As far as I can tell, congee neither lengthens nor curtails your life. And it’s just right there between comforting and bland: eating it makes you feel like you’re on the one hand nourishing your needs and on the other hand doing penance for your sins.
— Tallis Eng in The Paris Review
Last time we visited Hong Kong, my mother-in-law told me anyone can make congee. Anyone, she said, hiding her mouth as its corners turned upward. In fact, she said, it’s perfect for me. It’s a hard dish to mess up because congee is watery, over-boiled rice, a dish forgiving of lack of skill. She laughed and then waved her hand in apology.
It is a well-known fact among family that I am not a wizard in the kitchen. Not too long ago, there were two possible outcomes when I ignited our gas stove: the smoke alarm would go off because (1) I’ve started a fire or (2) I’ve burned dinner beyond recognition.
My husband has since disabled the smoke alarm whenever I’ve cooked.
This is not an insignificant gesture; my terribly practical husband is an engineer by trade. Brian can wrangle his team into solving problems they’ve dismissed as impossible, and then have a beer with them without any bad blood. He has a workspace filled with prototypes of all different kinds of gadgets. He does not believe in God, but in human potential. He is suspicious of politicians, organized religion, fringe theories in physics, health supplements, Laurie Anderson, and the logic of Malcolm Gladwell (of the latter, he’s not alone). Yet Brian is not always practical, at least by conventional standards: a few years ago he went hiking with friends and a snowstorm hit; although they’d been prepared for some snow, there was zero visibility and they got lost in thick of the Adirondack Mountains. He returned in one piece, and while I was worrying about frostbite and bears, he spun me around the room, exhilarated, asking me if I’d ever consider living off the grid, the very system that employs him, that sustains his intellect.
It didn’t surprise me, this side of him. When we first met at The Ten Bells wine bar on the Lower East Side and I told him I was a writer—and a poet at that—he didn’t flinch. When I told him I was a practicing Jew and then lit veladoras for a sick relative and prayed to a statue of Mary outside a Mexican Catholic Church, Brian prayed with me. When I fell very ill and told him my mixed Jewish and Mexican genes had a started civil war in my body, he nodded, but proposed I listen to my doctor and get those blood tests done anyway. So each time my husband disables the smoke alarm before I enter the narrow confines of our kitchen, I know it’s another day that he’s put practicality aside out of love.
Anyone can make congee, his mother had repeated to me that evening as we sat drinking tea on the rooftop of their building. It was cold, but the view of Central was too lovely to waste.
Anyone, I whispered.
Have courage, she added with a straight face and then broke into another round of laughter.
I was thinking of my husband leading his friends through a raging storm, his mustache and beard frozen with tiny icicles, so I listened to his mother’s instructions, which meant I copied them down carefully while deciding to improvise anyway.
* * *
I first met his parents over a FaceTime call. We were preparing to visit them in Hong Kong. We had only been together for five months, and here we were, going overseas to stay with them for three weeks. I had braced myself for a cool, skeptical response. For one thing, he’d told them we were serious, and then there were the major divides of race, religion, and occupation between us.
Instead, his parents were friendly, their questions genuine as they were anxious. I was anxious. It put on us equal ground. His mother’s chief concern was the daily menu. What did I not eat? What did I like the most? I was taken back when she told me she’d look up the laws of kashrut, in case I kept kosher, but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it, as there was so much conflicting information on the internet.
I stared at the screen. Brian nudged me, not wanting her to mistake my silence for something else. I told her I hadn’t kept kosher in years, and that I’d never really kept “kosher kosher” anyway, since my mother’s family was Mexican, my maternal grandfather a fisherman with a love for oysters and clams. For a long time, my father, who was raised observant, had avoided shellfish and pork, mixing milk with meat, but he too now enjoyed all foods. And even when he himself had kept kosher, my father always made exceptions for my brother and me, that in the company of others, we eat what we are given because someone has gone to the trouble of cooking for us.
Yes, she said, but it’s no trouble. I want you to be comfortable. To be happy with us.
Surely I was dreaming. I tried to imagine my own mother saying this to me. I want you to be comfortable. Happy. Instead I had a flashback to a family barbecue at my Aunt Nena’s house and asking my mother for a Happy Meal. We didn’t eat McDonald’s, but that didn’t stop my persistent requests that always seemed to come at the wrong times. In this instance, my very exhausted mother was standing over a large grill with tongs in one hand, partially enveloped in smoke, wiping sweat from her brow. You want a happy meal? Every meal is a happy meal, she’d snapped, shaking the tongs at me. I shook the memory from my head.
