Sincerely, an Afro-Latina Who

Dear roommates, lovers, or anyone who’s ever asked me to make them a meal,

I haven’t learned how to cook yet. You wouldn’t have guessed with my curvaceous frame and deep caramel skin. But I don’t know how to make eggs Or how to cook rice Or how to fry chicken Or how to cook pasta al dente. It's a little embarrassing, quite frankly.

I’m an Afro-Latina who grew up on arroz con gandules, soul food, and habichuelas for days. So it’s a bit humiliating when people ask me to bring “authentic” Puerto Rican food to the potluck and I come bearing empty plates.

My mother is a witch in the kitchen. Rosemary, oregano, cayenne, cilantro, the smells danced around the kitchen like a ballroom full of salsa dancers. When the heat of the kitchen proved too hot for my mother’s skin, she would take a step into the living room, take a deep breath, and go back to her wizardry. Sweating, spicing, creating gourmet delicacies in our small midwestern apartment. But even after watching my mom slave away at a stove all day I still don’t know how to cook.

See, in my culture cooking is the ultimate presentation of affection. My mom would bring a plate of food to my dad when he worked for a semi-truck company. Every night, no matter what, she packed his dinner into Tupperware and drove forty-five minutes to his truck station on the outskirts of the city. To us, food is a love language.

As my cousin Manny puts it, “eating food you cook anoints you.” You might be thinking, since when did God become a part of the experience of shoving homemade biscuits and fried chicken into your face? I ask myself the same thing. My cousin Manny is a good man, but I question his thinking sometimes.

So when I say that I can't cook, I feel defeated. Years of recipes passed down from my family, histories of spices and mixtures, and I have no idea what to put in the crockpot first. I haven’t learned to cook because of many reasons. Reason #1 – Once you learn to cook, you can get married. I don’t want to get married. Reason #2 – I can’t conquer the world if I'm stuck in a kitchen. Reason #3 - The world is full of chefs, there does not need to be another one.

But maybe one day the cliches will fatigue and I will learn how to cook.

Perhaps one day my ancestors will guide my hand so that my rice isn’t so crunchy. Or I'll hear a whisper from my father’s ghost telling me to turn off the heat under my pasta. Eventually, I'll open one of my grandmother’s old Paula Deen cook books and try to read the language of measurements and spices.

But for today, I’ll wait for my mom, who’s sweating in the heat of the kitchen, as I sit here complaining about my lack of culinary skills.

sincerely, an Afro-Latina who can’t cook