Our two-bedroom apartment is small and cramped. It houses four people: a mother, two daughters and a son. The living room has a very small, duct tape-covered couch, but an eight-person dining table. The table’s made of dark wood and marble and, unlike the couch, is in pristine condition. The table is one of the few items of furniture we brought with us when we moved from Linhares to Juiz de Fora in ‘98; a relic from the last time my mãe had a fixed income. To an outsider, it may seem out of place, too grandiose for such a simple environment. To our family, it represents consistency, makes our apartment home.
Every day at lunch time I sit at this table, a full plate in front of me.
I am a fussy child when it comes to food. It doesn’t help that mamãe is a terrible cook. There are only two dishes she can cook well, strogonoff de frango and lasanha, which she saves for visitas because the ingredients are too expensive. Our daily lunches of rice and beans are usually burned or flavourless or both. But my mãe is not to be faulted for her lack of skill in the kitchen. She is a single mother who has always worked multiple jobs. Learning to cook was a luxury she could not afford.
Still, the food is terrible and I want no part in eating it.
I am so skinny that my chest caves in. Mamãe wills me to eat by telling me to imagine the food is something else, something very tasty and fancy. One last bite, she says, over and over. She is so worried about my appetite that she takes me to a paediatrician we cannot afford, only to be told that I am perfectly healthy.
When my father pays us one of his biannual visits, he tells me a story to distract me into eating and feeds me like a toddler. It’s always the same story about two princesses, Raio de Sol and Raio de Luz. One is a good, virtuous girl because she always eats all of her food without complaining, while the other is bad for refusing her lunches. I have convinced myself that the good princess is my older sister, and for the sheer competitiveness of it, end up eating everything on my plate. But my father is not here for the other 363 days of the year, and I refuse to eat. What I don’t eat mamãe wraps up and takes to the family that lives in cardboard shack under the bridge.
My mãe works all the time, and still our financial circumstances are so strenuous that we rely on the church for our monthly groceries. There’s never anything delicious in the donations we get, only the basic stuff. Every month my my mãe splits these groceries in half and shares it with our next-door neighbours, a family of three.
I spend so much time at their house that Bete has started calling herself my second mãe. She too worries about my weight and insists on feeding me. Her daughter, Joana, is four years my senior and my best friend. She hovers around me when her mother offers me food, and I eat to gain her approval. Bete happens to be an excellent cook.
My siblings and I have scholarships to a private school, which we attend in the mornings. During recess, my classmates buy pastries from the canteen, popcorn from the popcorn man, candy from the candy van, or they bring luscious things from home like tiny tubs of strawberry yoghurt and chocolate-filled biscuits. I am usually empty-handed. My mãe tells me that recess ruins my appetite and I accept this explanation outwardly. But even as a child I am aware of our circumstances and know that I don’t get anything to nibble on because we can’t afford it. Between 6:30am and 1:00pm, I have nothing to eat.
Sometimes, as a special treat, mamãe makes me our own version of chocolate-filled biscuits, except they are plain Maria biscuits sandwiched together with margarine. When she takes the time to make these for me I treasure the experience of eating them, ignoring the looks I get from the rich kids. Because by pure magic, I just know they taste better than their expensive snacks ever will, better than chocolate.
♦
It is very early in the morning and I’m standing in the kitchen waiting for the oven timer to go off. The Perth sun is already heating up the room. I’m seventeen years old, swaying about in my school uniform. The skirt is extra extra small; my mãe has taken it in a few inches, and still I have to wear a belt to keep it high around my waist.
I made the batter for the muffins late last night, in between assignments. I prepare baked goods this way two or three times a week. I don’t sleep much or at all. I’ve grown used to it. I am in my final year of high school, and in addition to my demanding workload I have a number of other responsibilities to keep up with, like student council.
