Pocket Change Collective: Food-Related Stories Read online

  PENGUIN WORKSHOP

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Penguin Workshop,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2022

  Text copyright © 2022 by Maria Gabriela Melian

  Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Penguin Random House LLC

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021018230

  Ebook ISBN 9780593382769

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Food Is a Story.

  Food Is an Adventure.

  Food Is Patience.

  Food Is Strength.

  Food Is Courage.

  Food Is Love.

  About Us

  To my mom, you were right:

  el tiempo es un verdadero bromista—GM

  PROLOGUE

  My younger brother, Gonzalo, and I had not seen each other for at least seven years. For reasons that are hard to explain, I stopped traveling to Argentina in 2009 and hadn’t seen him much since. As he stepped off the plane to a cold, bitter winter in New Jersey, I wished our reunion was under different circumstances. It was 2016, a few days before Martin Luther King Jr. weekend and the biggest nor’easter we’d seen in decades. And we had to do the unthinkable: We were saying goodbye to our mother.

  The last day our mother was conscious was on that Saturday. She spoke softly with my brother and me, chit-chatting here and there with what little voice she had left—as you do when you’re trying to avoid the monstrous, glaring elephant in the room. At one point, Gonzalo stared out the window and asked if it was really going to snow. He really wanted to see snow. “Don’t worry, you are going to see tons of it,” Mom whispered, faintly smiling.

  She died that Monday, January 18, as the snow quietly started to lie on the ground and lasted for what felt like ages. One of the many times my mom kept her word no matter what.

  Everything afterward felt rushed. Goodbyes usually feel that way. They come too soon and rarely do you want to say them. The day after she died, we decided to go to her apartment. She lived in a senior citizen building in Jersey City, and we managed to get to her place, even though the snow made it almost impossible to walk the six blocks that separated my apartment from hers.

  So there we were, alone in her studio that she had proudly decorated and filled up to the brim with plants and pillows and her huge collection of owls. The apartment was small and had that very unique scent of a senior citizen’s home. You know the one. Even my mother knew the one. She often joked that it smelled “viejo.” Then again, her studio also had the faint scent of incense and cigarettes, the latter of which is what killed her in the end.

  It was hard to be confronted with her memories and the dust that began to form around them. Having to pack up her place proved even harder. While my brother was trying to comprehend how our mom spent her last months, and how she lived in such a tiny place, I was trying to figure out how in the world I was going to empty it. He wanted to save everything and wait. I wanted all of this to be done yesterday. I was too close to it.

  We started going through her things without a clear idea how we were going to do it. We weren’t even sure where to properly start. So I went for what I knew best: I started with the fridge. After all, her fridge was my domain, and I had been organizing it for months. I knew my mission as I stepped into the kitchen.

  Up until the day she was hospitalized for the last time, I went to her place daily with food. I made sure to fill up her fridge with things that brought her joy during the course of her cancer treatment. I knew what she liked to eat and what she did not. I bought everything from strawberry ice cream to vanilla yogurt to watermelon. In fact, I used to make tiny melon balls and fill up two- or three-quart containers so she always had something fresquito to eat.

  It was the first time in a little bit that I had checked her freezer. It held many things: pints of ice cream toppling over each other, Ziploc bags with bread for her morning toast, coffee, ice cube trays, and, of course, the one leftover meal—her fish.

  My mom only ever cooked for a crowd, which seems to be genetic because I’ve had the same issue for years. I recently learned to scale down my recipes for one or two people, but she never did. She would make large batches of food and freeze them until she remembered she had them, or until I showed up hungry. And there it was: my mom’s fish, her special recipe that she made for us. Oven-baked white fillet of fish (usually cod or whiting), over thinly sliced potatoes, red peppers, onions, and spices that vary from time to time depending on the day—from dry oregano to thyme—and, of course, olive oil, salt, and pepper. It was her caballito de batalla. Her war horse. The dish we always liked and never complained about. A winner every time.

  Tears began to stream down my face as I stared at the frozen Pyrex container wrapped in plastic. I wanted to somehow hold on to this (to hold on to her) for just a little while longer. But we also had loads of packing up to do and I was starving. So we went for it. My brother and I stopped what we were doing and sat down to eat together. And for a brief moment, it was as if my mom was with us, keeping her word and taking care of us one last time.

  Since then, I’ve made her fish numerous times. I can easily replicate the recipe and only now do I realize what a gift that is—to have had my mom pass down something so personal and so precious to me.

  I believe food makes things better, no matter how frozen or simple it is. The act of eating, in the company of others or alone, is a caring act. Caring for others but also caring for yourself. After all, food is what we all have in common. We all need to eat! But as we all well know, it is so much more than that. Food has rescued me in many moments—and not only because I sold food to survive. I cook to entertain; I cook to be liked; I cook to be loved.

