Heirlooms

Heirlooms is an ongoing project to document culinary oral traditions; to show how unique familial and traditional ways of cooking and preparing food are being passed down to future generations as part of a shared history. To investigate how this process is being disrupted, how it continues to endure, and in doing so evolve.

What follows is not a book of recipes, and this work will not teach you how to cook. I intend to document rituals. The story of the hands that have touched each dish, and given them flavor. Our heritage is boiled into these foods, and this is the story of the influences and memories that have seasoned them throughout generations.

Martha Caballero Salcedo - Sopa de Mondongo - Cartagena, Colombia

Martha Caballero Salcedo in her kitchen in Cartagena, Colombia.

When you were growing up who would cook for the family?

My mother had seven children, six women and one man. I was the last one to come from that marriage. We had other brothers from a different mother, but my father was always with us.

My mother did not teach all of us how to cook. But it's an essential part of any house. Eventually some of us started to study, some of us started to work and we didn't have time so on the weekends we would cook. One person would cook one day. One person would cook another day. And every time we were in the kitchen we learned a little bit more of how to cook the traditional way.

I helped my mom in the kitchen making the food. But for only a day on Sunday, because I worked. I would say I’m cooking today, and I could make any of the traditional dishes, fish or meat or chicken. Whatever we decided to eat that day.

What is the dish that stays in your memory from that time of your life? The smells. The feelings. Is there a dish that brings you back to that time?

A plate that I remember very well from when my mother was still alive and my grandmother too, the mother of my mother. She loved making a moté (a stew). A stew that consisted of salted aged meat, little black beans or little white black headed beans; to that they would add sweet plantain yucca and yami. And that stew came out delicious. It is similar to Moté de Vagre. You cook the Vagre which is a fish and you mix a hogao with tomato and onion and garlic. You take it and mix it with the fish. It is delicious. With a coconut rice with beans, salad, a salad of carrots, beets, onions and tomato. That is a plate that is delicious and traditional from here. I always have that in my head, because we had that at my house all the time when I was little.

Martha prepares her mix of vegetables onion, pepper, chives and celery (the base of many Latin American dishes) in batches ahead of time and keeps them in the freezer to easily scoop them out when it’s time to cook.

What's a dish that you’ve passed to your children?

More than anything they love their roasts. They love their roasts, they love their sancochos. They have learned, my sons especially, Mauricio and Javier, they cook well. They cook very well.

My daughter Yira Eugenia cooks. But.. she cooks well also, but they (my sons) picked up their fathers love of cooking which he got from his father. The father of Chevo (her husband) loved to cook a lot. And those two fell in love with that. Yira cooks but those two will prepare you a lamb, a pig bbq’d and roasted, they’ll do a chicken, they’ll prepare you an excellent whole fish, they’ll make an arroz con pollo. They do it all. They learned. Mauricio learned alone but Javier, who didn’t know anything, would call me and his father up and ask us, “I’m going to make this thing…how do I do this?” Well you do it this way grab this this and this, add these ingredients, put this much of this, mince up this and he learned. He knows how to cook well. He knows how to cook very well.

Martha Salcedo’s Sopa de Mondongo.

How do you make your Sopa de Mondongo?

First you take the tripe and you cut it into little pieces and you wash it very very well with lime. You add lime to the water and you wash it very well. After you wash it you put it into a pressure cooker and if you want to add the feet of the cow you break them up and wash them super super well. You put those into the pressure cooker with the tripe without salt or anything. Without anything. So that they soften. You also add hard chickpeas, depending on the quantity of soup that you want. When the chickpeas are done, so is the mondongo, they cook at the same time. The chickpeas add weight and thickness to the soup. In an hour more or less. In an hour the mondongo is cooked. You open the pressure cooker and you poke it and look to see if it's ready. If it’s soft and the chickpeas have given it weight then you know it's done. So when that's done and ready you grab potatoes proportional to the amount you are going to make. You cut them in quarters. You add yucca quartered in the same size as the potatoes. You wash it well and add it to the mondongo. You add vegetables, you add garlic, you add cilantro, you add celery, all cut up. You add green onions, you add all that. You add scented peppercorn. You add a little color. Corn. You cut the corn into thin medallions and then cut it through the middle. Cook all of this anew. When all that is… oh you add the salt and after if you want you add a little bullion. And you let it thicken. When you see that the potato and yucca and corn is cooked and the soup is thick you add more cilantro and diced onion. So that now when you are about to take it off you add more vegetables so that it stays with that fresh flavor. You season and add your salt and you taste it to decide if it's ready and has enough salt and everything. Now it's ready. It will be delicious. If you add the bullion it will be delicious. You can add some lime when you’re ready to eat and it will be delicious.

