MEMOIR

Identity Through My Knife and Fork

By Angie Martinez

Illustrations by Conny Gonzalez

I’ve been told I grew up poor. Perhaps my life would have been different if I’d known it. Privileged people around me, however, were poorer.

I’ll decode the riddle: I was well-fed. Literally and figuratively. I was fed love and patience, and it was washed down with cultural pride and education.

Sitting at Los Asadero’s Mexican Restaurant on a slow Saturday afternoon last November with a basket of tortilla chips for two, sipping on a Mason jar of iced tea, partially sweetened with Splenda, I stare at the corner tables. The corner tables where, as a child, I developed my lifelong addiction to iced tea. Where, as a child, I then, too, would finish off a basket of chips and hot salsa. Where I would cover my ears, as if annoyed with the sound of my aunt’s belting voice singing of her broken heart. She wasn’t really my aunt. Culturally, if we adore you and you’re around a lot, you become an honorary aunt. That sound — the sound of her voice — I yearn for today.

As I sit, staring at my usual Mama’s Special, I’m reminded of my childhood, those Friday and Saturday evenings, my singing “Tia Lucita,” harmonizing to a single guitar. The employee, an older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair, another familiar face but not related. The birthdays, which celebrated another year of life. The post-funeral dinners, reminiscing on the life lost but the life well-lived. All of these memories tucked into this 10-table restaurant. All of them are so well sewn into this plate of flautas.

Monetarily poor I may have been. The meals that I indulged in as a small girl, however, were those palatable and sought after by a higher tax bracket. “La Comida no se pelea,” my dad would say to me and my two siblings. “Food, you don’t fight over.”

For my family, wealth wasn’t achieved through the clothes we wore, the cars we drove or the amount of green paper we had in our wallets, but rather through our fridge. If the fridge was full, we were wealthy. To this day, a stocked fridge equates stability. All is well in our world if the fridge is full.

A serving of green beans isn’t simply a daily serving of vegetables — it’s a lunchtime snapshot from when I was 2. My mother would often prepare a meal of Tacos de Papa, Mexican rice with peas and carrots and a spread of fresh toppings to add to the tacos, but 2-year-old me preferred a fresh can of green beans and a can of Libby’s Vienna sausages. A meal I’m not proud of as a self-proclaimed foodie, but nonetheless, a scrapbook moment that is flipped to every Thanksgiving or lunchtime at Luby’s. Green beans, a reminder of the eclectic palate that was developing at such a tender age. What 2-yearold willingly eats green beans straight from the can?

And I’ve eaten shrimp tails, by naïve choice. A choice that wasn’t deemed incorrect until my first date with my now husband. As taught, I didn’t fight over food, but I didn’t necessarily give up food either. As a child, it was instructed that you ate everything on your plate, no questions asked, because there were people even less fortunate than we who didn’t have the luxury of indulging in fried shrimp from The River Oaks Steak House.

When asked, “Do I eat the whole thing?” The response was always, “You eat everything on your plate.” My first date came quick, with a fatty steak and flash-fried shrimp, from the ever-popular TGI Fridays. We were two broke college kids in love. The mortified look on my then date’s face is a look that will forever be ingrained because I popped that shrimp fully in my mouth, tail and all.

Beautiful illustrations dance in my head with every meal. My first can of green beans and the sensory excitement that came with squishing them between my fingers. My first beer fizz — a monumental, carbonated moment signaling my adulthood. My half-eaten Don Juan Coco Von from Los Vaqueros served at our wedding. A juicy chicken breast marinated in a savory white wine sauce, topped with mushrooms. I ate a mushroom, perhaps.

My first postpartum meal, three crunchy tempura fish tacos from Fuzzy’s Taco Shop on Berry Street. The infamous, “UH HUH” (if you know, you know) resonating in the back of my brain coming from that greasy kitchen, flashing teenage memories of TCU postgames with my brother. Me, now enjoying my signature Fuzzy’s taco order, holding my newborn child.

My life scrapbook isn’t stored away on a shelf, thick with photos and paper glued to it. It’s carefully stored in the sulci of my brain — layers of lasagna, tangles of pasta, pages of tacos all carefully adhered together by gallons of iced tea and slathers of salsa. A palate that is ever growing and continuously discovering.

I’ve been told I grew up poor. Perhaps that is true, but I never knew it. Today, at 32, I’m rich. Rich with memories, prepared in loving kitchens, served at 140°F or warmer, ready to be captured, cut, pasted and stored. I’m creating a culinary reminisce to be passed along through generations and shared with those they love.

My life scrapbook isn’t stored away on a shelf, thick with photos and paper glued to it. It’s carefully stored in the sulci of my brain — layers of lasagna, tangles of pasta, pages of tacos all carefully adhered together by gallons of iced tea and slathers of salsa. A palate that is ever growing and continuously discovering.