B is For Bread

I have tasted fancy dishes and eaten at fine restaurants many times in my life. I have sampled the strange and unfamiliar. I have found fresh favorites and discovered new ingredients, but nothing tastes so delicious to me as the flatbread I ate as a child.

Tortillas de harina, a bread made out of wheat flour and enriched with eggs and butter, is by far the most popular meal in Honduras, where I grew up. The dough is shaped into a disc, a griddle is put on the stove, and the bread puckers up, little blisters fill with air and golden spots appear on the surface as if by magic.

It’s a simple, unpretentious, traditional meal, accompanied most often by refried beans and sour cream, and called a Baleada when it’s smeared and folded in half. The word baleada comes from the Spanish word for bullet, or bala, and I think it’s called that because the little bubbles and dark spots sort of look like bullet marks.

My mother, who is an excellent cook, makes the best tortillas. She grew up in a large family, and as the eldest daughter she learned to make them when she was twelve years old. Kneading the dough was her daily chore, and she’d get up early every morning to do it before she went to school. My mother’s tortillas are soft and rich, and nothing speaks to me of home more than the sight of a ball of dough resting on her kitchen counter.

One of the earliest memories I have is of making small tortillitas for my father when I was a young girl, in the little house in Belize, where we were living at the time. They were awful, I’m sure, burnt on the outside and uncooked on the inside, but I was proud of myself, and as eager to please as only children can be.

Today my daughter and I made these together. I gave her a bit of dough and, standing next to me, she played around with her ball as I worked the mix into a soft, pliable dough.

I don’t think my tortillas will ever be as good as my mother’s, for years I thought I had a heavy hand, but I’ve let go of my fear of failing and with regular practice I have improved. My daughter loves them. I hope they will be as cherished a part of her childhood as they were of mine.

 

My Mother’s Tortillas de Harina

Flour Tortillas

 2 cups flour

2 eggs

1 ½ teaspoon butter

1  ½ teaspoon vegetable shortening

1 pinch of salt

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ to ¾ cup water at room temperature

 

1) In a large wide bowl, sift the flour, the salt and the baking powder. Stir with a spoon to combine.

2) Make a well in the center and add the eggs, the butter and the shortening.

3) Dust your hands with flour and move your fingers to combine the ingredients.

4) Add water, a little bit at a time, and gather the mix until a dough begins to form. Here you can make adjustments if you need to. If the dough feels dry, add more water, a tablespoon at a time. If it doesn’t feel soft enough, add more fat, a little bit at time, until you get the right consistency.

5) Knead the dough on a floured surface. Stretch the dough away from you, using the heel of your hand. Bring the dough back towards you and turn it a little before you stretch again.

6) When the dough is soft, shiny and it is easier to knead, shape it into a log and divide it into small pieces, about 2 inches in size.

7) Gently knead each piece and shape into a ball. Place the balls back in the bowl and let them ‘sleep’, as my mother says. Lay a damp cloth over the dough and leave it in a warm place for at least 15 minutes.

8) Women in Honduras flatten the tortillas in the palm of their hands, but that requires years of practice. I use a large zipper bag as my stretching surface because the dough doesn’t stick. Place the ball in the center of the plastic and use the tip of your fingers to flatten and stretch the dough, until you have a good size disc.

9) Place a flat griddle (a comal in Spanish) or a large non-stick frying pan over medium heat. Carefully peel the plastic with one hand as you hold the tortilla on the other.

10) Place the tortilla on the griddle and cook on one side for a minute or two. The bread will bubble up in places. Use a knife to turn it onto the other side, or your fingers, if you dare.

11) Using a cloth napkin gently press the tortilla to release some of the air trapped in the bubbles.

Your tortilla de harina is ready. Wrap it with cloth to keep it warm. Serve with refried beans and sour cream. I like queso fresco and scrambled eggs with it too.

The balls of dough keep well in the refrigerator for a day or two. Cover them with plastic wrap and lay them in a single layer inside an airtight container. 

Miss Lucy

I had a French tutor when I was 12. She was a Frenchwoman in her sixties who had settled in our town. Her name was Miss Lucy, and she was a famous oddity.

She lived a block away from my grandmother’s house, and she could be seen walking in the afternoon with her faded red umbrella on her arm, her brown printed dress and tattered old bag. She had clear, china-blue eyes, thin pink lips and thin, dirty yellowish-white hair that she tied in a bun at the back of her head.

I knew a girl who lived across from her house, and I remember being teased because Miss Lucy never took a bath. She had only two dresses, one brown and one purple, which she never washed. She would put one out in the sun and would wear the other one, and both felt stiff to the touch and smelled of toasted sweat. My mother once gave her a burgundy dress and a pair of shoes for a party at the Alliance Française, because she had nothing to wear.

