María Ísabel García Díaz
Arroz Con Coco
Since I decided to quarantine with my family in GA, I am spending more time with my abuela in the kitchen, or attempting to amidst work from home duties. I am also going through the letters from my tias that she kept that include family recipes. Before WhatsApp, my tias would send her letters with their mother's favorite recipes. Now they keep in touch through WhatsApp, exchanging more recipes, photos of what they prepared, and consejos of how to improve the meal.* With each food/recipe exchange, there's always a personal story included, and often relating it back to their parents. It's through these moments that I get to connect more deeply and familiarize myself with our family's food traditions from Colombia. I am lucky to have inherited the same cooking trait as my abuela, my tias, and bisabuela, but I don't know how to channel it into making food from Colombia. The way I've been cooking reflects more on the meals I see others cook in the United States—I arrived into my cooking practice after I left home to go to college in Baltimore. For this reason, I am recording my abuela on my phone so that I can hold onto these traditions and recipes engrained in her memory.
My abuela is rooted in the traditions of Colombian cooking despite being in the United States since 1991. As the eldest daughter, my abuela was the sous chef of the house, helping her mom prepare food for her eight siblings and their father. She was born in Bogotá, the capital fortressed in the high altitudes of the Andes Mountains, and later moved to Cali, a city in the warm valley near the Pacific coast of Colombia. I am learning how the move brought new recipes into the home. One day we were making limonada with limes and she recounted her time in Cali when she helped her mom make a lime dessert that required her to go to the river for a specific rock my bisabuela would ask for to zest the limes. She beautifully threads stories and memories of her mom as she lists the ingredients and instructions of the meal we are preparing together. My abuela is a great cook but I often wish I could have been alive to try my bisabuela's cooking with the way she describes her food.
Aside from being a native Spanish speaker, I find that food keeps me tethered to Colombia. I long for this connection even after calling the United States my home since 1999. The time I get to spend with my abuela in the kitchen deepens my understanding of our country's food tradition and how it evolves with our family's take on the recipes. Arroz con coco is just one of the many recipes I've been able to capture as I record my abuela while I quarantine in Georgia.* I love hearing how the recipe has changed, learning about the traditional way my bisabuela prepared it, and the iterations my abuela made to it after spending time with acquaintances from Barranquilla—a coastal city in Colombia—that she met in the United States. It's one of my favorite rice dishes and my abuela has become well known for her recipe among our extended, chosen, immigrant family in the United States.
*Letters, messages, and recordings are all in Spanish.
First page of the recipe
Second page of the recipe
The three sisters, among the brothers, that are still alive—the living matriarch. Castillo is my abuela's maiden name. She's the one standing in the back.
My bisabuela Ana Maria Muñoz de Castillo
A letter I found in my abuela's recipe folder which includes another coconut based meal that my bisabuela made
A message my tia sent to the entire family about a meal she was making that reminded her of her dad
A photo of my abuela, my mom, and me when we first came to visit my abuela in the US. A few years later we would move to the US. That was the first time I met my abuela.