Papi told me cook with love and your food will always be delicious. In practice, my mother always proved him right.
My household was blessed with a dynamic duo of vastly diverse yet symbiotic chefs. And although they seldom mix their magic, something’s always ablaze in our kitchen. After all, it is the epicenter of our home where we come to discuss family matters, bochinchar, have explosive altercations, mourn over lost ones, criticize one another, and celebrate one another. It has always been an open forum infused with Adobo where nothing goes unsaid and no one is excluded.
Papi is the antithesis of bashful when it comes to his cooking. It sounds harsh on the tongue to describe him that way, but it’s the closest I could get to the soul of his character. He doesn’t mind brazenly saying how palatable his food is going to be as he whips up his concoctions. They are wont to be made up on the fly and do live up to their own hype. He’s also got the cojones to do his thing in the kitchen wearing a flowery pink apron or whatever he happens to find. This man is all caché. He’s got the espuma and the chocolate. I once told him we had no tomato sauce for the beans and he said, “Pásame el cachú.” That’s Dominican for pass me the Ketchup. He then proceeded to make the most delicious beans I have ever had. Sessions in the kitchen with Dad always involved music that ranged from classical to merengue, light dancing, and a few glasses of wine or a crisp cold beer. Through him, I learned that cooking is never a chore and always a party.
My mother, on the other hand, has deliberate and unperturbed intentions. She is a quiet chef, requiring little from anyone around her. There is a serene ebb and flow to her routine and although her dishes don’t tend to vary, they consistently deliver bomb-ass flavor. She’s got the staples down to a science and can make a sancocho with her eyes closed. There is stoicism about her cooking that I associate with being la matrona, the matriarch. Her culinary inspiration came from that motherhood, from her precise instincts regarding any of our needs. She was content because we were fed, not because we liked her arroz con leche. But don’t let her catch you having eaten before she made dinner. Lessons on womanhood were interlaced in every experience of watching my mother in the kitchen. I learned how to be stoic myself. I learned how to be self-reliant and, most importantly, that quiet confidence makes for the most phenomenal kind of woman.
I am a boundless ocean of my parents’ antithetical waters—warm and cool, choppy and placid. My mother taught me how to respect the craft and my father taught me how to reinvent it. Over the course of my life, the kitchen has become an unexpected sanctuary where I am safe to cry over damaged fettuccine and gloat about perfectly timed rice.
Dad gave me one of my first cooking lessons and it was riddled with fortune cookie phrases. “You want to know the secret to always making your food come out delicious? You need a special ingredient. Love.” He said it with a smirk that implied he had coined the phrase. Since that day, I’ve always believed it to be true. But while my father meant it in the literal sense, the meaning has recently evolved for me.
It is assumed that doing any well-intentioned task will typically yield good results, but that doesn’t always apply in the kitchen. We want to believe that love can move mountains with minimal effort. It’s adorable, but not sustainable in the real world. It wasn't until I fell in love with the craft itself that I really believed what my father was saying, even though he may have meant something else.
I was in the kitchen when my partner said to me, “I love to see you cook because it so clearly is a passion for you.” I remember feeling a fulfilling sense of flattery for discovering a fascination that I never realized I had. As a Dominican woman, I was taught to cook because that’s what a woman should know how to do. There’s a saying in my culture that we use to compliment a woman on a good meal. That’s, “Ya te puedes casar (now you can get married).” Growing up, women certainly felt that they were measured in terms of their domestic abilities. Things are a bit different now, but there’s still a sense of machismo looming about that reminds us of areas where it’s crucial that we thrive in, should we want to be considered real women. Although that old phrase about marriage is said in jest, truth seeps out from underneath its floorboards. So naturally, I had always categorized cooking as a duty and not a passion.
That day, however, when I learned from my partner that it seems I really do love cooking, instances of that fiery affection poured into my mind like waterfalls. Who doesn’t feel a sense of pride at opening a well-stocked spice cabinet? The way the skin on my beans wrinkles up when they soften, for instance, and the smell of garlic underneath my fingernails long after I’ve washed my hands. Shuffling over to the sink, perhaps, to run ice-cold water over my eyes after a handful of chopped shallots made me weep. And who does not enjoy seasoning a brand new mortar and pestle, homage to the chefs of millennia past? The patience required to roll fresh gnocchi off of a fork? Garnishing a fresh bowl of pasta with so much Parmesan, it hides the spaghetti? What about the sensuousness of cutting open a poached egg, thumbing the seeds out of a plum tomato, the crunching of an onion beneath my chef’s knife? One could write sonnets about peeling a plantain, the fibrous nature of yucca, and the way an acorn squash disintegrates in a pot of guandules. These are the minutiae of the kitchen that enchant me. Perhaps there have been instances where I have cooked out of duty, but my partner was right. I was reveling in every moment of the process, too.
So maybe that is not what my father meant when he said to cook with love, although it may certainly have worked for him. I believe it’s the love for the craft that makes your food delicious, not for anyone else. It’s the respect that you have for honing that craft that infuses your dishes with flavor. And that’s true for all of our passions, isn’t’ it? We must love them, breathe them, bathe in them, go to bed with them, and wake up with them. We have to let them drive us mad. Fuss over them, let them exhaust us; occupy every corner of our minds. You will see how that obsession yields delicious results too.
