Tables is a serialized memoir by Jason Rodriguez. It’s about the tables that Jason has known throughout his life, the people who sat around them, and the food that they ate. It’s a story about transitions. Start at the prologue for more background and a chapter list.
Mom doesn’t work from recipes*. She works from tradition, memory, and story.
Mom learned her recipes from Nanny and Grandma, although I’m confident she simply created some from necessity and available ingredients on a Tuesday night. From Grandma she learned how to cook versions of Puerto Rican treats and delicacies like pernil and pasteles. The latter became Mom’s Christmas-time specialty. She’d spend an entire day making a platano and yautia masa, spreading the masa across paper, stuffing it with pernil, wrapping and tying the individual pasteles with string. She’d cook a few for herself as a reward for her hard labor and freeze the rest, doling them out to deserving relatives and friends over December and January. To deserve a pastele required more than simply being an important person in Mom’s life; you needed to appreciate the pastele. I’ve seen people measure up their first bite to see if they liked it only to have Mom pull it from them and never offer them a taste again. You either loved the pastele unconditionally from the moment you first tasted it or you had to find someone else to make you one. I don’t even know if I like them. I tasted one as a teenager and didn’t care for it, so I never got to try one again. Taste buds can evolve at Mom’s table, unless you’re trying pasteles. You have one shot, even if you’re her son.
Frankfurter Soup, drawn on hotel stationary.
The recipes mom learned from Nanny never shared that solemn importance; they certainly were never as coveted or protected as pasteles. But what they lacked in process they made up for in story. Frankfurter Soup, for example, was one of my favorite meals as a child. Frankfurter Soup was pan-fried Sabrett hotdogs in a tomato and onion soup. It was served over mashed potatoes. Mom told me it was an old Irish recipe that had been handed down for generations. This was significant to me, because Mom’s side of the family didn’t feel particularly Irish or Italian or really cultural at all, especially not when compared to Dad’s Nuyorican through-and-through family. Every time I ate Frankfurter Soup I felt like I was taking part in a history that I was otherwise largely disconnected from. This Irish heritage that gave Nanny red hair and a hardened liver and allowed me to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. This certain hardened edge her family had - a little more raw, a bit more mysterious. The type of folks who would put Frankfurters in their soup because only softees put Frankfurters in a bun with ketchup.
When I was older I was telling a friend about Frankfurter Soup, this traditional Irish meal. My friend replied, “Jason...you were just poor.” It was at that moment, well into my twenties, that I realized we had eaten Frankfurter Soup because the ingredients were cheap. For a few bucks you could feed the family for a week with the leftovers.
I started thinking about all of the Irish and Italian meals that Mom wrapped in an air of importance. Meals that were really just a bunch of cheap ingredients mixed together. Some were well known recipes with unique names, like Macaroni Junga-Junga, which was just baked pasta shells in a Bolognese sauce. But there was also pasta fazool, fried meatloaf - recipes that I spent my entire childhood believing were handed down in whispers, protected from outsiders, and plated around our kitchen table and our kitchen table only. In hindsight they were a hodgepodge of cheap peasant food from all over Europe, undoubtedly picked up by Nanny while growing up in blue color, dock worker-based Red Hook, Brooklyn. Frankfurter soup is popular in Germany and Eastern Europe. Pasta fazool is an Americanized bastardization of pasta y fagioli, an Italian meal. Macaroni Junga Junga is baked ziti, but with pasta shells. Meatloaf is also Germanic; but Nanny fried it because fried things are delicious. Probably the only Irish meal we ever ate was corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day, and I hated corned beef and cabbage. It didn’t feel special - it didn’t feel like it belonged to us.
This realization of actual origins made these meals even more special to me. Mom hadn’t lied. She just folded stories into her meals. She helped a kid feel like part of a culture when he was eating pan-fried frankfurters in a tomato and onion soup. She turned a meal passed down from Nanny, or maybe even a meal made from necessity and available ingredients on a Tuesday night, into tradition and memory.
A relevant timeline, drawn in a hotel bible.
Mom taught me to tell stories through meals. So here is a story about fish.