I really do eat everything, I said, and then blurted out: I love chicken feet, but no one will ever eat them with me.
Across the distance, two pairs of eyes lit up.
His mother pointed to his father, and said: He loves them. He will definitely eat them with you.
* * *
It was alchemy: in the morning steaming bowls would greet us.
We’d roll corn tortillas sprinkled with salt into tight wands.
Over each bowl, we inhaled the scent of our dreams.
Like magicians, we read both past and future
in shiny dregs at the bottoms of our bowls.
—Barbara Brinson Curiel, “Cooking Menudo”
My mother’s family always prepared menudo around Christmastime; it’s not a dish for the faint-hearted. A year or so ago, poet Barbara Brinson Curiel read in Bryant Park as part of the Word for Word series, co-sponsored by Letras Latinas. She read from her collection Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry in 2012. I remember this poem in particular because cooking menudo in her household was a family affair: from her father honing “the many knives / that the cutting would dull / and…trim[ming] the fat” before her mother “added la pata, cow’s hoof, / cut into pieces and smelling of pasture, / along with onion and garlic.” The meat itself was an event, “wrapped in pink paper / like a gift for a princess.” While one could simply read (and follow) it as an actual recipe, the poem itself pays homage to her family coming together to prepare the meal, as everyone has a part in “cutting the menudo into squares / the size of a man’s thumb, / our hands getting colder and colder.”
I remember my Uncle Balani making menudo around Christmastime, the smell of blood and murky dampness, the peculiar texture of “tender honeycomb” that Curiel recalls, the tough tendons. It takes hours to cook; some say it’s a soup, others a stew, but it’s more like an entire meal in itself. When my brother and I came to realize what the “honeycomb” of menudo was—tripe taken from one of the stomach chambers—he could never eat it again without throwing up.
My own journey with menudo—and chicken feet—was different. Now, I was a skinny child with a cast-iron stomach and a very, very curious mind; neither were ever completely sated. And one winter day, I began to consider where my food came from. I’d seen chickens slaughtered right after they’d been running around, pecking at the ground, curious and nervous at my young, ever-grabbing hands. I’d held a sick hen in my lap, and stroked her plump, feathered body, until she eventually relaxed and burrowed into me. I remember the thrill of her trust in me. I remember how she got well and I cupped her peeping chicks in both hands; all the same, whenever I was presented with a plate of fried chicken feet, I’d chew off the crispy outer skin and suck on the bones, ravenous and yet with a growing conscience of what I was eating: life itself.
Of Laurie Ann Guerrero’s collection A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, winner of the 2013 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Nikky Finney writes, “Guerrero has always written pointedly with a sharp pen and a sharp knife at the ready.” Her poem “When I Made Eggs this Morning” (listen to her read it here) reminds me of my first encounters with eating living things, from the “gooey discharge” to “tiny black skulls” and “bonemeal” that the poet then “served… / to [her] children.” It is a viscous poem; it is a violent poem. And it reminded me of the first time I realized that whether it was eggs or menudo or chicken feet, lives of animals were being taken to sustain me, and with that, their character, temperament, spirit.
I mean that we were not a family who regularly ate lunchmeat or fast food: I knew very well where our food came from, and some of our food had had personality.
I’d been the victim of a goat named Matilda who’d butted me, intentionally, because, as one uncle claimed, goats were cheeky animals who also liked practical jokes. I’ve brushed away the mosquitos from the coat of a cow chewing her cud, indifferent to their bites, and then looked into her languid, content eyes. I watched my grandfather nurse back to health the wild amazons that crossed back and forth over the U.S.-Mexican border, mending a broken wing or foot, and it suddenly occurred to me that my mother’s family ate everything—everything, including eel, cabrito (young goat), and even the stomach chambers of cows—but we did not eat cats, dogs or parrots, not the amazons, not the parakeets, and certainly not my mother’s very volatile cockatoo who screeched when she felt no one was paying enough attention to her.
That same winter day, it finally clicked just as I fished the last of the tripe out of my menudo and I asked the room just why we ate some animals and not others. Didn’t it seem kind of, well, barbaric of us? To decide who should live and who should die?
