Fishcakes R Us
by Gail Dottin
I only wanted one present from her for my birthday that year: teach me how to make them.
***
My parents coordinating picnic caravans with my fertile family and troops of replicating cousins, at least three weekends of each summer month. Club El Pacifico, the alumni association of Dad’s high school on Panamá’s Canal Zone. Their meetings were preludes to wives and husbands swinging around our basement to old calypsos and Celia Cruz’s ¡Azucar! The neighbor’s BBQ with the southerner-cum-Harlemite family in Queens, amidst the ribs and greens. At funerals when more than twice, “Everyone’s so busy, we only get together at things like this now” was heard. Codfish cakes. Bacaloaitos. Gatherings of my people. Our soul food.
***
Mom is one of four women in my fam with stellar fishcake reputations. Bacalaoitos aren’t exact. Small, crispy snackables, it’s a humbling recipe of only six ingredients: flour, eggs, baking powder, scallions, pepper sauce, and dried codfish. Mom and I tried writing the recipe for a family cookbook. But that still isn’t a guarantee of success. You must suck at making them before getting them right. “Right” is a bespoke concept. Flat, shaped like tater tots, snot-clearingly-spicy—the variations are as vast as personalities. Mom goes heavy on the pepper sauce.
***
A brief primer: Pepper sauce ≠ Tabasco/similar liquid tongue-tingling condiments. It’s an often homemade, mustard-colored, scotch bonnet-infused requirement at meals with Caribbeans. Seriously, Dad poured that stuff on spaghetti Bolognese.
***
Fishcake critique one never wants: “Dat one dere, musta wave de codfish ovah de batta. Becaw I don’ tas no fish in dere!” This is the death kiss, the funky body-under-swaggy clothes, the scarlet letter amongst mi familia. If there are few takers the second time you make fishcakes, reassess the codfish quotient. Klatches of my female elders are talking about you. The primary requirement of good fishcakes is the unquestioning substantial presence of dried codfish. Seems apparent, yet I’ve had eggy fried flour its makers insisted were bacalaoitos. The “essence of codfish”— Mom’s description of those sampled on a Barbados vacation where they’re a national dish. “Ours are better,” she nodded.
“I know you bringin’ the fishcakes, Olga!” was the anticipatory plea when family assembly was in the offing. If an oniony peppery sting hit my nose while putting the key in the front door to our house after school, I’d close my eyes in gratitude for imminent nirvana. Mom was frying fishcakes and I walked in grinning. Wielding the spatula, she’d give me the crooked eye while guarding the plate of spicy salty fish bites draining on paper towels. “You can have two now!” she presented her terms, mildly exasperated having had the same conversation with Dad who’d try to sneak handfuls. “Between you and your father, there won’t be any for tomorrow!” Like the boom-boom-bap of old-school hip-hop that drew folks to a block party, the wafting brought our upstairs tenant-friend to our kitchen. Soon followed by Mom’s best friend/neighbor having heard about the possibility of fishcakes from Mom.
***
My relationship with Mom is complicated. That’s a thing family says when the love is cluttered. It requires tip-toeing, boundaries. Devotion is hewed with pain.
My former best friend looks like my brother and birthed us both. Our complication is constructed of need and disappointment. We need the other’s respect and unbarbed love. Efforts to provide them haven’t translated though our love is large, mostly shared in English. I carry identities beyond her understanding: lesbian, writer. She and my father gave me the childhood Mom wanted for herself: middle-class, private schools, so much affection. She got me to grown. She’s done. I thank Mom in homemade cards on days celebrating her, make special dinners. I want to do more. But our complication. My requests that we become different squeeze her forehead into incredulous rows. Discussions about adjustments extrude her exhausted pleas of “What more do you want from me?” She only hears “Bad Mother” in my need. I need her to chuck elements that scrape and distance: accept me, stow judgement. While we have this too short life, I want a friendship with Mom worthy of cozy Airbnb commercials for mother/daughter getaways. It’s vulnerable, fun, durable amidst change. Loops of conversations we may never have fuel my insomnia.
“I will never understand it, but I’m always going to be here for you.” My dad’s promise after I came out. He was angry, but Dad and I were okay. He’s always been most comfortable giving to family—time, money, advice, hugs. I am family. Period. He gave us stories about coming up in Panamá, his Jamaican mom, Bajan dad who helped build Panamá’s Canal, the segregated Canal Zone where my grandparents raised him. He’s been the impetus for many a fishcake-making family event.