I visited Ro twice after she moved to Germany. The first time was to check in and see how we were feeling. At the end of that trip we decided to take our first break. The second trip was to reassess after the month-long break and to see if we could once again live together. I went out there ready to give it a shot. I’d been practicing my cooking back in DC, making a new meal every night, trying to cook without a book as much as I could. If I was going to move to Germany I was going to focus on cooking and writing; two of the things I always loved to do but never really had the time to focus on. This second trip to Germany was going to be my time to show what I’d learned. I was going to reheat this relationship with my cooking skills alone.
A salmon braise, drawn in a hotel directory.
A couple of days into my trip I decided to really go for it. I figured out the bus schedule and made my way to the largest supermarket in Kaiserslautern. Ro only ate white meat and fish, but I wanted to make something that was flavorful in a way that you can only get from animal fat;I decided to make braised salmon. It took me forever to find any of the ingredients I needed - I was shopping in a grocery store in a foreign country where everyone spoke a language I didn’t understand. I spent an hour putting together the oils, stocks, spices, vegetables, and other ingredients I would need before summoning the courage to visit the meat counter. I had the words I needed to speak on my phone. I needed four kilograms of salmon. Ich brauche vier kilogramm lachs. My number came up and I slowly read the words; the woman behind the counter motioned to see my phone, and she pulled two salmon steaks from the case, weighed them, and wrapped them up. I was so amazed that I managed to get salmon that I ran to the checkout line, paid, and practically skipped to the bus. It wasn’t until I got to Ro’s house that I realized my mistake: the salmon had skin on it.
Ro ate fish, but the fish had to be skinless. I knew this. I panicked. This, I thought for a moment, was the end. But then that moment passed and I remembered that I’d been cooking some great meals back at home, including fish with the skin on. I seasoned that fish. I seared it, I added my vegetables, I added my liquids, I deglazed the pot, I started the braise. The house smelled like wonderful garlic and tomatoes. I made a pot of sticky rice, I plated the meal when Ro came home from work. We sat around the table to eat, and she tried to eat the salmon, but she ended up just picking at it. Finally I packaged up the fish for my lunch the next day, and we went to a restaurant. We fought intensely that night. We didn’t even mention the fish; we just talked about whether or not I should move to Germany or whether or not we should move on from each other. When I left Germany, everything was still up in the air. About two months later, mid-January 2016, we put the whole thing on an indefinite pause that was so complete and full of vitriol and physical distance that I, at least, knew it was over forever.
Several months later Ro came back to Washington DC to visit. I knew she wanted to see if there was any chance we’d get back together, and I also knew that the bar that would need to be cleared was impossibly high by this point. Our conversations were honest and reminiscent but they didn’t even come close to that bar with one exception. Just one sentence. One little moment within several days worth of moments. Unprompted at a bar, against a backdrop of tears, with a cracking voice, Ro said, “I’m sorry I didn’t eat the fish.”
I think about that moment quite often. I think about how hurt I was that she didn’t eat the fish. I think about how she knew how much it hurt me but couldn’t eat it anyway. I think about how that moment stayed with her, even though it was never a central point in any of our fights. As time went on, I was able to look back at that moment and realize that it was unfair to her to have put so much importance on something that I knew she wouldn’t like. I think about how this one moment among millions of moments that made up a sixteen-year relationship can become a succinct and poetic coda.
I’m sorry I didn’t eat the fish.
___________________________
*Tables is a memoir, so it’s my story as I remember it, and I would like to preserve that. Having said that, as I was talking to Mom about her pasteles, she texted me Grandma’s hand-written notes on how to make pasteles. This is technically a recipe, although I never saw Mom use a recipe before. It adds to the story building that Mom infused into her food, as far as I’m concerned. Below is one of the two pages from Grandma’s notes. I chose this page for a few reasons. First of all, I loved how Grandma drew a picture of how to place the achiote on the paper. I didn’t know this is was something Grandma did, and here I am drawing little pictures in my stories. I also love the last line, “Good luck, call if anything.” It says to me that the recipe is just the guide, things will go wrong, and family is standing by. It is the central theme that I’m aiming to expose in Tables. Regarding Grandma’s hand-written recipe notes, of which I now know there are quite a few, I’ll talk to Mom and see if we can do a separate post together on some of the other foods Grandma passed down to Mom. Maybe that’ll be Tables 2.5, or a newsletter-exclusive piece. Speaking of, subscribe to the blog below!
Grandma’s hand-written pasteles notes. To all my friends and family members, I just want to say, “Good luck, call if anything,”