The Chicken

I was nineteen and my mother was sick and nobody was telling me how sick. That's the thing about immigrant families. You protect each other from information. It comes from love. It also makes you crazy. She had been in the hospital for four days. My father was there every hour he wasn't at work, which meant he was eating nothing, sleeping in a chair, and running on bad vending machine coffee. My abuela had flown up from Oaxaca and was staying at our apartment, which meant she was cooking constantly, because that is how she processed fear. Every surface had something on it. The whole place smelled like epazote and worry. I came home from my shift — I was washing dishes at a Greek place on Halsted, which, fine, it was a job — and my abuela was sitting at the kitchen table not cooking. Just sitting. That was when I understood something was wrong beyond what they had told me. She looked at me and said, in Spanish, "There's no food." She didn't mean the refrigerator was empty. She meant she had run out of the ability to make any. That happens. I had never seen it happen to her before. I was nineteen. I had maybe cooked twenty meals in my life, not counting eggs. But I looked in the refrigerator and there was a chicken. There were onions. There was a jar of dried chiles my abuela had brought from home because she didn't trust Chicago chiles, which is fair. There was rice and there was garlic and there was a lime that had seen better days. I made arroz con pollo. I had no idea what I was doing. I kept tasting it and adjusting, which is the only real cooking instruction anyone ever needs and no one ever gives you straight. I burned the bottom of the rice a little. The chicken was good. The whole thing took about an hour and a half and I was terrified the entire time. My abuela ate two plates. She didn't say it was good. She said "tu madre te lo va a agradecer." Your mother will thank you for this. Which is a very particular kind of compliment, the kind that means something without making a big production of it. I brought a container to the hospital. My father ate it standing up in the hallway. My mother was awake and she smelled it and she wanted some and the nurse said she could have a little and she had maybe four bites of rice and a small piece of chicken and she said "mija, the bottom is burned" and I said "I know, Mamá" and she smiled. She was fine, eventually. Took a few weeks. She came home and immediately started correcting everything in the kitchen and I let her, because that meant she was back. But that night in the hallway with my father, watching him eat out of a plastic container because I had made a thing that could be eaten, watching him look less gray for ten minutes, that was the moment. Not a birthday. Not a legal anything. It was a slightly burned arroz con pollo on a Tuesday in November, and the knowledge that I could be the person who made something when nothing was being made. You have to understand, in my family food was never separate from the rest of life. It was the medium everything moved through. Grief moved through it. Love moved through it. The decision to put a chile-based Mexican stew on a Polish-Mexican menu in 2009 and call it something nobody could pronounce was its own kind of love letter to that idea. I was nineteen and I made a chicken. My grandmother ate two plates. My mother tasted it from a hospital bed and complained about it, which meant she was still herself. My father stood in a hallway and for a few minutes his shoulders dropped. That's not nothing. I have cooked thousands of meals since then. I have run a kitchen for fifteen years. I have a James Beard nomination I keep in a drawer because I don't know what else to do with it. None of it felt more significant than that Tuesday. The lime was bad, by the way. I used it anyway. You could barely tell.