The precision of baking, of following recipes step by step, of accurately measuring ingredients and timing each process, helps me deal with stress. Sharing treats with my anxious, sleep-deprived classmates makes me feel helpful, like I have something to offer. I don’t have to worry about the price of ingredients because when my mãe married my stepfather and we moved to Australia, our financial circumstances changed drastically.
John is a strange man when it comes to money, generous but controlling. We’re never denied food though. The fridge and the pantry are always full of delicious stuff, which he buys under the pretence that it’s for us girls, but really is for him. He eats when he is nervous, which is very often, while I don’t eat at all.
My mãe can’t practice psychology in this country because of her English and because they haven’t recognised her degree. She attends English classes at TAFE a couple of hours every day and has become very particular about keeping our house clean. The pantry is meticulously organised, spotless. Each shelf is dedicated to a type of food. The items are then lined up exactly, so we can see each and every one of them when we open the cupboard.
My Australian friends noticed this once and thought it was weird and hilarious. They moved some stuff around, misplacing everything; it was their idea of a joke. At the time, I laughed along with them, but really, I didn’t think it was very funny at all. It was fucking disrespectful. Having the food out of place also bothered me a great deal. It flicked an anxiety switch inside of me that I could only reverse when they left, and I was able to put everything back in place.
Mamãe had been single for nine years when she married John and we moved to Australia. Notorious for her terrible cooking, she was given three recipe books that doubled as wedding and going-away gifts. One was an expensive and expansive collection of recipes from Brazilian cuisine, given to her by a wealthy friend. The other two were handmade.
The first of these was made by Tia Marta, her daughters and granddaughters. My cousin Gabriela, who is very crafty, decorated the book cover with scraps of fabric. Each woman and girl in the family contributed in their own handwriting. In between instructions you can find small drawings, farewell notes and letters to my mãe. The second book was made by her best friend Babi. It is a collection of our favourite recipes from Sunday lunches, which we often spent at her house. Later on these Sunday afternoons, we would pile on her bed, talking, watching tv, napping, our bellies full of picanha, torta de banana, bolo de cenoura. The book is typed up and professionally bound, but photographs of our weekends together are pasted on pages throughout.
Brazilian food has become the stuff of special occasions in our house because the ingredients are hard to find here. Every once in a while, mamãe holds huge lunches for young Brazilian people, who come over longing for the taste of home. This act of sharing is an act of extended motherhood. We gather to eat around our new eight-person dining table, which my mãe has deemed so precious that it is permanently protected by a clear plastic cover.
Mamãe has become a better cook but, much to her dismay, her daughters have turned vegetarian. She and John don’t consider a meal a meal if there’s no meat in it. My irmã doesn’t live with us anymore and mamãe says if I want to be vegetarian I must cook for myself. But I don’t. Vegetarianism gives me an excuse to not eat. I don’t cook for myself, but I bake for others. Like my mãe, I share.
She still worries about my weight. We went to see a GP about it after school one day. The doctor asked me if I’d been eating and I lied. She told me I was well below my BMI but if I just put on a kilo or two I’d be healthier.
“Anything above that is a little bit fat anyway,” she said.
My race is not handled well at school. Teachers undermine me because of it. My peers tease me about my accent and the colour of my skin. I have no control over my brownness, but I can control the rest of my body by not eating, by making myself smaller. It sets me apart in my own terms.
The perfect muffins will go in the small basket I have ready on the kitchen counter, lined with a checkered tea towel to keep them warm. I will take them to school and give them out to my classmates. Not a single one will touch my lips.
Later in the day I go see the school nurse. I do this often. I don’t feel well. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I don’t tell her about the latter but she can see. She also worries about my weight, asks me if I’ve been eating. I gesture to the empty basket,
“I don’t know what you mean. I brought in a batch of muffins, fresh from the oven, just this morning.”
♦
Zig-zagging along the cramped shelves of Casa Ibérica, my wide eyes grow shiny; saliva fills the inside of my mouth, my tastebuds tickle with the anticipation of memory. I’m in my mid-twenties, but I feel like a kid in a bombonière, a candy shop, so pure is my excitement. Except instead of processed sweets, what I treasure now is the everyday food from my childhood in Brazil.
