... arroz y habichuelas ...
Food is always an issue in my household: Eze likes his rice & beans, pork chops and viandas; I don’t. I’m usually met with incredulous faces (complete with gaping mouths and wide eyes) when I admit that I don’t like rice & beans at all. If you’re boricua, you have to like rice & beans, sancocho, pasteles… in a case like mine, the kindest of remarks is that I’m “fussy with food”. I’ve even been told that I wrongfully believe that I’m not boricua (“te crees europea, es?”). I’ve tried by all means to understand why it is that there’s food that everyone seems to love that I don’t like at all: this is important to me becase most of that food is the food my husband loves, the food that is served at his parents’ house table. The easiest conclusion achieved is that I was brought up on an “American menu” (a.k.a. hamburgers, hot dogs, mac & cheese), but that is only partly right. I think I finally understood why it is much more complex than that…
Comfort food
(n) Defined as food that gives emotional comfort to the one eating it, these tend to be favorite foods of childhood, or linked to a person, place or time with which the food has a positive association.
For most people around me, such things as rice & beans, pork chops, bacalao, etc are associated with positive and happy times around the table with the family: the warm and loving mom that cooked this for you is the one handing you the plate with a smile. There’s no trauma to eating a plateful of rice & beans, right?
Well, in my case, I wasn’t so lucky to be born liking rice & beans, and the earliest memory I have of that dish is my Mom snarling at me to eat it all. Beans taste to me like force-feeding. It’s not comforting at all. I’m pretty sure these incidents were not daily occurrences: my mom also cooked mashed potatoes with hot dogs, cordon bleu, etc… these were the foods I associated with good times: sharing a chicken cordon bleu piece with my father … yeah, eating most of it because I didn’t like my own dish …
Comfort food for me? Sweet dinner rolls with butter, with a side of slices of salchichón. Instant mashed potatoes with chopped salchichas mixed in. Serrano ham with fried cheese balls. Arabian desserts. My grandmother’s turkey and relleno (potatoes, eggs, onions, almonds, raisins). Mom’s ground beef with rice. Colombian or Venezuelan arepas. Braunschweiger. It wasn’t so much what food I had most often, it was the food that I came to associate with happiness
Some things, I’ve learned to love as an adult: peppers, roquefort cheese, onions, cauliflowers, some viandas. Others, like rice & beans or string beans (or lima beans, or any kind of beans,except refried – because they’ve been killed and mashed) I associate immediately with frustration and almost being sick at the table …
So, dear loved ones: stop insisting on the rice & beans. It.Makes.Me.Sick. (and eating it certainly feels like a chore)
Thank you.