My aunts and uncles and parents stopped whatever they were doing and looked at me strangely, especially my mother, who looked as if I’d just betrayed her.
Wouldn’t it be better, I ventured further, just to eat only plants so we could just hold the chickens with more honesty?
What began as a curiosity erupted into a bombardment of cultural economics: didn’t I know how precious meat was? That when my elders were growing up, it was even more rare. (But—) And how foolish was I not to know the difference between a cow and a dog? (Honestly I didn’t, but was not given a chance to say this.) And I wasn’t going to be some crazy vegetarian like…like…those other leaf-eating fools? (They meant Anglos, which means white people.) Didn’t I know the best kind of animals ate other animals—like sharks for instance, volunteered my mother. And who messes with a shark?
And just when have you been holding the chickens? An uncle called out.
Up until this point, my mother had been silent because she was absolutely furious with me, just as she had been when I’d cried hysterically during Igor Stravinsky “The Rite of Spring” in Fantastia when the Tyrannous rex killed the stegosaurus, and again when the dinosaurs marched to their death in a sun-bleached desert. Apparently there are some historical inaccuracies, but that’s another matter; the fact I had deemed “leaf-eating-saurs” good and “dino-eating-dino-saurs” bad rubbed my mother the wrong way because, why else, cultural economics. I was a very small child, and the thought of me becoming a vegetarian was a great concern.
I quietly finished my bowl of menudo even though I felt queasy. I noticed that my brother and cousins had conveniently slipped outside to play a game of soccer in the street, stopping only when cars zoomed by without any regard for speed limits.
My mother shook her head as I brought my bowl to the sink. I did the dishes without asking, hoping work off the peccadillo I’d just committed. She watched me and said: Sometimes the parrots steal a bit of chicken when we aren’t looking. Think about it: what do you think hawks eat? Salad?
She lifted my chin with one hand. You understand?
I pulled away from her. I understood. Birds eat birds. In this world, my mother believed, one is either predator or prey. And no daughter of hers was going to be some leaf-eating fool who never sees it coming.
* * *
On the first day of spring, I make my own stock from chicken bones, which I know is strange for someone who doesn’t know how to cook. Ten cups of water and the bones. I haven’t held a live chicken in years. Once the water is boiling, I remember his mother saying something about adding rice wine, but all we have is rosé, so I add a few tablespoons, meaning that I pour a few splashes into the pot. I drop in some scallions, which I cut in half; fresh ginger that I’d attempted to peel (I was mildly successful in doing so); a pinch of salt. I turn down the temperature to let it simmer for 3 hours.
My husband enters the kitchen, and considers the state of the counter, the bowls of dried mushrooms and dried scallops from our local Chinese market soaking in water, to rehydrate them, for when I add the rice. The cutting board with more scallion and ginger for garnish. A chicken breast to be shredded and mixed in. Outside it begins to snow, and I retire to my desk to finish this essay. A mourning dove hops up the fire escape ladder. I wonder if it’s the same dove who visited all last spring with his calls. From the kitchen I hear the quiet simmer of the large pot my mother had given me when I’d moved back to New York, which I’d never used until now. I hear the footsteps of my husband. He sits down on the bed next to our cat, who has not moved all day. I swivel around in my chair and tell him that the other day, a neighbor’s kid mistook her for a stuffed animal because she’s so indolent. I consider my attachment to her. I tell my husband that she’d be no match for the wild amazons back home; they’d eat her alive if they had to.
True, he says, and then: hey, did you know you have a lot of mushrooms soaking?
Just a cup, I said.
Yeah, he said, but when they rehydrate, it’s probably going to be about four.
I look at the cat, who stretches, yawns, and goes back to sleep.
That’s a lot, I say quietly.
Yeah, he says, it just means it’s going to be four times as good.
Suddenly we hear a noise in the kitchen, and jump to our feet. The uncovered pot is boiling over. I had not turned the heat down. My husband helps me clean up as I turn off the gas to clean slivers of ginger and onion that had fallen on the stovetop, and wipe down the sides of the pot. Then I carefully adjust the temperature.
No need for the smoke alarm, I whisper.
Not at all, he whispers back.
Outside, the snow falls silently to the ground, on this first day of spring.
This is Part 1 of a 2-Part Series on writing, memory and making congee.