My friend Panchi, amused by my wholesome enthusiasm, takes out their phone and starts filming me walking joyfully through the aisles, tenderly handling the packages of foods imported from Latin America as if they are precious things, which they are to me. Panchi is Syrian-Venezuelan, making them an understanding and worthy companion on this trip to the deli.
I am at the end of my pay week and must stick to my very short and precise shopping list. It’s July and I have been craving the warmth of canjiquinha, a dish served at Festa Junina this time of the year. I have combed through the international food stores in Brunswick and Coburg, where I live, and have failed to find the main ingredient, corn grits. Which brings me to Fitzroy, where my search continues to be fruitless.
I ask the stocky older woman behind the counter if they sell it and she replies in Spanish, which I can’t speak but understand. It validates my race somehow, even though what I speak is Portuguese. I try to explain what it is for and we agree that the closest substitute for it is dried corn.
I return to the aisles for one last look, just in case, and end up picking up a few other things, things that were not in my shopping list. Pão de queijo mix, a jar of doce de leite, a can of Guaraná. Panchi orders food from behind the counter in Spanish, empanadas fritas con carne mechada, alfajores, a palmerita, cocosette.
“Tienes Malta Polar?”
“No, pero tenemos Malta Pony de Colombia.”
Panchi is unimpressed but settles for what they consider to be the lesser version of the drink.
Though it is the middle of winter, we find a sunny spot across the street and sit against the wall on the narrow sidewalk. We become an inconvenience to pedestrians but don’t care. I take a photo of the dried corn and send it to my mãe, asking her if she thinks it will work for canjiquinha. We crack open our drinks, take a sip and swap. We start with the empanadas but end up eating everything Panchi’s bought. All the while, they are telling me stories about the food.
“We have a lot of Guaraná in Venezuela because after the revolution they stopped importing Coke products, and people were really craving fizzy drinks. But We got Guaraná from Brazil.”
They take selfies with each individual item, but confess that they feel too guilty to send the pictures to their family back home because they currently don’t have access to this kind of food. Food is a privilege.
Still, we eat until our bellies hurt and I think of my mãe warning me not to have o olho maior que a barriga, an eye bigger than the tummy. She has not replied to my last message so I call her from the tram on my way home.
Mamãe is sceptical about the dried corn but tells me to try grinding it up a bit.
“Not too much or it’ll turn into polenta!”
She is out when I call and needs to hang up quickly. Later in the day I receive a long voicemail from her with directions for making canjiquinha. She has left me a lot of voicemails like this one in the last few months.
♦
The black beans have been boiling on high for nearly two hours now and it’s time to season them. I fry the chopped onions and bacon until they are golden, add a generous amount of garlic, some chili flakes and a tad of dill. I ladle part of the bean water into the frying pan, let it simmer for a few minutes and return it to the sauce pan. I add salt and flick the stove switch to low.
Secos de Molhados is blasting out of the speakers and I sing along to the Brazilian songs from the seventies while I cook, cheerfully moving my hips to the music. The stove top is literally a hot mess right now. Brown liquid is splattered everywhere and all four of its burners are occupied. Garlicy rice, all ready to go, sits at the far back corner. The farofa with egg is starting to brown up and I mix in a bit of parsley. I turn off the heat and pour it into a bowl next to the stove, where the couve’s been waiting. I’ve cooked the leafy vegetable in butter and spring onion and it’s looking pretty juicy.
I fry up onion rings with olive oil and vinegar, take them off the pan, turn up the heat and chuck in the steak. Two minutes each side then one more minute with the onions, for good measure. I give the kitchen a quick tidy up, pile the food neatly onto a plate and sit down at the table with it. It’s a flimsy old thing that one of my housemates found on the side of the road years ago and is starting to fall apart. But half of the table is covered with happy plants and it sits against a big window. Sunlight is filtering through it, warming up my face.
