Legacy of Leche
“It’s really quite simple,” my abuelita says to me over a video call years ago. “Start with just a bit of sugar… ”
Through Wi-Fi glitches that froze or sped up or disconnected us altogether, I leaned in closely to hear my grandmother pass on the recipes she loved growing up, and still eats today, in Chile. It wasn’t always like this.
Growing up in the Conejo Valley, over 5,500 miles from Santiago, I felt disconnected from my maternal side because they lived so far away. There wasn’t a Chilean community here. At home, my mother cooked typical American foods to help her assimilate to her new culture. I ate tofu and pasta and baked potatoes—white foods that became staples as I moved out and cooked in my own kitchen. Nowadays food imported from Chile is much more common: grapes and wine, even dulce de leche. Though the 805 has diversified its restaurant culture more over the years, in the 1990s the most common ethnic foods available were Mexican and Indian. But burritos and curries, delicious as they are, weren’t the same as humitas and bistec.
With every burger and each spaghetti dish, I felt like I was silently choosing my paternal side, reinforcing their importance and muting my mother’s. A large part of my identity was erased. It wasn’t until I was older that I heard stories (or maybe I was just finally paying attention) about my mother’s family meals back home of cazuela, sopaipilla and desserts of sticky manjar blanco. I wanted to know more: What did these foods taste like? Boiled milk for dessert didn’t sound very appealing, honestly. It was time to reconnect with my heritage, one bite at a time.
In 2005, I went to Santiago to visit my family. My cousins took me out to cafecitos (little cafés) where I tried lucuma (a tropical fruit known as Gold of the Incas that is now considered a superfood) and tres leches with meringue and alfajores. My taste buds started to unlock core memories. With each lick and every bite, I realized I’d eaten these foods before. My cake when I turned 2 was a torta panqueque, something I hadn’t eaten since I spent my birthday there in South America all those years ago.
Back in California, when I started learning how to cook, I wanted to feel more connected to my family history through the sense of taste. Slowly I began, recipe by recipe, to cook into my heritage, first from my mother’s handwritten cookbook that she’d brought with her when she first immigrated here, then through recipes online, a Chilean cookbook, and finally to the original source: my 95-year-old grandmother.
Opening my mother’s cookbook was like watching a wobbly home video, peering into a time capsule to reveal what my mother ate as I carefully turned the crisp pages. The first thing I noticed was her handwriting, so different from what I knew hers to be now. Bubbly and bright, it told me she must have been in her teens when she recorded these recipes. I translated them from Spanish to English; from metric to U.S.; from hard-to-get items to readily available ones that could substitute.
The first dish I made was brazo de reina—a Swiss roll with manjar (a caramel similar to its popular sister, dulce de leche, made by boiling a can of condensed milk)—named for its resemblance to a queen’s arm. My mother knew the dough got sticky; that as soon as it was out of the oven, you had to roll it delicately to shape it with a cheesecloth even though it was so hot it burned your fingers; to moisten the dough with a touch of brandy.
I was so proud of my first Chilean dish, but nervous if it would taste anything like what my mother had grown up enjoying. After it cooled, I sprinkled powdered sugar on top, cut the roll and served it. The gooey golden manjar oozed out, spilling onto the plate. It looked messy. Had I put in too much?
“Well, let’s see,” I said tentatively. We grabbed our forks and dug in. The plates were scraped clean in minutes.
“¡Que rico!” my mother said. “This tastes just like I remember it.” With that, I passed my first kitchen test.
Next on my list of recipes to make was a typical ensalada chilena—fresh, peeled tomatoes with thinly sliced onions drizzled with oil and vinegar—a classic staple of my mother’s childhood. To go with it, empanadas, like mini sandwiches of my youth, stuffed with browned meat, sautéed onions, hard-boiled egg with bright yolks crumbling into the mix, black olives and the surprising burst of sweet raisins. The crisp golden thick crust folded over a pocket of the savory mixture, so piping hot the steam fogged my face like a humid day in Santiago.
