Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
The blood that runs through our veins is made from three different types of chiles. Guajillo. Pasilla. Chilhaucle. Dried like raisins in the sun and scorched until black on a clay griddle. Next to the pan comes sesame seeds and almonds, each counted in precise amounts. Peeled by hand fresh from the fire until they look new, as though they never touched the flame to begin with. Then you add raisins. Allspice berries. Nutmeg. Cinnamon. Your American stomach will start to think of Thanksgiving and Christmas, but this is no dessert. This is not the pumpkin pie you loved to eat with your güera friends during potluck parties. This is the food of warriors and mothers living in desert sands who smell of smoke and corn, of people who were force-fed Spanish and Catholicism.
Two months before Christmas my mom brings out the painting tarp from the garage. The white plastic fabric is draped over our bumpy wooden table and the family- the mujeres of every household - gather around. Brown, delicate yet plump and heavy hands of every stage of life pick up silver spoons. The gold is brought out: masa. Tubs of masa. Ground corn and lard and salt. Decades-old silver pots with burn marks filled with chunks of pork in a spicy sauce made from two different types of chiles - a danger to any white shirt in sight. Glass bowls of shredded chicken in my tia’s famously secret salsa verde, something that my mom routinely attempts to duplicate yet can never master. And chiles. Black cast iron griddles lined with dark green and shiny poblano peppers - the emeralds of Puebla, Mexico. The smell of their black, roasted skin in the air and teasing your eyes, waiting to be peeled, sliced, and mixed with Oaxacan queso and onions. This marks the beginning of Christmas. These are tamales.
My parents both took to cooking like ducks to water, with knives sitting perfectly in their palms and their fingers being immune to griddle burns from flipping tortillas. My father spent his early teenage years in the back room of his parent’s grocery store, hunched over a bright copper pot filled with hot lard and pork, with the accouterments of an orange for sweetness, a can of Coke for color, plenty of salt and hidden familial secrets. His slightly husky frame and already graying hair stood over this kettle, stirring and stirring for years, until one day the carnitas stopped. He would not see a kettle again until almost 40 years later when I gifted him a similar pot for Father’s Day; his small, almond eyes welled with tears as he was reminded of the man he used to be. These carnitas connected him to my mother before he knew her name or curly brown hair or their tumultuous ending; her father couldn’t get enough of the fried and simmered golden morsels from the Ruiz’s corner store.
Add your ginger, thyme, oregano. Avocado leaves that you picked from the tree outside your favorite neighbor’s house. Onions and garlic with the skin still on, charred and aromatic, burning your eyes slightly and their ash clouding the air around you. Tomatoes and tomatillos, not to be confused for one another. One is red and one is green, both are essential to the dish. Golden chicken stock, fresh from the bird you picked from the blue market stall this morning. Lard gathered over time, waiting to be added to frijoles. Only two pieces of white bread charred like the chiles and left to be mixed with the others. Sugar. And chocolate. Never forget the chocolate.
I first stared at a clay griddle like it was a bright and shiny new toy when I was four. The Maxwell Street Flea Market is a place for Mexicans in Chicago to walk around proudly in their huaraches and traditional cotton blouses, stained with salsa and embroidered with flowers and surrounded by old, crumbling factories and too many police cars. It's a place where vendors set up stalls with dirty white tables and menus handwritten on poster boards, hanging by thin white strings. It's a place for a burning cup of champurrado, a thick and sweet drink made from corn and flavored with vanilla or strawberry, but always best when chocolate. It's a place for tortas stacked with fried beef cutlets, ham, Mexican string cheese, slightly sweet avocados, and acidic pickled jalapeños. For me, it was a place for watching women of all ages stand over a scorching hot griddle, hands caked with masa in every crevice, furrowed black eyebrows, and beads of sweat running down their indigenous brown and slightly wrinkled skin. These were the women that watched my small round face and braided hair running down my back as they pounded masa with such ferocity it had no choice but to flatten out: a tortilla. These were the women that bent down and gave me balls of dough to play with, not knowing that all I wanted to do was stand behind the griddle myself.
The stone you will use to marry the ingredients is as old as your village. It was made from the founding rocks of your home. It is only washed with water and has the same flavor your mother grew up with. The chiles, soaked in hot water until soft after leaving the white coals, are first to the rock. Use the smaller stone, the one you used to pick up and try to play with when you were younger, to knead them back and forth until a deep, black paste forms. Add the onions, the garlic. The sesame seeds that make you wonder who brought them to the Mexican desert to begin with. The almonds that left the tips of your fingers red and raw while peeling. Your spices come next, all but the avocado and bay leaves. Keep the stone dancing until you can no longer differentiate between guajillo and bread, onion and cinnamon, or allspice and ginger.