Fanny Salcedo - Enyucado - Cartagena, Colombia

Fanny Salcedo stands in her kitchen. Cartagena, Colombia.

What meals do you remember from your childhood?

My mother was excellent in the kitchen. Unfortunately I didn’t learn a lot of dishes from her because I would go to study very early and then I would work, and I would spend some nights studying as well. But on the weekends I had a chance to be with her.

I remember well that she would make us an egg soup. An egg soup with little diced onions and tomato. She would add a little garlic to that and it would turn out delicious. We would eat that based on necessity. When there wasn’t anything else and no money to buy anything at the store that was more substantial. Something else she made when there wasn’t anything to eat was a salty bread soup. She would take salty bread and grind it into a soup when we didn’t have anything else. But when she could she would make a crab rice. I loved that. But I don’t make it often because you almost never see them anymore, but it would fascinate me when she made that.

I loved the soups she would make. There was an eggplant soup. There was a rice soup and sometimes she would add beef or chicken. And we would be fascinated by that. She would make fish stew with coconut and it was a delicacy with a side of coconut fried rice. I learned a lot of things from her. And that's where my love of the kitchen comes from. All my life. Even when all the kids were in school and I had a lady come to help me I would still cook every chance I had.

Fanny peels the yucca over her sink for enyucado.

What was your first responsibility in the kitchen?

My mother would always say look at what i'm doing and me with my curiosity would be watching everything. I was stuck to her. I was always at my mothers side. So I got to see how she did everything, so that when the day arrived that she was too tired or didn’t want to cook or didn’t have time, and me having seen how she did everything, one day I just said, “Mom I’ll do it”, and I was able to pull it off, to help her. And after a while where I had made a number of dishes she would come to me and say, “Fanny I need a dish for this many people”, and I would do it.

Fanny adds the ground coconut to the ground yucca, the two main ingredients for enyucado.

How do you make your enyucado?

First you grind up the yucca. When you have the yucca grated or ground you add a big ladle of vanilla. Like a soup spoon of vanilla. You add annis, as much as you like. After that, you grind up a piece of coconut. Like a quarter of a coconut, add to that a little spoon of baking soda. To that you add butter. I add a little bar of butter and your portion of salt and sugar and mix it all up with a spoon until it all becomes one. Now you have to try it and see the point of sugar and salt. Make sure that their flavors are equal. You grab a saute pan and put it all on the stove, put a lid on it and put the fire low. When it’s time to flip it, grab a wooden spatula and check the bottom to see if it’s golden. If it’s golden it’s time to flip it so the other side cooks. If the pan is big you scrap the corners and you do it carefully. When the other side is cooked you will see it because the yucca changes color. Then it’s ready.

Fanny Salcedos Enyucado.

Is there a recipe that your family is in danger of losing?

I never made it, but my mother made a bread soup. When there was nothing to eat. She would grind up or pull apart a salty bread and put those pieces of the salty bread in water. To that water she would add salt, some onion, and whatever vegetables we had. And that bread would become undone into little soaked pieces. That recipe came from my grandmother.

Thu Le - Pâté Chaud (Báhn Patê Sô) - Vietnam

Interview coming soon

Thu Le in her chair at her sons home beside a portrait of her mother. Charlotte, North Carolina.

Thu uses a plastic glove and mixes the pork liver pâté and other ingredients together by hand.

Thu teaches her adult son Tam for the first time how to fill and seal the pastries.

Thu Le’s Pâté Chaud (Báhn Patê Sô).

Ramphai Noikaew - Nam Prik Tak Gratan (Spicy Chili Paste with Grasshopper) - Thailand

My name is Ramphai my surname Noikaew. My dad gave me this name Ramphai, it means like sunshine after the rain is gone. I just turned 39 last month. I’m from Thailand. From a very small province called Utteradit which is the northern part of Thailand. My family lived in Chiang Mai, my own family, my husband and daughter. We lived in Chiang Mai for 11 years now. 12 years for me 8 years for Greg and 2 years for [my daughter].

