Post #175 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
All Things Labor — Memoir Contest – Honorable Mention Story, Labor Day Category
Women’s Memoirs is pleased to publish an Honorable Mention winner in our September 2011 Memoir Writing Contest, Labor Day Category — Judith Newton.
Congratulations Judith on your award-winning story. My mouth is watering. We enjoyed your thoughts on cooking, love, and politics and the way that you weave the story of Like Water for Chocolate into your storytelling.
NEW CONTEST
You’ve inspired us to announce a new contest that will result in an ebook. We hope everyone will read the details at the bottom of your story and recipe. Then get busy writing a story of food for Women’s Memoirs.
We invite you to leave Nancy a note in the Comments section below her story.
LIKE WATER: A MEMOIR VIGNETTE OF LOVE AND FOOD
By Judith Newton
“How do you peel a walnut?” my daughter asked as she looked, not too happily, at the mound of nuts on the kitchen table. We’d spent three days in the kitchen laboring over the twelve dishes we’d planned for a large buffet, and chilies en nogada, or chilies in walnut sauce, was the final stage of our cooking marathon. That evening some forty faculty and students from all over campus would be arriving to celebrate our new, multicultural graduate program, and if any dish could instill a sense of community it would be chilies en nogada.
Making simple recipes like tacos de crema, refried beans, and macaroni with spinach and serrano chilies had been easy and even pleasurable, but the chilies in walnut sauce was posing a challenge. I’d combined Frida Kahlo’s recipe with one I’d taken from the Internet, and the latter called on us to peel the walnuts before pulverizing them for the sauce.
“Mom,” said Anna, rubbing at one of the walnuts with her fingers, “this brown stuff isn’t coming off.”
“This is a window into the lives of generations of women,” I said, ineffectually rubbing another walnut in my hand. “Can you imagine how much time they spent working in kitchens?”
“I love cooking with you like this,” Anna had said when we first began.
“I love it too,” I’d said. Our years of cooking together and of struggling through some difficult recipes had created a strong sense of solidarity.
We decided not to peel the walnuts since Frida’s recipe didn’t call for it, but we did roast the two dozen poblano chilies and pulled off their skins. Then we chopped a picadillo out of shredded meat, fruits, nuts and cinnamon, and cradling the chilies in our hands, began to stuff them with the sweet and savory mix. We were treating those chilies as if they’d just been born, but despite our efforts they were developing some ugly splits. We decided not to flour them, coat them in egg mix, and then fry them in hot oil as Frida’s recipe required.
“It’s too risky,” I said, entertaining grim visions of the chilies bursting their sides and spilling their multi-colored innards into a smoky pool of oil. Did Frida fry her own chilies, I wondered. But then came the sauce–easy, sweet, and cool. Four cups of (unpeeled) walnuts pureed with cream cheese, Mexican crema, cinnamon, and a fragrant half cup of sherry. Finally seeds from six pomegranates and sprigs of parsley to go on top. Red, white, green—-the colors of the Mexican flag.
I had been thinking about a Mexican novel for the entire three days of cooking, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies
Each chapter of the novel is organized around a recipe, and the process involved in making the chapter’s dish—-the grinding, the toasting, the chopping, the boiling, the frying, the cracking of eggs–is so thoroughly woven throughout the pages that cooking, an often invisible form of labor, becomes as central to the story as romance and revolution. Cooking, indeed, becomes an emblem of the domestic love work that makes love and revolution possible. It is the force that keeps women and men alive not just physically but emotionally, spiritually, and politically as well.
Cooking is like that–always there–and if it is as it should be, it not only nourishes our bodies but gives us the comfort of feeling loved, cared for, and secure. Eating what is cooked and served in a loving way evokes one of our first experiences of feeling at home in the world, the experience of being fed by another being. That is one reason that cooking and eating with others can heal the adult self, one reason that it can so easily make us feel connected to another person, a family, a culture, a political community.
Like Tita and Chenca, Anna and I were laboring in the service of politics and love. The new graduate program was meant to be revolutionary—-cross racial, multi-cultural, oriented toward political activism not just inside but outside the classroom as well. And I had done enough organizing by then to know how cooking for others, not just from duty, but with generosity and lightness of heart, can develop and sustain those emotional connections to others that are, at bottom, what make political community possible.
In Like Water for Chocolate, food is given magical force. Quail in Rose Petal Sauce invites Tita and Pedro to enter each other’s bodies both spiritually and sensuously as they sit at the dining table. It prompts Gertrude to run away with a revolutionary, sitting behind him, naked, on his horse. The Chilies in Walnut Sauce provoke the guests at Tita and Pedro’s wedding to make passionate love. Magical realism like this suggests the power of emotion, of the unconscious, and of cooking as emotion work in the day to day activities of our lives.