It was in this market that my father’s favorite sister with the gold rings, badly dyed blonde hair, chunky black eyeliner, and purple eyeshadow done by her husband on a late Friday night full of beer, noticed my chubby hands attempting to copy the women behind the comales. This is when she began putting my chair by her rusty stove in her second-floor apartment. In the company of grease stains and green ivy peeking from her kitchen window, I watched Sylvia dip the same emerald poblano peppers my mother would later teach me to roast over an open fire in a fluffy egg white batter, fried in bubbling vegetable oil that always seemed to stick in the air. She would smack my sticky fingers from dipping in the mixture, wanting so badly to scoop up the white fluff and pop it in my mouth. She would show me how to stuff the peppers with cheese and potatoes, heavily seasoned with the one spice mix found in every Latino household: adobo. Granulated garlic, onion, oregano, pepper, salt, dashes of everything in between, mixed up and added to every meal that came out of that beige, deteriorating, and crowded kitchen on Ridgeway.
When the paste is thick and soft, bring out the oldest pan you have in your kitchen. The one with dents and stains that never seem to come out. The one that is scorched at the bottom from years over a small gas stove. Fill it with the white lard and wait until it becomes lethally hot. You will know it is ready when it begins to sing. Add your paste, frying it in the molten fat to the point that your skin is afraid of getting too close to the pot. Then you stir. Stir until your hand cramps. Stir until your arms are weak and tired and begging to stop. Stir until the hair on your face is sticky from the steam and smells like your grandmother’s hands, stained from years of peeling garlic and picking seeds from jalapeños.
When my peers in high school were spending their time at home researching “Top 10 College Campuses” and “Biggest Party Schools,” I watched Anthony Bourdain’s tall, lanky, and extremely depressed figure eat pig ear sandwiches in the Mississippi Delta on his show No Reservations. I listened as he explored dark alleys in Middle America, looking for the next best bowl of chili or the most deliciously fake and processed hot dog New York had to offer. I bit my nails as he pointed out that the burgers we love to eat, stacked high with bacon and gooey, abnormally yellow cheese, are made by people we would never consider to be American. I was reminded of Sylvia, with her small, brick restaurant that would only serve the many faces of Chicago for a few years, becoming a close friend to the mayor and his wife over a plate of her flautas and enchiladas suizas. She would only show me photos of the small dining room years later, packed with people of all colors in a bright orange room, as I struggled to decide between two futures: a grueling four years at the CIA - the Culinary Institute of America - where a young, drug-addicted but extremely talented Bourdain spent his teenage years; or having my slightly wide and brown nose stuck between textbooks at some esteemed university, someplace foreign to my immigrant family that can’t pronounce “aluminum” without tripping over their tongues.
I watched behind the wooden kitchen counter as Sylvia no longer dipped poblano peppers in egg white fluff. She stopped lightly frying corn tortillas in vegetable oil, making them just soft enough to stuff with chicken and roll into a flute shape. Her stove was sparkling under the yellow kitchen lights, an unfamiliar sight to me. The air was no longer slicked with a thick oil that stuck to your hair and inside your nose. Her rice was cold in her refrigerator, not piping hot and brightly orange after boiling for ten minutes, then covered and left to simmer for twenty more. “Mija, I’m tired. Your cousin will make something.” Nina, her daughter and the closed down restaurant’s namesake with snow-white skin, walnut hair, and too many children to keep up with, was now in charge of dinner: pizza bagels and frozen chicken nuggets. Diet coke and soggy french fries. Salty instant ramen noodles and sloppy peanut butter sandwiches. No more frijoles and milanesas, thinly sliced steak that was breaded and fried until golden brown, best when put in between bread and made into a torta. No, she was too tired. She was too tired.
It will become thick and brown and luscious. Like your cousin Lucia, the fuller girl your friends laugh at but all the men in town love in secret. Like your mother after carrying you for nine months, still waking up before the rest of the family to make your father huevos y tortillas. Add in the chicken stock, simmered for so long a light sheen glazes the top of it. And then the sugar and salt. And the chocolate. Never forget the chocolate. This is the blood in your veins, the reason your bones are strong and wide, the reason your skin is lightly toasted under the summer sun. This is mole negro.
I stopped looking at the CIA application deadlines when Sylvia put her wooden spoon in her broken kitchen drawer. New York University became my something new, something unfamiliar and different and exciting. And I made sure to go to the London campus just in case New York was too boring. I could not turn into her. I could not stop loving the smell of fresh garlic frying in hot oil, the excitement of eating foods in brightly colored sauces that were sure to leave a stain, the taste of a fresh flour tortilla with only sliced avocado and salt. My heartbeat quickened as I thought of one day hating the art of boiling milk until frothy and adding fat tablets of sugary and spicy Abuelita hot chocolate, burning the roof of my mouth when drinking it fresh from the stove. Out of this fear of no longer feeling my cheeks turn red with eagerness at the sight of raw masa, waiting to be turned into tortillas or huaraches or sopes, I tucked my dreams of standing behind the comales in the Maxwell Street Flea Market in Sylvia’s drawer with her wooden spoon. One day, maybe, I’ll take them back out.