Juan Villoro
One of the great mythologies of our time consists of believing that all grandmothers cooked wonderfully. It tastes tastier if someone says that the pipian comes from a distant family recipe. The past spices up.
Pau Arenós, Catalan writer and food critic, has rebelled against the widespread belief that grandmothers seasoned like no other. This dissenting opinion does not have many followers. The reason seems simple: we need rigorously unprovable reserves of wisdom, and one of them is the superiority of tradition over the unsavory present.
Intrigued by the subject, I talked to several people about their culinary background. I found no one who repudiated grandmothers’ parsley. The children of immigrants spoke of soups and stews as the last contact with the homeland of origin, and the Mexicans referred to the stoves as a sanctuary forbidden to men where women concentrated, with identical doses of talent and submission, to turn their emotions into stews.
The world of grandmothers is associated with ingredients foreign to commerce and the work of chemistry; among them, those that arrived home alive stand out. Decades ago, around this time, a turkey used to fuss restless the roof of the house. It was kept fattened to be eaten at Christmas, which provoked sentimental crises. Even if it did not reach the rank of a pet, no one wanted to kill it to celebrate peace. At dinner on the 24th, as we prayed around the turkey, I feared that God would answer our prayers of thanksgiving for life and resurrect the animal at the dinner table.
In my quick survey, I found no spoon apostates who would deny the culinary virtue of their ancestors. Those who did not know their grandmothers or knew them already sick, far from the provident pantry, celebrated the seasonings of other grandmothers and mentioned restaurants where tradition does not forget the epazote. It seemed evident to me that people who lack cooking prowess do not want to be seen as orphans of flavors. To speak with the delight of the purple onion and the tiny sesame seed is for them a matter of lineage, a way of saying that their palate does not belong to the rank of the uncouth who are satisfied with the insipid.
Interestingly, those who had enjoyed the wrapped child, the Aztec pudding, or grandmother’s indelible manchamanteles (tablecloth stainer) described their favorite stews in minor detail and referred to the recipes as an interesting abstraction. Like literature, cooking can be learned but not taught. Great cooks work by intuition and rarely repeat a stew in the same way. Following the long preparation steps are not enough for the result to taste the same. We arrived at a decisive point: gastronomic wisdom is better transmitted as legend than as a reality.
As a child, I preferred to soak sweet bread in my grandmother’s café con leche because she sweetened it with unique expertise. The way she moved the spoonfuls turned the cup into an alchemical pot. I never tried to imitate her; the important thing was to steal her candied mixture.
The etymology of “taste” (sabor) coincides with that of “know”(saber). We, grandchildren, will always be at a cognitive and culinary disadvantage concerning grandmothers. There is no point in transcribing recipes because the most important things are kept in strict secrecy. What is the dosage for “sal al gusto” (salt to taste)?
When talking about their mysteries, cooks omit things out of modesty, out of forgetfulness of a procedure that has never been carried out in the same way, or for the pleasure of keeping a secret. What is certain is that the dictation transcribed by the grandchildren is tasteless.
In a world where everything aspires to be quantified, the fame of grandmothers depends on an intangible legacy. For technology, the reality is a measuring system. One application measures our steps and another our heart rate. Health is a variant of statistics. Fortunately, in an environment that confuses data with science, there is knowledge that is impossible to calibrate.
Certain prestige depends on its unverifiable condition. Grandmothers’ casseroles are an act of faith. We do not need proof to believe in them. If we don’t like the new version of the recipe, we assume that an ingredient was lost along the way. Nothing is inherited better than nostalgia.
This was originally published in Spanish on November 19, 2021, by Reforma.