“What kind of name is that?” Severio barked.
“He was from San Diego.”
“San Diego de Los Baños?”
“No, no. San Diego, California.”
“California as in the United States?”
“Yes. According to what he said, they were planning to get married.”
“Yarmi marrying a Yankee?” Reutilia spat on the cement floor. “What nonsense!”
The term Yuma hadn’t yet become popular in Pinar del Río, or at least not under this roof. Here, Americans were still Yankees—the enemy.
“That’s not true, compañero,” Severio said and his jaw clenched. “On my word as a communist, I tell you that Yarmila had no deals whatsoever with Yankees.”
“How can you be so sure?” Padrino pressed. “You didn’t see her often.”
“She would have told us,” Reutilia said stubbornly. “She told us everything. We talked on the phone regularly. Yarmi wasn’t interested at all in foreigners.”
“Much less someone from the evil empire.”
“She wouldn’t have given a Yankee the time of day!”
Padrino decided to drop the subject. He remembered one of Yarmila’s posts about her family. “Are you still working at the clinic, compañera?” he asked Reutilia.
Her response surprised him as much as her previous statement about “the Yankee.” “What clinic?”
“The one that you manage.”
The woman squinted. “I don’t manage anything.”
“I thought—where do you work?”
“At home. I help Severio with the crops.”
“Have you ever had a job, Reutilia? Outside your house, I mean.”
“When Yarmi was little I used to clean the classrooms at her school and run errands for the teachers. But a regular job, no.”
Padrino was going to insist, but changed his mind. There were other topics more pressing than Reutilia’s employment history. “Did you ever meet Pato Macho?” he asked instead.
“Pato who?”
“His real name is Yosvani Álvarez.”
“No.”
“Did Yarmila have a boyfriend at all?” Padrino refrained from adding “that you knew of.”
“She dated some guys, but nothing serious,” Reutilia said. “She wasn’t planning to marry anyone, at least not in the near future.”
“Yarmi was very devoted to her work.”
“She didn’t have much time for men.”
Padrino stared at Yarmila’s picture. The young woman’s expression was unreadable—a half-faced sphinx.
“What about Isabel Quintana?” he asked. “Do you know her?”
Severio nodded. “A woman who has a little restaurant?”
“Yes, a paladar. Yarmila cooked for her.”
“No, compañero.” Reutilia retrieved a magazine from the table and showed Padrino the first page, where Yarmila’s full name was printed. “She worked at this Institute. The Institute of Literature and—I don’t know what else. Look, here is something she wrote for them. She was a writer there.”
“She worked as a translator,” Padrino said. “But you are right, she was a writer too. Did she ever tell you about Yarmi Cooks Cuban?”
They stared at him blankly.
“The food blog,” he offered.
Reutilia and Severio didn’t know what the word “blog” meant. The whole concept of the internet proved too complicated for them.
“Yarmi liked to cook,” Reutilia said. “She was very close to her late grandmother, Hilda, and learned a bunch of recipes from her. Her sofrito was the best! Better than her grandma’s and ten times better than mine.”
“But she wasn’t a cook.” Severio frowned. “She didn’t work in a restaurant or anything like that. She was an intellectual.”
“Now that I think of it, she borrowed my copy of Nitza Villapol’s Cocina al Minuto last time she came because she needed it for a work project,” Reutilia said. “So she might have written something about food.”
Padrino paused before the next question, “Did you ever meet the dissidents she used to hang out with?”
As he had feared, the reference to the gusanos aroused a storm of indignation.
“What dissidents?” Severio yelled.
“They were neighbors of hers. An older couple that writes for American papers and—”
“American papers!”
“With all due respect, compañero, that’s the stupidest and craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Reutilia said. “Well, that and the Yankee story.”
“Please, understand that I am not saying she was part of that group, or involved with it. I just said they were acquaintances. I was wondering if you had—”
“Acquaintances, mierda! My daughter never hung out with gusanos!” Reutilia yelled. “She hated them!”
“It looks like you didn’t know Yarmi at all,” Severio said gravely.
“I didn’t, compañero. I am basing my questions on what people who knew her have said.”
“Maybe you have been asking the wrong people.”
Padrino left shortly after that, fearing he would be unceremoniously thrown out of the remodeled hut if he remained there any longer. It was already dark and he knew he wouldn’t be back in Regla until midnight. He was confused and somewhat out of sorts. He found it difficult to reconcile Yarmila’s parents’ version with Matt’s description of his fiancée and the chatty girl he had met a few times at La Caldosa. And yet she was all of those things.
Yarmi Cooks Cuban
Everything starts with sofrito
Sofrito is a magic potion, an amazing gift from the Kitchen Fairy.
A foundation for many dishes like rice and chicken, mincemeat and beans, sofrito is an integral part of the Cuban cuisine. You can make enough to last for a week or prepare it fresh for a day’s meals, which I’d rather do. But aged sofrito isn’t bad. It gains in flavor as all the ingredients interact when left in the refrigerator for a few hours. The taste gets more concentrated and potent.
