In those days, the Bushwick section of Brooklyn was changing. White folks were moving out because Black and brown folks were moving in.
Sitting on the stoop, Maria and I saw moving trucks load up the belongings of our Polish, German, and Italian neighbors. We didn’t know they were leaving because families like ours were moving in. We watched them go.
Maria’s mother raised their top floor window, leaned out, and called, “¡Ven a comer!”
“I gotta go eat,” Maria said. She and her sister headed into the building. But after a moment, I heard Maria’s mother again.
“Tell your friend she can come eat too.”
I bolted up the stairs two at a time, into the world of Maria’s mother’s kitchen—a small sunlit room where pots bubbled and steamed. Under the guidance of Maria’s mother’s deft hands, orange circles of dough became meat-filled pastelillos fried golden and crisp. I sat down at their Formica table with its padded yellow chairs and tasted the food of a new world, a world that would in the decades to follow become as much a part of me as my own name.
As that first day melted into years, Maria and I became best friends, running up to her apartment for mounds of mofongo with bits of chicken, yellow rice and red beans with cubes of calabaza squash, and fried plantains—both the sweet and the saltwater-dipped green ones. As my mother’s cooking skills improved, Maria began eating at our house, our predinner question to each other becoming, “Whatchu eating?”
In the summers we brought our dinners out to Maria’s stoop and traded: foil-wrapped plates of my mother’s fried chicken, cornbread, and mashed potatoes (lumpy, but Maria didn’t mind) exchanged for her mother’s pollo guisado, a thick stew of chicken, tomato, olives, and onions served over white rice.
Though it has become my favorite dish of all time, I have yet to make this stew quite the way Maria’s mother did—the spices perfectly melding into the broth, the chicken nearly melting in the mouth, the olives so much a part of the dish and yet holding a space of their own. Still each time I pull out the ingredients to start a new batch of sofrito, I think, This time I’ll nail it!
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