A Prompt: Write the Story of a Family Recipe

Thank you, Lainie and everyone in our weekly writing group, for this fun evening of writing. I loved how Lainie’s prompts led to so many ideas for potential slices. Writing with them each week is wonderful!

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I grew up understanding how important New Year’s Eve celebrations were. In Venezuela, music, decorations, and lights are out as early as November 1st. You know you must get two special outfits in December: one for Christmas and one for New Year’s. And you can definitely count on hosting or attending gatherings with a lot of people.

This story has to do with food, I promise.

Year after year, my large family would come together at someone’s house. My mom has three sisters, and two of them always lived in the same city as us, so it was a given that we would be together. My other aunt—the one who was like a second mom to my mom—moved from state to state every few years, so my memory shows me flashes of us either traveling to spend the holidays with them or them coming to Maracaibo, my hometown.

Always a family affair: loud music, late hours, kids sleeping on chairs (!), lots of singing, dancing, and laughing well past midnight.

But the memory that came to me when Lainie suggested this prompt was the food my mom and her sisters would prepare for these celebrations. I honestly can’t imagine who would win a cooking competition. Each of them has a special talent in the kitchen.

The flavors always come in layers, one surprise after the other. The colors, the textures, the aromas. I can close my eyes and smell Tía Duilia’s pasticho, its cheese bubbling in the oven. Tía Mayu’s pernil, deeply marinated in garlic, citrus juice, and spices. Tía Enmita’s rich hallaca guiso or her unique arepas. My mom’s lentejas, earthy with a slight taste of bacon. Each dish, a gift to all of us.

Recipes I don’t think were passed down to them, but rather emerged from rushed creativity in their kitchens while we ran around—fighting the veggies or strong flavors as kids, flavors we would later treasure as adults, too far away to experience them again.

When I think of my family from a distance, I think of their stories, and I think of their cooking.

My cousins and I often ask for their recipes, hoping we could follow them if we’re in the right mindset. And when they come back with “a little bit of this” and “whichever vegetables you have in the freezer,” I know it’s probably better to keep missing it than to try to recreate it.

Their food is a love language in our family. It’s an invisible thread connecting all of us living in different countries.

Their recipes are stories we’ve told over and over, recalling the exact moment when a particular dish set a new record of deliciousness. Other times, a meal brings us back to a moment before leaving Venezuela.

That New Year’s Eve of 2013, at my house, with all our plates overflowing with love, we enjoyed each other’s company, blissfully unaware of a future in which missing those meals would be the norm rather than eating them.