  I’ve made my mom’s fish countless times, but it’s never tasted as good as on that cold January day. That was just one of the many ways food has saved my life.

  * * *

  FOOD-RELATED STORIES

  FOOD IS A STORY.

  Every story has a smell. I recently learned that there is a name for people like me. Or rather, for what I do. What I do is smell everything. Yes, everything: near, far, here, there. I can smell it all. Some call it hypersensitivity. I call it my lucky charm.

  My nose has become an archive for my childhood memories. Whenever I talk to my brother or my three cousins and we reminiscence about our childhood, I am the one who remembers the smell of the story above all else.

  We all grew up together in a tight-knit circle in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires has a very distinctive scent that stays with you forever. It smells like mildew,
coffee, and cigarettes. But some days, depending on the season, Buenos Aires smells like jasmine, my favorite flower. If you were a young porteño like me (that’s what Buenos Aires natives are called because it’s a port city), those were the best days— the early October days right around my birthday.

  The five of us did everything together. We lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same school. Most days after school, we spent the afternoons with my Abuela Porota. My Abuela Porota’s house was tiny: a small two-bedroom apartment with a patio on Calle Cochabamba in San Telmo. San Telmo is one of the oldest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, lined with cobblestone streets that are full of cafés, street murals, and antique stores. And even though Abuela Porota’s house was tiny, somehow she managed to raise three daughters there and, years later, had the five of us together every afternoon wreaking havoc. We would do homework, watch cartoons, and, of course, make a mess. Well, she called it a mess. We called it “cooking.” Every story has two sides.

  Abuela Porota’s house always smelled clean (read: like bleach and floor wax), and I’ve loved that smell ever since. As you entered the living room, there was a small twin bed in the sitting area that doubled as my youngest tia’s bed for many years. To your left, there was a small corridor with the master bedroom on one side and the kitchen right across. My abuela was always brewing or boiling something, even if it was just water for tea. Off the kitchen, there was a second, smaller patio, referred to as a lavadero, because it had a big outdoor sink and a clothesline. She also had a pantry on the patio. The pantry couldn’t have been bigger than a cabinet, but I remember it being huge. Probably because what was inside made a world of difference to a future chef-in-training: That was where she kept the flour, sugar, eggs, and spices. My cousins, my brother, and I would experiment, talk, and laugh while a big cloud of flour formed over our heads. Abuela was cool enough to let us do it, but smart enough to make us do it outside.

  I still remember the smell of wet flour—the smell of musty, bubbling, raw yeast. An experiment waiting to be shaped and cared for by my abuela’s warm hands. She would stand at a very small table (that could fold into an even smaller table) and knead at the wet flour. As a child, I was always curious about what she was making, what her creations would look like. On one of those occasions, she was making her famous handmade ravioli.

  I have to stop here. I am sure most people have eaten ravioli in their life: good, bad, mediocre, or even out of a can. You know, the kind where the filling is an unrecognizable cheesy-flavored mush. But I wish that all of you, at least once in your life, would’ve gotten the chance to experience my abuela’s ravioli.

  Her dough had the perfect balance: elastic but also strong enough to hold the filling neatly packed inside. Her fillings varied because the way we cooked would change as we approached the end of the month, and the meals started to be heavy on potatoes, rice, dry pasta, and, of course, polenta. But her most decadent and famous ravioli among our family was her ravioles de seso.

  Seso is the brain. Cow brain to be exact. I recently called my cousin Pablo and my brother to ask them about the food-related memories we all shared (because, like me, they love to cook and are often my source of inspiration), and they, too, remembered the brain ravioli. They also admitted that, unfortunately, no one makes them anymore. “Pity,” I replied. Perhaps it is a lack of time or space. Or maybe they have suspicions about the quality of the cow brain, since these days, conversations with your local butcher are few and far between. I am sure that at the time that my abuela was making them, she knew exactly where the brains had been, and how to clean and cook them without having to look at a recipe or watch a video, simply because she did not have such a thing.

  But her ravioli was a little square cloud of magic, and she’d often let us help her make them. She’d usually prepare the dish on Sundays because a pasta dish is a traditional Sunday lunch in Argentina. (Some may disagree with me and say that it is actually the asado, our barbecue, that is our traditional Sunday lunch dish. But for that, you need an outdoor space and nice weather. So I stick by my trusted pasta and ravioli.) Nothing is closer to a labor of love than making pasta. It’s even more special if the pasta is filled. To make ravioli, you need a bit of table space and a steady hand. After you roll out the dough, you carefully portion the filling in a straight line to keep the same distance between each little bit of filling. In my abuela’s case, the filling was ground cow brain cooked in butter and olive oil, and liberally seasoned with salt and pepper. Then, of course, comes the hard part: placing the top layer onto the filling, which seals the dreamy ravioli. The secret is to carefully lay it down with one hand while you softly press with the other, not allowing any air bubbles to remain inside. It’s painstaking but so, so gratifying. I would watch my abuela do this with the same calmness she did everything else around the kitchen. She’d proceed to cut the ravioli with a tiny fluted wheel cutter, and that was when she’d let me help. I needed to be precise. There was no going back and forth with the wheel. There was only one chance, a quick straight cut and on to the next. We’d work together like a well-oiled machine, my grandmother portioning the fillings as I watched along and meticulously cut the dough.

