Rice and Sancocho
by Ana-Maurine Lara
[Life in the pandemic is constrained by brackets.]
For the rice, you will need jasmine rice [Maram brought me a twenty-pound bag of rice from Sunrise market after all the other supermarkets ran out.], water, two tablespoons of oil, salt, a bowl, a colander, a pot with a lid and a large spoon. You can use sunflower oil. Coconut oil. Peanut oil. [I have a half-jar of coconut oil on the counter from when the state of Oregon shut down.] You will use one-part rice to one-and-a-half parts water. You will salt to taste. You will wash the rice by placing the rice in a bowl and filling it with water. [Five months into the pandemic, fires burned down 200,000 acres eight miles from my home. The faucet water becomes oily with ash.] You will use your hands to stir the rice inside the water. [I wash my hands more than ever now.] Then drain by pouring the rice and water through the colander. While it is draining, heat the pot, add the oil and then add the rice. [I am sick of my pots.] Sauté the rice. If you want, add chopped garlic or chopped onion. [In April, a month into lockdown, I harvest the garlic from my garden.] Sauté. When the rice is translucent, add water to cook [Is bottled water any cleaner?]:
1 part rice: 1.5 parts water
2 parts rice: 3 parts water
3 parts rice: 4.5 parts water
I like to use a mug to measure my rice. One mug of rice is enough for two people [I am bunkering with my partner. I can’t imagine being alone right now.]
Add salt, to taste. Bring the water to a boil on high heat. Once it has begun to boil, cover the pot and bring the heat down to a simmer. Cook for about twenty minutes, until the grains are soft [I burn things now. I put a pot on there, and then get distracted walking around the house over to my “office.”]. If you would like the crunchy rice on the bottom–known as concón or pega’o in the Caribbean– then just before you are about to serve the rice, remove the lid and bring the heat up for five minutes. [Turns out I am becoming really great at making concón.]
A bowl of rice is very adaptable. [Will I still eat rice when this is all over?] It was introduced to the Dominican diet during the U.S. Occupation in the early twentieth century [I really miss going home.]. It has now become a staple food. Each accompaniment is a world, an opening. [I can’t wait to be able to open the door again without a mask on my face.] We eat it with stewed meats and beans. Sometimes, we cook it with curry and ginger and add vermicelli noodles to make “arroz con fideos.” [I miss my parents.] We also serve rice with sancocho, a complex root and meat (or vegetarian) stew prepared on Saturdays [What day is it?].
Ingredients for the Sancocho
Any of the following roots: Cassava root, Taro root (yellow, purple, white), Cocoyam, Potato, Plantain. You only need one pound of each [I find a pound of frozen cassava in my freezer, a ripening plantain in my bowl of potatoes, three potatoes from the garden. I examine them. They will do.]
For the meat version, any (and possibly all) of the following meats: stew beef, seasoned sausage, chicken, pork chop, stew lamb, stew goat. You only need one pound of the stew meats, and no more than two pounds of chicken and pork. [I only have some frozen wings in my freezer. I defrost them. Their bones make good broth.]
For the vegetarian version: one pound of dried split peas
Other ingredients:
3 large onions, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
½ cup culantro or cilantro, finely chopped
1 cubanil pepper (sweet Italian or green bell pepper also work), finely chopped
1 habañero pepper
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon cumin
salt to taste
2 tablespoons oil
½ kabocha squash, diced
2 ears of corn, cut into 3-4 pieces [I use frozen corn. The grains, yellow and full, add texture. It’s weird, but it will do.]
To prepare the roux, heat a large pot and add the oil. Add the chopped onion and sauté until translucent. Then add the garlic, pepper, culantro/cilantro [I dig around in my spice cabinet. In the back, there is a jar with some dried culantro leaves my father brought from New York nine months before. In the D.R., we call culantro cilantro ancho. In Puerto Rico, they call it recaito. In Oregon, this leaf has no name.] and sauté. Add oregano, cumin and salt and stir. Add one cup of water and stir. [This is my favorite part, making the roux. I love all the smells coming together. Every Dominican apartment in New York has this smell.]
Add the meats and stir frequently, cooking until they begin to release their juices. Then cover with water, cover and stew on medium heat. Once the water begins to boil, stir the soup, add the roots, habañero pepper and more water. Cook until boiling. Then stir again, add the kabocha squash and corn. Top off with water, cover and cook until the kabocha squash is soft. [We call kabocha auyama. There’s not enough sun in my yard to grow auyama.]
For the vegetarian version, prepare the roux. Instead of the meats, add the dried peas and bring to a boil. Stir, add the roots and water, boil. Stir, add the kabocha squash and corn, and cook until the kabocha is done. [So many people in the poultry industry are sick this year. By May 2020, 3- 18% of poultry workers are diagnosed with Covid. I think about this as I defrost the chicken in the sink.]
Serve in a bowl, with rice. [I run my hands over two bowls in our cabinet. The others break our first two months into the pandemic. These are the survivors.]
You can also add avocado, sliced, and hot sauce.
This is the food that brings me comfort. It is the food that nourishes my body and spirit. It is warm and textured; it is both solid and liquid. It is also adaptable– a food of the African Diaspora when it met the Indigenous world after 1492. The cassava comes from the Caribbean, the taro from the Pacific Islands, the cocoyam from West Africa, potatoes are from South America and plantain is from the Philippines. None of the meats are Caribbean. They all came together through colonization, and yet we make of them something of our own. It is the food of the plantation and of the maniel–those sovereign Afro-Indigenous spaces that provided a respite from slavery for so many over all of these centuries. [We call our house the maniel; a sovereign Afro-Indigenous space in Oregon.] It is a food that allows us to adapt to what we have and do not have. With very little, we can serve many people. [I miss feeding people.] The sancocho and the rice can be cooked on a stove, over an open flame, at a campsite, in a home. It can be prepared in many places, in many ways, with very little. The roots can be hard to find on the West Coast. It usually requires going to an Asian market, and an African market, a Latinx market that also caters to Asian migrants. [There are no bodegas in Oregon.] This food connects me to the global South–to all the people who nourish ourselves on roots and saucy foods, stews that we eat over rice, in bowls we hold in our hands, close to our hearts. [I serve my partner a bowl of sancocho with rice. She holds it close to her heart, in her hands. I smile as the steam rises.]
Ana-Maurine Lara (PhD) is a scholar and a national award-winning novelist and poet. She is the author of: Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press, 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones, 2011), Watermarks and Tree Rings (Tanama Press, 2011), Kohnjehr Woman (RedBone Press, 2017), Cantos (letterpress, limited edition 2015), and Sum of Parts (Tanama Press, 2019). Her academic books include: Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (SUNY Press, 2020) and Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Lara’s work focuses on questions of Black and indigenous people and freedom. She has been published in literary journals (Sable LitMag, Transitions Literary Journal), scholarly journals (Small Axe, Bilingual Revue, Sargasso, Feminist Review) and numerous anthologies, as a scholar and as a creative writer. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon, in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.