and had a sort of system going where she would be constantly breading the fish, frying it, warming the tortillas, and prepping the plates. She said that’s what it was like at home when her mother would cook for everyone, needing to feed many mouths.

When this dish was being prepared, my dad had a few different beers at home but none were a Mexican beer, so my nanny actually went out and bought Coronas to cook this recipe, which I think is interesting in that even though I’m sure other types would have worked, it is more traditional to the recipe that she used a Mexican beer for the recipe.

 

My Thoughts:

 

I had always thought this was just a random recipe my nanny had found and cooked for our family, but it turned out this was a recipe she had learned from her mother and brought here to cook for us. There are many more dishes my nanny knows how to cook from home and makes them constantly, but this one is hands down my favorite that she does.