Looking for The Gulf Motel

Cooking with Mamá in Maine

62 Cooking with Mamá in Maine Two years since trading mangos for these maples, the white dunes of the beach for the White Mountains etched in my living room window, I ask my mother to teach me how to make my favorite Cuban dish. She arrives from Miami in May with a parka and plantains packed in her suitcase, chorizos, vino seco, but also onions, garlic, olive oil as if we couldn’t pick these up at Hannaford’s in Oxford County. She brings with her all the spices of my childhood: laurel, pimentón, dashes of memories she sprinkles into a black pot of black beans starting to simmer when I wake up and meet her busy in the kitchen. With my pad and pencil eager to take notes, I ask her how many teaspoons of cumin, of oregano, cups of oil, vinegar, she’s adding, but I can’t get a straight answer: I don’t know, she says, I just know. Afraid to stay in the guest cottage, by herself, but not of the blood 63 on her hands, she stabs holes in the raw meat, stuffs in garlic: Six or seven mas ó menos, maybe seven cloves, she says, it all depends. She dices about one bell pepper, tells me how much my father loved her cooking too, as she cries over about two onions she chops, tosses into a pan sizzling with olive oil making sofrito to brown the roast. She insists I just watch her hands stirring, folding, whisking me back to the kitchen I grew up in, dinner for six of us on the table, six sharp every day of her life for thirty years until she had no one left to cook for. I don’t ask how she survived her exilio: ten years without her mother, twenty as a widow. Did she grow to love snow those years in New York before Miami, and how will I survive winters here with out her cooking? Will I ever learn? But she answers every question when she raises the spoon to my mouth saying, Taste it, mi’jo, there’s no recipe, just taste. ...