My grandmother and I had started visiting weekly over video calls and I was excited to report my kitchen adventures. I showed her photos and described my dish, proudly stating that Mom gave her seal of approval.
“You’ll have to make it here for me one day, querida,” she said.
Soon I started asking her more—how accurate these published recipes were, and how she made her favorites, scrambling to write down the ones she knew by memory, trying to help her think of the name of the dish she was describing. Along with the measurements, I heard stories of love, friendship, and travel.
“Oye,” she said to me one day. “You know, I used to eat this with your grandfather when we went down to the farm.” He was the love of her life, and ever since he passed away a few years ago, eating foods that they enjoyed together evokes memories of 70 years of a joyful marriage.
Or sometimes: “You know yesterday I had the most incredible dish… But nothing is like the corvina I had at Pablo Neruda’s house…” She went on to share the parties she attended at the famous poet’s home, drinking pisco sours and lots of wine. While I couldn’t replicate a special stone oven with freshly caught seaside fish, I could find Chilean sea bass and put my own spin on it. Like looking at the same moon at night, I felt connected to her even through miles and countries apart.
My biggest ambition was to make my favorite cake: torta de mil hojas, or cake of a thousand layers, a dessert so rich, it’s sliced as thin as possible. But I was quickly deterred.
“It’s too labor-intensive,” my mother said. “And it won’t taste the same.”
Instead, I opted to make leche asada, a jiggly custard flan-like dish. To try to replicate it, my mother insisted, we had to get the best full-fat milk we could find. It wouldn’t be like the farm-fresh milk of her youth, still warm and frothy, but it would do.
“Is this right?” I asked my grandmother via video, tilting my phone near the saucepan.
“You have to cut open the vanilla first and scrape out the bean specks inside,” my grandmother taught me.
“And constantly monitor it so it doesn’t burn,” my mother added.
As I stirred the milk warming on the stovetop, memories stirred too. “Meme used to make this when we’d come home from school,” my mother said about her own grandmother. The power of this image, of her grandmother standing over the stove, wooden spoon scraping the pot, invoked my ancestors in a way I hadn’t been able to access before. I felt my emotions welling up. There is something sacred about consuming the same foods that my mother did, the foods that shaped her, that comforted her, that built her—and the generations of women before her.
Then came more traditional recipes over the seasons: mote con huesillo (dried peaches with wheatberries and spices), turrón de vino (whipped egg whites and wine), peras con vino (poached pears in wine), porotos granados (hearty bean and squash stew). I even attempted pastel de choclo, a dish similar to shepherd’s pie with beef, raisins, chicken with merkén (a spice from the indigenous Mapuche people) and a mashed corn top baked to chewy, crunchy perfection. But there was a hiccup.
“The corn has to be fresh,” my mother said. She was used to eating seasonally growing up.
“Can’t I just use this?” I pulled out a bag of frozen corn.
“Por favor,” she rolled her eyes. Instead, I waited until summer for fresh corn from la feria (farmers’ market) to have the best chance at making one of her favorite comfort foods from her childhood.
Of course, not all of the ingredients could be exactly the same, and I didn’t get to share what I made with my abuelita to see if it tasted bueno, but it felt like a bridge between our two worlds through food. Eating the same dishes my grandmother ate as a child, as did my mother, felt like I was honoring our heritage one meal at a time. The dishes all felt sacred to me, special not in their ingredients but the stories behind them. The legacy of cooking over the stove.
Any time I miss my grandmother, I call or message her, or open up the recipe book and start cooking. Even something simple like pan con palta (avocado toast) is accessible and pretty hard to mess up. (My grandmother was eating avocado toast well before it became an overpriced staple on every trendy hipster menu.)
We sit on video call with our cafecito helado, my grandmother, my mother and me, three generations of women united through food and family. Recently we even found a small Chilean restaurant in the Valley, where looking at the menu made us nostalgic for the foods we associated with the motherland. On dieciocho (a Chilean holiday) we pick up a dozen, warm them in the oven at home, and let the smells take us back to the calles of casas a continent away.
