This will be my 3 part Blog series about my life with food – The Beginning, Growing Pains, and Here & Now!
It all started when I was a wee child…I was very particular about food.
Not because I had this great palette, but much like any child, texture played a big role to my sense of taste. My mother was a good decent cook in our young years (she was a very young mother of three) and like most Latinas, she cooked with lots of spices – dried and fresh. Sometimes, spices are just too much for a child, but it was more than that – it was the texture. Fresh adobo and sazon, sofrito and recao, along with chopped cilantro, sliced onions, and diced peppers played like rounds of tennis on my young tongue ( <—hey, that rhymed.) Too many textures and flavors would overload my system and caused me to heave, spit, or throw-up. Imagine being a frustrated mother and your youngest child is spitting up food that you worked so hard to buy, make, and serve? There was nothing but “cocotassos” everywhere…I still have the knots on my head to prove it… jajajajajaja!
The rich spices & herbs (I use to call them “creepy-crawlies” because to me, they felt like insects crawling inside my mouth) would just make my eyes shut tight, my lips purse, and cause me to stop breathing while my hands clutched my throat (I was a very dramatic child, if you can imagine that - ha!) I would try to scrape and hide the creepy-crawlies under my food. My mother would just look at me and ask, “Kripy de que…eh? Kripy de que?” and another cocotasso would ensue, “Sangano!” LOL
You can usually find (at the same sitting) two types of rice in many Latin homes – arroz blanco y arros moro. I only liked and would eat white rice…I use to call it “arroz lindo” (pretty rice) and I use to call Latin style rice (whether red, yellow, or brown) ”arroz feo” – which means ugly rice. Imagine a Hispanic child calling “White” rice pretty and ”Spanish” rice ugly…no one said, “Hmmmm, maybe there’s an issue of racism and an ingrained inferiority complex going on in this child’s life?” Outside of my home, I was made to feel that anything White is beautiful and everything Spanish/Brown is NOT (TV, Movies, Friends, School, etc.) so I liked the bland White rice as oppose to the flavorful Spanish rice…but that story is for another post.
My mashed potatoes could not have gravy (looked like caca) nor creamy butter (looked like mocos) and my mashed potatoes could not be over-whipped (I swear, sometimes it looked like a bowl of watery potato soup in my bowl.) I would either complain or scream, and I have to say, it hardly went over well with Mami, “Mira pendejo, callate ya y acabar de comer!” LOL
My mother was a big fan of soft-boil eggs (sandwiches, salads, etc.)…I was not! Now that I’m older, I see that it wasn’t because I was not a fan of soft-boil eggs, it was because I was not a fan of “partially” cooked soft-boil eggs. Those eggs actually had runny egg-WHITES!! She could have killed me/us!! (Didin’t I tell you I was a lil’ dramatic?) jajajajaja
Meats…oh those meats: She would give us liver and tell us it was steak (the begining of trust issues) and she would serve rabbit fricase and say it was chicken. So of course, when I was told we were having steak or chicken for dinner, I would be skeptical of the on-coming dining experience that was about to come. Why do mother’s think that covering liver with sauteed onions is enough to fool a child into thinking it’s steak? Don’t they know children have taste-buds too??
Then there’s sancocho – till this day, the texture sends me reeling. Sancocho is a hearty soup (often times considered a stew.) It usually consists of large pieces of meat and vegetables served in a broth…sometimes seafood as well. Now you think that a child would take to it as if it were ice-cream, right? No – kids hate it…kind of looks like baby vomit. Similarly there’s Mofongo. Mofongo is generally made from fried green plantains (fried yuca too) which is mashed together with broth, garlic, olive oil, and pork cracklings or bits of bacon. It is often filled with vegetables, chicken, crab, shrimp, or beef and is often served with fried meat and chicken broth soup. Now ask any self-respecting Dominican what mofongo is, and there eyes may light-up while their mouths water, but me?… a ‘Rican child of 8, born and bred in Bayonne, NJ would just throw it right on up.
Don’t get me started on seafood – especially salted cod (bacalao.) I will not eat salted cod, not even today (the smell is still too tied into my childhood memories!!) But once again, in Latin American homes, bacalao is a major protein food staple. There’s also mondogo (tripe) – another Puerto Rican specialty that I am not a big fan of – because of the texture of the dish.
My family thought I was a picky eater. They would say that my American body was rejecting it’s cultural roots to the Borinquen. Afterall, I did like other foods that stemmed from my other “root origins” like all Italian foods (especially baked ziti with sausage, lasagna, and meatballs & spaghetti), Soul foods (anything pork, anything “smothered,” deep-fried chicken, collards or cabbage, and home-made biscuits & cornbread), and American classics (like Yankee pot-roast, meat-loaf, potatoes, and cheesburgers,) maybe they were right. I loved “those” foods, so what was it that I liked about them and not the Latin foods??
I didn’t figure that out until I was around the age of 14, then things really got interesting at home…
Stay tuned for part two: My LIFE with food: Growing Pains
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OOh this is soo interesting! And thinking about the exact description I don’t know if I would like dishes like mofongo and mondongo (haha, and I’m a proud Domincan, Puertorican, Black American).I never had the liver/steak experience, but listeneing to the story I thought of the famous chopped hot dogs & macaroni meal, o such healthy sustenance HAHA. How we came a long way, thanks for everything Papi!!! Luv ya!
H. Luiz Reply:
July 16th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
@Jonathan, Just for the record, Jonathan was mentioning his mother’s cooking when he wrote “I thought of the famous chopped hot dogs & macaroni meal,…”
jajajajajajajajaja!
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Thanks Luiz, now I’ll never look at those dishes the same way again,lol…I like most of those dishes, but as a kid I hated them. I would actually gag and vomit when my dad would make me eat them. It was torture, although I’m OK with them now. I’m more into other foods that are not latin. Maybe it’s because our parents didn’t cook anything else but that, that they bored our taste buds lol.
I have noticed that most of the foods that you like and cook, I also love as well, and the spices you use are OK in my book. I guess we have to thank our parents for our need to experiment with other foods NOT of our culture…just keep posting those recepies so I can make them.
H. Luiz Reply:
August 11th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
@maria montes deOca, Thanks for the compliments, Sister-in-Law (you still my S-I-L, I don’t care who your man is – much love to Pete, though…jajajajajaja.)
I’m waiting for you to share some recipes with all of us…you Cubans can cook!!
Incidentally, I do cook Latino foods too – 1 to 2 times a week (Henry just gotta have his arroz con pollo dishes with black beans and maduros at least once a week.) Like you (and me,) he LOVES aguacate too.