My household was blessed with a dynamic duo of vastly diverse yet symbiotic chefs. And although they seldom mix their magic, something’s always ablaze in our kitchen. After all, it is the epicenter of our home where we come to discuss family matters, bochinchar, have explosive altercations, mourn over lost ones, criticize one another, and celebrate one another. It has always been an open forum infused with Adobo where nothing goes unsaid and no one is excluded.
Papi is the antithesis of bashful when it comes to his cooking. It sounds harsh on the tongue to describe him that way, but it’s the closest I could get to the soul of his character. He doesn’t mind brazenly saying how palatable his food is going to be as he whips up his concoctions. They are wont to be made up on the fly and do live up to their own hype. He’s also got the cojones to do his thing in the kitchen wearing a flowery pink apron or whatever he happens to find. This man is all caché. He’s got the espuma and the chocolate. I once told him we had no tomato sauce for the beans and he said, “Pásame el cachú.” That’s Dominican for pass me the Ketchup. He then proceeded to make the most delicious beans I have ever had. Sessions in the kitchen with Dad always involved music that ranged from classical to merengue, light dancing, and a few glasses of wine or a crisp cold beer. Through him, I learned that cooking is never a chore and always a party.
My mother, on the other hand, has deliberate and unperturbed intentions. She is a quiet chef, requiring little from anyone around her. There is a serene ebb and flow to her routine and although her dishes don’t tend to vary, they consistently deliver bomb-ass flavor. She’s got the staples down to a science and can make a sancocho with her eyes closed. There is stoicism about her cooking that I associate with being la matrona, the matriarch. Her culinary inspiration came from that motherhood, from her precise instincts regarding any of our needs. She was content because we were fed, not because we liked her arroz con leche. But don’t let her catch you having eaten before she made dinner. Lessons on womanhood were interlaced in every experience of watching my mother in the kitchen. I learned how to be stoic myself. I learned how to be self-reliant and, most importantly, that quiet confidence makes for the most phenomenal kind of woman.
I am a boundless ocean of my parents’ antithetical waters—warm and cool, choppy and placid. My mother taught me how to respect the craft and my father taught me how to reinvent it. Over the course of my life, the kitchen has become an unexpected sanctuary where I am safe to cry over damaged fettuccine and gloat about perfectly timed rice.
Dad gave me one of my first cooking lessons and it was riddled with fortune cookie phrases. “You want to know the secret to always making your food come out delicious? You need a special ingredient. Love.” He said it with a smirk that implied he had coined the phrase. Since that day, I’ve always believed it to be true. But while my father meant it in the literal sense, the meaning has recently evolved for me.
It is assumed that doing any well-intentioned task will typically yield good results, but that doesn’t always apply in the kitchen. We want to believe that love can move mountains with minimal effort. It’s adorable, but not sustainable in the real world. It wasn't until I fell in love with the craft itself that I really believed what my father was saying, even though he may have meant something else.
I was in the kitchen when my partner said to me, “I love to see you cook because it so clearly is a passion for you.” I remember feeling a fulfilling sense of flattery for discovering a fascination that I never realized I had. As a Dominican woman, I was taught to cook because that’s what a woman should know how to do. There’s a saying in my culture that we use to compliment a woman on a good meal. That’s, “Ya te puedes casar (now you can get married).” Growing up, women certainly felt that they were measured in terms of their domestic abilities. Things are a bit different now, but there’s still a sense of machismo looming about that reminds us of areas where it’s crucial that we thrive in, should we want to be considered real women. Although that old phrase about marriage is said in jest, truth seeps out from underneath its floorboards. So naturally, I had always categorized cooking as a duty and not a passion.
That day, however, when I learned from my partner that it seems I really do love cooking, instances of that fiery affection poured into my mind like waterfalls. Who doesn’t feel a sense of pride at opening a well-stocked spice cabinet? The way the skin on my beans wrinkles up when they soften, for instance, and the smell of garlic underneath my fingernails long after I’ve washed my hands. Shuffling over to the sink, perhaps, to run ice-cold water over my eyes after a handful of chopped shallots made me weep. And who does not enjoy seasoning a brand new mortar and pestle, homage to the chefs of millennia past? The patience required to roll fresh gnocchi off of a fork? Garnishing a fresh bowl of pasta with so much Parmesan, it hides the spaghetti? What about the sensuousness of cutting open a poached egg, thumbing the seeds out of a plum tomato, the crunching of an onion beneath my chef’s knife? One could write sonnets about peeling a plantain, the fibrous nature of yucca, and the way an acorn squash disintegrates in a pot of guandules. These are the minutiae of the kitchen that enchant me. Perhaps there have been instances where I have cooked out of duty, but my partner was right. I was reveling in every moment of the process, too.
So maybe that is not what my father meant when he said to cook with love, although it may certainly have worked for him. I believe it’s the love for the craft that makes your food delicious, not for anyone else. It’s the respect that you have for honing that craft that infuses your dishes with flavor. And that’s true for all of our passions, isn’t’ it? We must love them, breathe them, bathe in them, go to bed with them, and wake up with them. We have to let them drive us mad. Fuss over them, let them exhaust us; occupy every corner of our minds. You will see how that obsession yields delicious results too.