I make sofrito as often as I can because it leaves my kitchen smelling like my childhood home. When I’m sautéing the onions in my beloved “cured” sartén, the frying pan that mom gave me when I went back to Los Palacios three months ago, I am a teenager again. I am listening, all ears, to my grandmother Hilda, who explains in great detail how to keep a man happy forever and ever.
Wait a minute! Grandma wouldn’t talk about sex. Is that what you are thinking, mal pensados? No way. Old guajiras, those shriveled peasant ladies who considered a trip to Havana similar to a visit to Sodom, didn’t even mention the names of private parts. It was always “down there” or just a gesture, eyes cast down in a nun-ish way.
“You’re becoming a young woman,” Grandma told me when I was twelve years old. “You need to get an education. And I am not talking about these silly things they teach you at school.”
Grandma Hilda wasn’t fond of “uppity girls,” as she called the ones who went to college and (gasp!) earned degrees. She’d have been happy if I had just married the guajiro next door and had a bunch of kids.
Yep, I was a big disappointment to her.
Her advice for keeping a husband happy consisted of memorizing a collection of recipes handed down from her mother, the only inheritance that she got. My bisabuela Fayna was a Canary Islands native. She was a Guanche, the indigenous people that lived there before the Spaniards arrived. I got Fayna’s thick black hair and brown eyes, though, unfortunately, I didn’t get her height. She was six feet tall and I am what you call “petite.”
So instead of showing me how to dress or walk seductively, Grandma Hilda instructed me in the secrets of sofrito. I want to share it with my readers today, in case anyone out there is interested in, you know, keeping a husband happy.
Wink, wink.
&n
bsp; So here it is.
Start with half a cup of oil or, preferably, lard. My Yuma boyfriend will be horrified when he reads this, but real sofrito, at least in Pinar del Río, is cooked in lard, easy to get when a pig is slaughtered and less expensive than store-bought cooking oil.
After heating the lard (it can be slightly used: the same one you have fried a steak or a chicken thigh in), add one chopped onion and two garlic cloves, and cook until the onion becomes translucent.
“You should be able to see through it,” Grandma explained. “If you can’t see the frying pan underneath, keep cooking, but do not let them burn. There is nothing more disgusting than a slice of charred onion!”
Add a sliced bell pepper and sauté it for two or three minutes at the most. At this point, Grandma would use whatever seasoning we had at hand. Obviously, one has to include salt and pepper, but ground cumin, oregano and bay leaves are fine too.
Now come three tomatoes, nicely chopped, and five spoons of canned tomato soup. When we didn’t have canned soup, Grandma would put ripe tomatoes in a blender with water and boil the mix with onions and a teaspoon of sugar to make her very own salsa de tomate.
After stirring in the tomato sauce, handmade or canned, let everything simmer for a while.
“This is the moment to take out the bay leaves,” Grandma would say. “Bay leaves are like cold cream for your face. You put it on, but don’t let anyone see you with it.”
Toward the end, if we had a bottle of sherry, she would pour a bit, just a chorrito, and let it boil for a couple of minutes. Any kind of wine, or even beer, can be used to give the sofrito more flavor but don’t worry if you don’t have it.
Once it is ready, you can use sofrito as the base for stews, meats, soups and many other dishes.
“When the belly is full, the heart is happy,” Grandma would say. “Barriga llena, corazón contento. The secret of a successful marriage lies in what happens at the dining table, not what goes on behind the bedroom door.”
Along the same line, one of her favorite sayings was El amor entra por la cocina. Does love really come in through the kitchen? Comment and let me know what you think.
Kitchen kisses to you all!
Comments
Taos Tonya said. . .
Here we say that men love sex, food and sports. In that order. Oye, hita, but what about cilantro?
Yarmi said. . .
Sports, huh? Here it would be la pelota, baseball. As for the cilantro, I never saw my grandma use it in the sofrito, so I don’t. But I guess it won’t hurt. But add it at the end because cilantro burns fast.
Julia de Tejas said. . .
My husband, who is from Mexico and an MD, likes to say, “Death comes in through the kitchen” when he thinks I’m eating too much. Pigging out, sabes? I thought that was a real saying and found it shocking. The “love” version sounds better.
Quick question: Would you add sofrito to the rice as well?
Yarmi said. . .
Your husband el doctor has a twisted sense of humor, Julia. I’ve never heard the “death” version, I swear. I would add sofrito to moros y cristianos (white rice and black beans cooked together) and yellow rice, if you are making arroz con pollo or a paella. But to white rice alone, definitely not.
Cocinera Cubana said. . .
I use Goya seasoning all the time, but will try your recipe.
Alberto Pena said. . .
With you in the house, love will come in through a barred window! Linda, mi amor! I’m so jealous of your boyfriend! I bet he has a happy heart, and a full belly too!
Yarmi said. . .
Uff, Goya! No offense to the painter (it’s a joke, I know you are talking about a brand name) but you can’t compare homemade sofrito to that insipid dust. I tried it once and the food tasted synthetic. Making sofrito doesn’t take over twenty minutes and you can even prepare it while watching TV.
