The Tastes I Miss, or, The Tastes I Haven't Had by camille hermida-fuentes

I have a good friend of mine who stayed in New York, who stayed when I left. He’s always been a good cook, to the point where if he said he was opening up a restaurant I wouldn’t doubt it. Not even a little, not even now, in the age of the covid-19 pandemic that has turned that industry upside down, where opening one seems more impossible than ever before. We talk almost every day since I left New York, exchange texts and video calls. But on Sundays we do not. Sundays are when he cooks, for the entire day, long stretches, when his whole family does, together. My friend has a penchant not only for the cooking itself but also for taking artfully arranged photographs of what he makes: crystal shrimp dumplings, fried sweet buns sticky with dollops of condensed milk, gin and tonics with delicate sprigs of herbs peeking out of ice, homemade miso soup, green tea poured over soft piles of fresh rice. 

I remember when it was, unbeknownst to us, our last day on the job at the movie theater where we both work. I remember that I was about to get on the train, join him in the box office when we both got the email: don’t come in today. If you’re here already, leave. They put it into more formal words but it was what it was, words that told us our workplace was closed down, for three weeks, although now, midway into October, we know it’s been much longer than that. I think about the popcorn we serve there, although it is not very good, the butter fluorescent and not really butter (canola oil instead), the salt ground so finely it’s hard to not spill too much into the metallic cauldron we’d tossed the kernels into. I have tried to recreate this popcorn at home, but the real butter, the better salt, in a bowl still warm from the dishwasher, does not feel the same as how I felt going home after a double shift, clock turned to midnight, scraping the last salted flakes out of the bottom of a nondescript paper cup, trying to stay awake on the train. It should taste better, and it does, but it doesn’t. 

I am not a good cook. I am not a good cook, not like how Eric is. I don’t have a big family like he does, one that stretches from coast to coast and checks in with each other weekly, cooks together. My family lives on the other sides of oceans and seas, scattered throughout different countries. I do not talk to them, do not know how I am even related to most of them, a web of cousins and half-cousins, half-siblings I have never met and never will. 

But then I think about the cookbook I left in New York, in my now ex-apartment: Cocina al Minuto. My family smuggled it out of Cuba when they left in 1962, after the revolution– one of the conditions of them leaving the country was that they were supposed to leave mostly everything behind, could only bring the essentials, and books were not on that list. I think about the cost of that, about how the desire to feed your family had to overpower your fear of the legal consequences. It’s a tiny, bright blue leather bound volume, small enough to fit into a handbag. I swore I would use it in New York and I did not. Swore I would learn a new recipe every day and I did not, or at least every week then and I did not. The cookbook sat on my shelves and now it sits in a box in a basement on Long Island, rescued by a friend from a vindictive (I broke my lease) landlord. I wish I had slipped it into my handbag, like my great grandmother might have done. It would have stayed close to my chest, my literal chest, in a leather tote banging against my side while I ran, ran into a friend’s car, ran through security, ran to my gate, stuffed it under a stranger’s seat on the plane but still closer to me than it had been to be when I ignored it, for months. I think about the tastes in it: pot roast simmered with water, wine and chorizo, tender beyond belief, empanadas stuffed with olives, small but heavy in my hand like a gift, the caramel top layer of a flan bursting between my teeth. I never made them, but I remember when people around me did. And I can imagine the shape of the great grandmother I never met stirring the pot of arroz con leche frothy with cinnamon, decades later my mother taking up a whole afternoon to make it, just like her mother did, and her abuela before her, calling me into the kitchen to taste it. And I think to myself, that is enough. Today, right now. The memory is enough.