Poetic License: Mama Carmen suite Part Two
Comida (Nutrition)
She was plumper than a calabaza
yet never sat down to eat at the table
with the rest of the family,
but picked bits and pieces
from the memorable dishes
she spent most of the day preparing,
tasting, correcting, re-tasting
and finally serving,
often right from the enormous sartn,
the black cast iron frying pan
she had brought from Vieques
and that once, in a prior century,
had been shiny and much lighter,
but by then aged and encrusted
with the soot and grease
of fifty thousand lard-fried dishes –
weighing almost five pounds,
an inch thick at the sides:
its residue of three generations
of family meals and history,
like old sherry wine in soleras
mixing with the new —
molecules of the pork chop
my great grandfather had eaten
in the nineteenth century
mingled with the crust
of her latest hit,
the fried plantain tostones
that sang on our palates
the music made
by her cast iron lyre.
And once every month, pasteles,
as the grandchildren
in assembly line stations
around the kitchen table,
competed at the various tasks:
Momn, Juanito and I
at our separate graters
scraping the plantain
at furious speeds
to win the race
for maximum production of masa,
the mash which Lul and Isabel,
my younger cousins,
spread on banana leaves or waxed paper
while Mama Carmen
poured precise portions
of achiote and legendary meat filling
right in the center
and Angelina and Lydia, older cousins,
folded each pastel rectangle in half,
nudging the filling toward the fold,
folding it in half again,
folding the ends,
while Carmen, the eldest,
bundled two pasteles,
seams facing each other,
into communion by tying
an arm’s length of string around them,
along the right and left width
and once along the length,
and then dropping them
into the caldero of boiling water
where they could cook for an hour,
be lifted by their strings,
placed on a plate and wait
to be snipped and unfolded
into consummation
and final epiphany
with white rice and red beans.