Chapter Four
The Woman of My Life
Padrino believed that the crime scene often had all the evidence needed to solve a case. “The walls have eyes and ears,” he would say, “but no mouth. You have to figure out what they have seen because they aren’t going to tell you.”
When he was working on a case he always made sketches, trusting them more than he did photographs. The day after visiting Yarmila’s parents, he had gone to her apartment and made drawings of the floor plan and the furniture. He made sure to depict every minor detail, from the ironing board blocking the refrigerator to the knives and forks left on the kitchen counter. Martínez assured him that everything had been kept unchanged, except for Yarmila’s computer, which had been seized by Seguridad.
“We also got rid of some rotten food, but there were no fingerprints anywhere,” she said. “The murderer must have gone around cleaning every damn piece of furniture.”
Now, while he listened to the recordings Martínez had given him of Isabel and Pato Macho’s interrogations, Padrino took quick notes, but kept peeking at the sketches.
I met Yarmi around a year ago. She told me that she kept a food blog, whatever a blog is, and visited paladares to get ideas. She didn’t have a lot of money, but was so friendly and sweet that I invited her to have lunch on the house a couple of times. She promised to write about La Caldosa and said that her posts were good advertisement because many foreigners read them.
No, I never saw any of her write-ups. I don’t have a computer and all these things are Greek to me.
After she began to cook for us, she also gave me four hundred dollars, which we used to repaint the house and replace the toilet. Yes, compañera, I am aware that this is illegal. But everybody here does illegal things, no?
Yes, she was involved with my son. I tried to talk him out of it. I am old-fashioned in that sense—a woman, in my opinion, shouldn’t be older than her guy. And then there was the Yuma. I thought that Yarmi would eventually marry him and move to San Diego, and my poor nene would be left heartbroken . . .
Oh, Pato wouldn’t kill a fly, much less his Yarmi! She was the only woman he has ever been in love with. Besides me, of course. But that’s another kind of love.
I saw Yarmi for the last time on Tuesday morning. I had brought her a whole chicken to make croquettes. We talked about putting together a special menu and discussed whether Mateo would like a cake or a tocinillo for dessert. She said she would make merenguitos too.
No, I didn’t go upstairs because my varicose veins were hurting like the devil. I could hardly walk, and she lived on the third floor. Now that you ask, she seemed a little anxious to get back upstairs. But she didn’t say that there was someone with her.
What? How could I know? A thief maybe? Her neighbors had heard about the Yuma and they probably thought she was rolling in dough. You know how people gossip, particularly that old woman, Fefita.
I don’t think she had any enemies. She was so likable, so kind . . .
Yes, there were some things she did I didn’t agree with, like having two men at the same time, but who am I to judge? The truth is I had actually started to see her as a daughter and was dreading meeting that Mateo guy. I knew it was going to be awkward.
I never told her how I felt. I hate to admit it, but sometimes Yarmi scared me. There was something tough about her, an I-take-no-shit attitude, though she didn’t flaunt it.
Anyway, I hope you find out who did it because she didn’t deserve to die like that. Poor Yarmi! I also hope you don’t get on my case for the few little things I’ve admitted about the paladar and such.
•
On Wednesday the fifth I was helping out at La Caldosa from early in the morning. Several people saw me there. My mom wanted me to sharpen all the kitchen knives. She said they were duller than toothpicks. And after lunch, I went to El Cincuentenario Bar. I knew the Yuma was coming that day and I didn’t want to be around if he and Yarmi ate at the palad
ar. I was in the bar when I heard the news—
Last time I saw her was on Monday the third. I went to the apartment with an old ironing board that I had just repaired for her. She was happy with it but told me not to come again until the Yuma left.
On Tuesday . . . uh, I don’t remember what I did. Wait, I went to the construction site where I work. I was there at eight in the morning, but there was nothing planned for the day so I just hung out with the guys until four o’clock. And I went home.
Look, compañera, if you think I had anything to do with what happened to Yarmi, you are wrong. So wrong! I would have killed for her!
Yarmi was my first woman. Well, not really the first one because I’ve been sticking my pinga wherever I could, excuse the language, since I was twelve years old. But she was my first serious relationship. The one I would have married had I had the balls to propose.
At first I only thought of her as a nice lady. I had never been friends with anyone like Yarmi—a career woman with her own apartment and a salary. A grown-up. I was sure she would say, “What does this little comemierda want?” if I approached her. I wouldn’t have asked her out if she hadn’t let me know she was interested.
And then I was so happy! She was smart and quick, like my mom, but nicer. She could have been the mother of my children, even if she thought I was a child at times.
In the end, I can’t tell you she was my girlfriend because she didn’t see it that way. But to me, she was my true love, the woman of my life. And she was crazy in bed. I learned more with her than with all the girls I had sex with before. She would—
Excuse me! I was trying to cooperate, to tell you everything of importance, as you ordered me to do.
We hooked up after she moved into the Espada Street apartment. She used to live in Old Havana and I only saw her once or twice a month, when she came to the paladar. Later she started to cook for Mom so we met more often.
Death Comes in Through the Kitchen Page 17