The house smells like childhood and I know the food will taste like it too.
I have been working on a story that begins in Brazil in the 1940s. It is difficult to access information about this particular context given that I’m writing about Black, Brown and poor people: people who are excluded from recorded history. The story is born out of a letter written by my tia to my mãe years ago, when I began asking questions about our family. It is oral history written down in my tia’s cursive hand, in her primary-school-Portuguese. The letter is both straight-forward with fact and heavy with emotion.
In order to give the story texture, I have decided to make cooking and eating a central part of it. Food is a powerful conjurer of the senses. I’ve spent the last few months searching the internet for recipes of traditional Brazilian cuisine from Minas Gerais, the state my family is from, and requesting directions from mamãe.
I am no longer vegetarian. If my avó was alive today to see me turn up my nose at perfectly good meat that I can afford, well, I’d probably be in for a beating. My mãe tells me stories about the kinds of food her mother cooked, how she made delicious things out of pigs’ guts, which she got for free from the butchers. She’d make dobradinha with these left-overs and sell it to local butecos to put food in the bellies of her six children.
“You had to know how to cook it just right, otherwise it would stink up the whole place. We were poor but us kids, we were strong.”
My avó died due to pregnancy complications. In my tia’s letter she talks about how sickly her mother was, and how part of the reason she died was malnourishment. She didn’t feed herself so her children could eat. In a particularly cruel twist of fate, the baby passed away just a couple of months after her. When I was a child, meat was not included in the grocery donations we got from the church. My mãe would ensure we had it on our plate by walking over an hour to work and back instead of paying for the bus.
Brazilian food is very meaty, and a lot of it was traditionally made with the parts of the animal white people considered to be below them, and repurposed by slaves. Feijoada for example, our national dish, is made with the feet, livers, kidneys, tongue, and guts of pigs and cows.
Eating meat again has expanded my ability to reconnect with Brazilian cuisine, my culture, my race.
I have been dedicating my Saturdays to cooking a new dish, paying close attention to the process. It is research. I feel the ingredients on my hands as they season pieces of meat. I hear the sound of chopping and frying. Observe food as it boils, smell it roasting and baking. Imagine what it was like to make everything on a wood fire stove, as opposed to the appliances I have access to today.
I live away from home now. I don’t have an eight-person dining table, but I try to share the food I make with the people I love. My friends and housemates, my chosen queer Melbourne family. By sharing food with them, I’m sharing an important part of myself.
As I began writing the piece, I made caldo verde, a potato-based broth with pork and couve. Midway through cooking it, my kitchen was suddenly filled with its fragrance, a smell I had not sensed in years. Tio Paulo used to cook batches of it in the church kitchen, to sell and raise money for the youth group. I felt such intense desire, not just for the food itself, but for being a child again.
There is a word in Portuguese, saudade, which does not translate into a single English word. It means missing something, a place or a person or a time. It is nostalgia and longing. My mãe once explained it as the presence of absence, or the absence of presence. On one of my trips back home after we moved to Australia, I got the word tattooed on my body in my own handwriting.
My brown body. It no longer caves in places. It is rounder, softer. healthier. My mãe doesn’t have to worry about it being too skinny anymore. Quite the opposite.
“What does the doctor say about your weight gain?” she’ll ask.
But the doctor doesn’t have anything to say. Because the truth is, for the first time in my life, I am hungry. I cook for myself and I eat with pleasure. I eat.
I cut a small piece of the steak and scoop up the rice, beans, farofa and couve onto the fork. I take a bite.
I taste the food, taking my mouth on a journey into sensory memory.
I eat.
About the author
Ana Maria Gomides is an Afro-Latina writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry working out of Birraranga, also known as Melbourne. She is a snoozy, hungry creature, currently hibernating her way into immortality. In sleep, she conducts intricate ritual sacrifices of white cis het men, avenging the past and bringing blessings into the future. You can find her on Twitter @anamariagomides.