I requested the fishcake tutorial while tensely living with my parents as I was pursuing an MFA in writing. Sharing my gay after college overwhelmed Mom. It pumped ugly things from her mouth that embossed themselves on my psyche. Here’s where writing instructors would draw an arrow scrawling, “illustrate a scene sharing the ugly.” But 30 years later, I don’t want to see the words on my screen. That says more than anything I’d write. I’ll tell you that those words propelled me out of my childhood house after college. I had expected to stay there while I configured the elements of my 20-something life—job, savings, apartment. For nearly a decade our communication was sparse. Grad school tuition moved me back. Fishcakes were my olive branch.
***
After too many conflagrations over the eater of the last fishcakes, Mom bagged and labeled our allotments. Dad and my brother inhaled theirs. I’d ration mine for a week, hiding them with the veggies. “But your names were on them,” you say. A labeled bag was no guarantee of safety amidst late-night rummaging.
You ever taste something in your brain? One day at work I was so excited about finishing my fishcakes for dinner, my cerebrum tingled with scotch bonnets and salt. Eight hours, three trains, and a bus later, I found only produce in the crisper. My brother had moved out. Mom keeps to her own bag. In the basement I found one satisfied father reclining next to one greasy Ziplock. It held crumbs and the scent of fishcakes. My name in red ink. “I ate them before I saw that,” was Dad’s sheepish defense. Resigned, I ate something unmemorable.
I haven’t told that story in 393 days. I was on stage in Queens speaking to family, my dad’s club friends, my brother’s work associates, a writer friend of mine. From Jersey, Florida, Texas, Connecticut, Virginia, Brooklyn. My father brought them all together, as usual. I was honoring him. We were celebrating his life. The life he lived with and for us. Ten days before sharing that memory, he was ice cold at six a.m. Contorted, his head rested against the railing of his hospital bed in my childhood bedroom.
***
“I don’t make them anymore. You have to ask Gail.” Teaching me to make fishcakes turned out to be a good thing for Mom. “People expect me to make them for their parties. I don’t wanna be the Fishcake Lady!” I make them more often than she does, not just for special occasions. Sometimes I crave them joints. She likes mine better now. I’ve fried them for Brooklyn friends’ birthdays and get-togethers. White women without a scotch bonnet in their DNA, they clamored for them. Packed half a large Ziplock for my brother during the honeymoon phase with his wife. “Know how many I got out of that whole bag, Gail?” I was in the car with the newlyweds, hearing my sister-in-law’s lament, “Three!” Explaining my theory of generosity amidst new love and marriage, my brother put extra bass in his voice to clarify, “Fishcakes. I don’t play!” He was focused on driving but let it be known, “That’s one thing I don’t share.” At a church cookoff, I won an award. Though I basically waved the sauce bottle over the batter for a friend’s party in Soho, lightweights said they were spicy. I loved making them for Daddy the most.
More than Mom, he always made it seem like we—our Pana-Jam-Bajan-New York blend— were classier than the white idea of blackness. I always gave Dad a sampling first, hot from the pan. Bagged-up his stash when I finished. Mom got a few just-fried ones, too. But that was apprentice seeking approval from the master. Both parents painted me with pride in where and what we’re made of. Yet seeing my father scarf down a bag gave me a rare joy. I just loved us when he’d inhale them, barely remembering the “thank you.” They made him smile. In the late years of dementia, that was something I could do for him. He could savor the love I held for his stories, our culture, the sacrifice my parents made to gift me this American life.
We lost Dad two weeks before quarantine. Comfort food and sourdough absorbed national anxieties. My thoughts of making fishcakes stung. I wish I could remember the last time he had mine. I know he smiled. Making them feels pointless without him.
I finally made a batch around October. They tasted aight. A first-timer would’ve thought they were dope. They didn’t have enough pepper sauce and accidental baking powder slippage didn’t help. They were puffy, not crisp, kinda doughy, slightly blander than the ones that have gotten me raves.
Gail Dottin is a N.Y. writer who doesn’t live in Brooklyn because that can happen. She’s a VONA disciple, and if you’re a writer of color, she commands you to apply to VONA. This is VONA. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Panamá for writing. Where There Is Pride In Belonging, her work in progress, is a family memoir woven around her Bajan grandfather’s life building the Panamá Canal. The book was inspired by her father, who gifted her with dozens of stories from life on the segregated Canal Zone. Her essays have been anthologized and featured in journals including Atlas +, Alice, Pank, and Autostraddle. She was an MFA Fellow at Columbia University.