So my family, my great grandfather from my dads side is from Laos and my mom and my grandparents are from Naan province which is in northern Thailand like different from the central.

Ramphai Noikaew stands for a portrait in her kitchen. Paonia, Colorado.

My first duty in the kitchen was to make curry paste. My mom was who made me do this. It was not something I was excited to do. When you’re young you don’t want to do these things. So I would have to mash up the garlic, chilis, lemongrass and galangal. Things to make chili paste. My hand would get tired and I’d have to switch hands. It was the only thing I got assigned as a job. At first my mom would have everything there waiting for me but when I got older I had to go collect them too. So collecting things for her and making a curry paste those were my first jobs in the kitchen. And sometimes it was spicy and you would touch your eyes. I feel like I didn’t like it. But I feel like the smell of kefir lime skin. Usually I have some in the freezer. Its just like the green limes but its skin is bumpy and it has a lot of oil. It’s kind of bitter so that’s why they don’t squeeze the juice or eat it. But they use the aroma of the oil on the skin and mix it in. When you smash things the aroma of the things comes out really nicely. Now they have a food processor that cuts but doesn’t smash. When you smash it is so different. It smells different tastes different.

For curry paste we only use a stone mortar but for the somtam green papaya salad we do it out of wood. Sometimes it would be a whole carved tree. And my father would cut the tamarind tree to make a cutting board. It had to be wood from a tamarind tree. Because it's so medicinal, and when you cut meat on wood, wood comes out too and you scrap everything out. You never would wash the cutting board with soap. Washing things with soap would come later. When you would cut on those board the tamarind wood would come with it too.

So it added some flavor and maybe some medicine?

Ya ya, and now with the plastic cutting board you get micro plastic in there and you never know. But before itv was just wood and it was a medicine and that’s why they describe food as a medicine. It has to be sour tamarind.

In every house the garden home would have to have certain things. Like a fungshue. These plants would support your energy in this order:

In the back of the house you would have to have a jackfruit tree, in front of the house you have to have a sour tamarind tree, and you have to have a grapefruit and gooseberry tree and bamboo tree and banana and coconut tree. Those are amazing trees you can eat every part. The shoot, the bark the fruit. Every household has to have those. Sugarcane! You have to have sugarcane. So in the marriage ceremony instead of giving money they would make sure that the new family has banana or sugarcane jackfruit. Because those are the things that you need. Because with a new family that is what you use for food. Lemongrass and Kafiram tea and a bag of rice seed. It’s all about food and seed. It’s all about life. Like my wedding with Greg we didn’t exchange rings we exchanged seeds.

Ramphai catches grasshoppers in the morning because they are slower and easier to catch. She collects them in a plastic bottle to be washed and prepared later on.

Tell me a little bit about the tradition surrounding insects.

Well my favorite is the cicada. Because it comes in the hot and dry season. Insects come with the seasons. So cicada will come around April because it’s the hottest time of the year so they come down from the mountains to the river. So they will be on the bank on the shore. Thousands of them. So we would have this kind of festival. Every family will soak sticky rice, mash it down into a power and boil it until it becomes like a very sticky gruel. They would have a thick bamboo stick and coat it with the gruel and stick them along the banks of the river. The kids would run around there and scare the cicada from their places and they would just fly and stick on the stick where they cannot move. We would come with buckets of water and just collect the cicadas and put them in the water. It’s so fun and it’s so yummy and a lot of work. After you catch them you have to take the wing out because you don’t eat the wing, you have to take the leg out because its spikes and will catch in your throat. After you clean them to preserve them for a long time you can dry them and then you can have them later for different season.

Ramphai checks the heat of the coconut oil the she will use to fry the cleaned crickets.

To to have them fresh after you clean them you can make a curry or fry them with some salt and then you make a spicy paste that we usually eat. This spicy paste is like salsa for Mexican food or atcha for Indian food. Every culture has its spicy dip ours is called Nam Prik and we have so many kinds of Nam Prik. Nam is water Prik is chili so its like chili water, but it has a lot more than that.

After frying for a number of minutes, as the crickets become a golden brown, she seasons them with salt.