  Years later, when I tried to make ravioli for the first time as a grown-up in culinary school, I knew exactly what I was doing. As I was making them, portioning the filling and cutting the dough, all of the memories of learning how to cook with my abuela rushed back to me. I began to realize that there’s a sanctity to the act of sharing a recipe. It’s an act that can oftentimes be taken for granted, but it’s one that so sneakily becomes the fabric of our lives. Over the years, I would call my Abuela Porota every Sunday to chat with her and my Tia Susy, who was my mom’s oldest sister and one of the best cooks I’ve ever known. We would always compare notes, and I tried to get her to narrate recipes for me, recipes she had memorized and never measured. “You know, just put the one cup of this and half a cup of that,” she would say. But I knew that the cup she was referring to was not a measuring cup, but rather her green, black, and orange teacup that survived from her wedding china set and was always sitting on the cupboard like a trophy.

  Passed down from one person to the next, from one generation to the next, these recipes are our stories. They are the way we keep ourselves afloat, a way to process and organize the thousands of memories that hold us. It’s another way for us to remember and cherish moments of comfort and joy.

  Because let’s be real: My nose is pretty good. But it can only do so much.

  * * *

  FOOD IS AN ADVENTURE.

  The day I arrived in New York City was very cold. It was December 13, 1996. My boyfriend at the time, Lester, and I landed early in the morning, and it was my second time in John F. Kennedy Airport, a place that brought about so many emotions for me, from fear to joy. I’m of the belief that the importance of an airport cannot be measured by how many flights it has or how clean it is. It should be measured by the emotion that it brings for people, and for me, JFK was the happiest place on earth. I was excited to visit my family and even more excited to see my mom, who had moved to New York City six months earlier. I couldn’t wait to hug her after such a long time.

  The plan was for Lester and me to stay a few months, practice our English, then go back to Argentina, where we both had jobs waiting for us, a nice apartment, a dog that we had left behind with my dad, friends, and a lot of plants. Well, that was the plan, anyway.

  I was also a recent college graduate. I went to the oldest journalism school in Buenos Aires, Instituto Grafotécnico. I was fascinated with journalism from a young age—ever since I was twelve years old and the ten-week undeclared war between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) had us completely glued to our TV sets. Back then, we would watch the news from three or four various channels that were pretty much controlled by Argentina’s military government. In fact, we regularly listened to the radio station from our
bordering country, Uruguay, to find out a bit more of what was going on. From then on, I wanted to be able to help somehow by telling the truth. I wanted to be on the ground, investigating, and learning about the issues at hand. But as I graduated college with a journalism degree, I realized that that path was not necessarily the most popular career choice in Argentina. I wanted to explore where that path could take me in New York City, a place I had dreamed about for as long as I could remember.

  That wasn’t the first time I had set foot in New York City. I had traveled there with my mom a few years before to visit my mom’s sister, her kids, and her husband. We stayed for almost a month and ended up spending Christmas there. I have to admit that it was my first time celebrating Christmas with real snow. I had seen snow in the south of Argentina, but never in December because summer is usually in full swing at that time. In fact, my family once decorated our Christmas tree in Buenos Aires with fake snow, a tradition that ended as quickly as it started because of the mess it made.

  I immediately fell in love with the city: the people, the colorful skyline, the gray asphalt streets, the squirrels. I fell in love with every iconic thing the city had to offer, from Rockefeller Center and its ice-skating rink to Central Park to the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building with its eagle gargoyles. It felt surreal, especially when you’d grown up watching movies set in New York City. I was hooked for life. I immediately wanted to find out if the city had a smell, too.

  On one of those eternally tiresome tourist walks with my mom, I realized that New York City did, indeed, have a particular smell. And no, it’s not the smell of pee in the subway on a hot summer day. For me, the smell of the city is the smell of steaming hot salty pretzels from the Central Park street vendors. The first time I ever had a pretzel in my life was by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was presented with this knot-shaped bread covered in salt flakes so big they looked like glass shards. I had never seen anything like it before. Then, like magic, the vendor proceeded to offer me mustard, a staple food in my refrigerator to this day (only ever to be outmatched by butter). I thought someone was kidding me when I was given a piece of salty warm bread with mustard. How completely genius!