Like life, the novel is full of mothers, those who nourish and those who do not. The bad mother, Elena, controls Tita, insists that Tito serve her until she dies, forbids Tita to marry Pedro, the man she loves. Cruel, repressing, she is the mother who denies. Even after death, she reappears, forbidding Tita to be happy. Like a force of nature, she returns again and again, suggesting the lasting influence of how we are mothered. But Tita finds good mothers to take Elena’s place–Chenca, the cook who tends to Tita in the kitchen; Dr. John and his Indian mother, Morning Light, who feed Tita healing foods after Elena brutally entombs her daughter in the Dove Cot. Tita herself becomes a nurturing mother to Esperanza, her sister’s daughter.
Like Tita I, too, had found alternative mothers–in my gay ex-husband Dick, in my women friends, in colleagues I had come to love. But most of all I had found mothering in being motherly—-to Anna and to my political community. Cooking and eating with others had all but eclipsed those days in my mother’s house–the shame, the lost identity, the spilled water on the floor. Like Chenca I wanted to pass on, to Anna and to others, the recipes, the utopian practices, the ways of being and of labor that make history more than a tale of struggle, that make it also a love story, a story of caring for others.
CHILIES EN NOGADA
(Chilies in Walnut Sauce adapted from StarChefs.com)
Meat:
2 lb beef brisket or 1 lb beef and 1 lb pork butt
1 small white onion cut into quarters
2 cloves garlic
1 T sea salt
Picadillo:
4 T. safflower or canola oil
1/3 c. chopped white onion
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/8 tsp ground cloves
3 heaping T. raisins
2 T chopped walnuts
2 T. candied pineapple
1 fresh pear, peeled and chopped
1 apple, peeled and chopped
3 large, ripe tomatoes, roasted, peeled and chopped
Kosher salt to taste
Chilies:
6 fresh poblano chilies, roasted, peeled, and seeded with stem intact
Walnut Sauce:
1 c. fresh walnuts
6 oz cream cheese (not fat free) at room temperature
1 ½ c Mexican Crema
½ tsp sea salt
1 T. sugar
1/8 tsp cinnamon
¼ c. dry sherry
Garnish:
1 T. chopped flat-leaf parsley
½ c. pomegranate seeds
1. Cut meat into large chunks; remove excess fat. Place meat in large Dutch oven with onion, garlic and salt. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil. Skim off foam if it collects on the surface. Lower heat and simmer for 45 minutes until the meat is just tender.
2. Remove from heat and allow meat to cool in the broth. Then remove meat and finely shred it.
3. Warm the oil in a heavy skillet and sauté the onion and garlic over medium heat until pale gold. Stir in shredded meat and cook for 5 minutes. Add cinnamon, pepper, cloves. Stir in raisins, 2 T walnuts, and candied pineapple. Add chopped pear and apple and mix well. Add tomatoes and salt to taste. Continue cooking over medium high heat until most of the moisture has evaporated. Stir now and then. Let cool, cover, and set aside. The picadillo may be made one day ahead.
4. Slit the chilies down the side just long enough to remove seeds and veins, keeping the stem end intact. Drain chilies on absorbent paper until completely dry. Set aside. Chiles may be made a day in advance
5. At least 3 hours in advance, place 1 c walnuts in small pan of boiling water. Remove from heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Drain the nuts and, when cool, rub off as much of the dark skin as possible. Chop into small pieces.
6. Place nuts, cream cheese, crema, and salt in a blender and puree thoroughly. Stir in the sugar, cinnamon and sherry. Chill for several hours.
7. Preheat oven to 350 F. When ready to serve reheat the meat filling and stuff the chilies. Place chilies, covered in warm oven. After they are heated (about 15 minutes), place chilies on serving platter, cover with chilled walnut sauce and sprinkle with parsley and pomegranate seeds.
ALL NEW MEMOIR CONTEST
Women’s Memoirs invites you to send us a 500-1000 word story about your favorite recipe. Is it a nostalgic dish that reminds you of your mother? Is it a romantic recipe that you make for your partner on Valentine’s Day? Is it a self-invented recipe that you love to share with your friends? Whatever your story, whatever your recipe, we’d like to receive them for consideration in a new ebook from Women’s Memoirs.
More people are eating out than ever before. As you can see from the chart on the left, away-from-home food (this includes take out as well as restaurant meals) is almost half of all food consumed.
Let’s give everyone some great food to prepare and eat at home and let’s give them stories they can share while they are starting to create their own special family stories around meals.
Let’s bring back kitchen table wisdom.
Your story and recipe is due June 1, 2012. Just email a .doc file that includes both the story and the recipe to:
matilda (at) womensmemoirs (dot) com.
BE SURE TO PUT IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF THE EMAIL:
Food Memoir and Recipe Contest
(If you use a different subject line, your story might get lost in my email.)