Actually my favorite is cricket, but I started talking about the cicadas because they were so fun to catch, and within an hour you can collects a bucket of them. But crickets come by the end of winter. You know when the crickets are coming when you smell this kind of flower blossom in the forrest. It’s like a purple vine flower, and when you smell the blossom it means the crickets will be gone soon so it is time to catch them. You go out to look for the hole. Like a prairie dog hole but smaller and you dig them up. Spend half a day and you get maybe 20 of them. They are really hard to find but they taste so good. I love crickets.

Also the bee hive or wasp hive. Not the ones that fly but the young ones (the larva) from the hive. They are so expensive, and it’s so tasty. It’s like a protein and its so good. You steam them. If you fry them they will pop. Or you wrap them in banana leaf and grill them. It smells so good. Just put some salt shallots and some basil. It’s so good.

Then we have beetles. They like to live on the tamarind tree. You have to get them at night. You just go and catch them at night it’s so easy, and they are so big and so juicy. Think about like a yogurt, or milk. All these insects that have something in them like that. Like creamy white things. It’s so good.

Then we eat grasshoppers but we don’t have as many as you do here. That’s why I’m like “I need to catch these grasshoppers”.

Ramphai Noikaew’s Nam Prik Tak Gratan. Recommended to be eaten with fresh as well as steamed vegetables and sticky rice.

Walk me through how you made the meal.

It’s called Nam Prik Tak Gratan in Thai, but in English it would be just a spicy paste dip with grasshopper. Nam Prik is all the base of the spicy dip in Thailand that we make of any kind. Like eggplant, or with fish, with many kinds of insect like cicada and crickets, even frogs and shrimps and mushrooms. Many things. So the base is the same like you saw how I grilled all of those ingredients in it. So the base could be like pepper. Green, black, purple, yellow, or red mixed together is nice. Onions. We use big onions here, but in Thailand we use shallots (because it’s a little more spicy I think like strong), garlic and then tomatoes. So these four things: a spicy taste, an aromatic taste, and a sour and sweet umami. These four things are the base for all this spicy stuff.

And then we have grasshopper. The way I do it is I collect grasshoppers the day before and let them kind of fast a little bit before you kill them haha… sacrifice them. Then you wash them take the wing out, take the hard leg out, take the poop out, and clean them well. Then you roast them with a little bit of salt. So then you grill all those chili garlic onions and tomatoes. Usually in Thailand we grill above the charcoal stove with a kind of low heat. The smell of things roasting on the charcoal stove is so aromatic, but yesterday we baked in the oven and that works as well. Sometimes the eggplant is a really good flavor in there if you want to add more of a texture, sometimes we add insects and those main ingredients, but sometimes we add eggplant in it to give more of a soft and smushy texture. This is what we did yesterday. Then use a pestle and mortar to smash them together and the way you smash them the aroma and smell comes out when they get smashed and its nice, but the food processor also works.

You know you are missing something there, but nowadays that what people use it’s quicker and can mike a big amount. I like to use fresh coriander leaves on top, or if you don’t have that you use spring onion, and chop them into slices and put on top. Then when you bite it it’s good. The main thing also you have to have many varieties of greens like we had raw vegetables and steamed vegetables to eat with that, because it’s quit spicy. Then when we eat it it’s like we gotta use the cucumbers to have some crispy and sweet.

Usually we eat it with sticky rice, we can eat with jasmine rice too, but with sticky rice it’s more fun and chewy. In my tradition we always eat it with sticky rice because you can use your hand. We dip a little bit of spicy dip, as well as each vegetable, raw eggplant and steamed pumpkin, cabbage and long beans. So many things. So that way you eat maybe more than 10-15 kinds of vegetables in one meal. The tradition is to eat food as a medicine so that’s the way that we eat. So our traditions is: you have some rice, you have spicy dip, and tons of vegetables and you have maybe you have some meat too. Some grilled meat like pork of chicken or some fish to add some more protein there. Yesterday we ate with a soft boiled egg which is good. It was so good.

Maria, Natividad Cordova-Cañete and Marcelo Cordova - Sopa Paraguaya and Gnochi’s - Paraguay

Interview coming soon

Three generations of the Cordova family stand for a portrait in their kitchen outside of Charlotte, NC. From left to right: Maria, Natividad and Marcelo Cordova.