Nicaraguan Cooking Classes

Any time there is a lull in conversation, food is usually the first topic we leap to. Whatever our cultural differences with the people of San Nicolas, we all like eating. I might not be able to communicate as well as I would like with people, but I am just as adept at eating rice and beans as anyone else around the plastic card table.

In the last few weeks, we've cooked and shared food with lots of people in the community. Last Sunday Idalia, the school principle, invited us to her mom's house out in the campo to bake rosquillas in her clay oven. Rosquillas are a flaky corn-based pastry that come in all different shapes. They usually have a filling of egg, sweet cream and a type of cheese they make here called cuajada.

We arrived at Idalia's mom's house to find a huge family reunion in progress, with everyone fulfilling their gender roles. The women were gathered in the kitchen, kneading the rosquilla dough and holding babies, while the men sat on the porch outside and the kids watched TV and played with plastic duckies. They had all been at it for a few hours already.

We tried our hand at shaping the soft rosquilla dough into different shapes, but it was a lot harder than it looked. Meanwhile, the women were all buzzing around, shaving a huge chunk of brown sugar to put in the middle of the rosquillas and mixing together milk and corn to make atole. They only used the white of the egg in the rosquilla filling, so Idalia's mom, a classic old woman in a shawl, put the egg shell with the yolk on top of the wood stove to cook and eat.

After the rosquillas (probably about 500 of them) were all prepared, we took them out to the clay oven next to a pasture of grazing cows. The family had been heating a fire and burning it down to coals all day. Idalia's daughter helped shove all of the coals out of the oven with a long stick and Idalia's sister put the trays of rosquillas into the steaming oven, deftly moving them around with a long paddle. When they were done, we ate the rosquillas with mugs of sweet coffee. We rode back to San Nicolas through the mountains, crammed into the bed of a pickup truck with a bunch of Idalia's family, clutching bags of rosquillas.

We had also been talking to Idalia about making tostones (deep-fried plantain chips), so we bought two green bananos at the market last week and Idalia volunteered to come over with the English teacher, Vilma, to show us how to make them. They showed up in our kitchen on Tuesday afternoon and took over completely. They hacked off the skin of the unripe banana and showed us how to chop the bananas into chunks, partially fry them, smash them into discs, and deep fry them again. They also helped us make Nicaraguan rice, which involves a lot more oil and garlic than the white rice that we're used to making.

We've been eager to share our food traditions with the friends we're making here too. Last week we had a group of girls over to teach them how to make brownies, which they just called “chocolates.” They were super excited about helping; they fought over who got to wear the two aprons that we have and wanted to keep beating the eggs for about 10 minutes. Then they deep-cleaned our entire kitchen as the brownies were baking, scrubbing out the sink and sweeping the floor. When the brownies came out of the oven, they devoured them, dropping brownie crumbs all over the floor before they left.

We also have developed an ongoing food trade with our neighbors, Dina and her son Henry. We handed them a plate of cookies over the fence when we first moved in, and they returned the plate with a guirilla, a kind of tortilla made of young corn that is typical of this part of Nicaragua. Then they gave us some honey-baked squash and we gave them some brownies. Just today, they called out our names and we went outside to find Henry holding a plate of bananas over the fence. He also told us that one of the banana trees in our back yard had ripe bananas. We didn't believe him at first, so he jumped over the chain-link fence with his machete and hacked down the branch, which was indeed heavy with a big bunch of ripe square bananas.

Cooking and eating food together has been a way for us to bridge our cultures (everyone likes eating), but also a way to share and learn about each other's unique food traditions. As we continue to share recipes with each other, we will also continue to build our community here.