She kept the shutters in her house closed, and her porch was full of broken furniture, an old bicycle and a rusty swing. She had cleared a little pathway in between the junk to reach her front door. She never invited anyone inside, and the neighborhood children always wondered what hid behind the walls.

She had no friends, except for the cats and dogs that kept her company. Sometimes we would see her at night walking her pets, a ghostly white lady wandering in the dark.

My mother remembers when Miss Lucy first came to our town. She was a tall, blonde young woman with long hair and and a sure step. People said she came to Honduras because of a man, but something went wrong along the way, because she was always alone.

She never left and now, so many years later, she is a charity case. The Embassy of France took responsibility for her, paying for a caretaker who neglected and abused her.

My mother went to the hospital for a test a couple of months ago and while there she heard the nurses talking about the little French lady that had been brought in the day before. She went to see her, but the blue eyes gave no sign of recognition. Miss Lucy was confused and frantic and all she could say was ‘it hurts’.

The caretakers had mistreated her. She was malnourished, her hair was dirty and full of lice, and her nails curled long under her fingers. Someone took her away from them, dropped her at the hospital and contacted the French Embassy.

I wonder what kind of life she led in her own country, and whether there’s someone there who loved her and wonders what happened to her. I wonder too, why she stayed in a place where she had nobody, and where loneliness and poverty seemed her only destiny.

A fading photograph

My Honduras vacation is over, and for the past week I have immersed myself in domesticity, as I try to bring my house back to order. I have slowly attacked the omnipresent dust that finds its way to every surface. I have named Pakistani dust cosmic dust. It has supernatural powers, because it can crawl inside a narrow groove, a crooked crevice behind a locked cupboard, even the inside pages of a closed book. It’s depressing, like a musty, gloomy blanket that covers your whole house.

I have finally finished the mountain of dirty laundry that my small, three-person family generates, while at the same time erasing the presence of the two live-in helpers who did nothing but crack my plates, smear grease all over the kitchen walls, stash sugar away inside a box full of old baby bottles, and furtively eat my daughter’s chocolates. I have let them go, to the astonishment of my relations, and our utter relief. True, I now have to do everything myself, but we can go without cooking if we feel like it, we can leave our wallets and handbags unattended, and breathe the precious, healthy air of total privacy.

Seeing my family in Honduras was wonderful. The lively talk and friendly silences, the delicious, memory-laden cooking, and that warm feeling of togetherness, as soothing and welcome as flannel sheets on a winter morning, or the smell of tuberose on a summer night.

I brought back some old photographs of my husband’s family that I had left in my mother’s house. And while looking through them and seeing the outdated fashions and the young faces of the elderly uncles and middle-aged sisters, I have been thinking that my memories of growing up in Honduras are very much like those old, fading, black and white photographs. My childhood experiences have very little to do with real life as it is lived in my country. They are a snapshot, a frozen image, a crooked, clumsy picture drawn by a child, where the paralyzing bureaucracy, the undisguised dishonesty and the failed economy do not exist.

Of course things change. I’ve never expected my hometown to remain the same, but the differences have left me feeling sad and old. I drove through streets that bear the same name they did years ago, when 35 seemed a long way off, but they seemed to have moved around. The lagoon is not where it used to be, and even the houses that still resemble the pictures in my head are a sad reminder of how everything else does not, with their peeling paint, their drooping windows and their neglected air. They look like the village tart after 20 years of hard living.

I think people give character to a place, and the old families, the people who grew up there, are fewer every day. Most of them prefer to live 45 minutes and a world away in the big city, and now my hometown is a temporary place, populated by those who come looking for work in the clothing factories. As a result, every other house has been turned into a snack bar, selling beer and carne asada with banana chips.

My feelings about Honduras are a strange combination. Together with the frustration of being unable to mail a postcard because the Post Office had run out of stamps, and the horror of hearing about the three people who were murdered on the bus while I was there, there is a curious, unexplainable feeling of acceptance. It’s a part of me that I cannot erase, and those memories from so long ago, as different to the current reality as they are, are dear to me. With every passing year, the colors become more muted, the voices become fainter, and yet, more vivid.

I can still hear the rustling of the palm trees as I walked home from school. I can recall the afternoon sunshine streaming through the kitchen window in our old house, and the dry, hot smell of my mother’s freshly ironed clothes.

Blue sky and fried fish

The other day my cousin, my little girl and I made the twenty-minute trip to Omoa, the little village where the Fort of San Fernando de Omoa is located. The sky was blue and the mountains green, and they were more beautiful than I remembered.

 

 

 

From the fort we went for a walk on the beach…

and had a delicious lunch at the Flamingo’s Restaurant. 

Maybe it’s the memories, maybe it’s the salt, but fried fish doesn’t taste the same anywhere else.  

I will remember this day. I will remember the sound of the ocean, the feel of ancient stone, and the smell of moss and salt in the air. I will remember walking behind my daughter and my dear friend, seeing her small hand holding on tight.

More pictures, here.