The Cold Outside

My grandmother kept a modest white house in Quito – it had pink roses all around it.  The doors were old, wooden, and the inside rooms very drafty. My sister and I huddled under the heaviest woolen blankets when we slept there. We could see our breath in the drafts. In the morning, it felt like we had woken up outside.

We found Mama Sarita and Lala in the kitchen. They had been up for hours, of course. They handed us tea, with warm bread and queso tierno. My grandmother sat down with us, sipping morocho from her coffee cup. It smelled like corn husk and steamed her face, a soft, beautiful face – that’s something I remember about her.  

Strictly speaking, morocho is cracked white corn. It’s made into a breakfast cereal by boiling the dried kernels and adding milk, sugar (in the form of panela), and spices. The cereal rests at the bottom of the hot glass, and it’s spooned up like rice pudding.

The process takes a long, long time. First, the corn is set out under the sun. After it dries, the kernels get broken down into small shiny bits. That’s how they look in the markets in Ecuador  – like little broken teeth. A starch covers these bits, as silky as hand lotion.

My grandmother belonged to an  older generation. She had a now extinct patience – she thought in weeks and days, rather than minutes or seconds. Back then, there was virtually nothing worthwhile that you didn’t have to wait for. Nature needed luring, and food was as stubborn as a tree, or a rock, or a cold morning. Morocho called for that kind of taming, a sustained soaking in water. So Mama Sarita sat the broken kernels in water, for however long it took to soften. This sometimes took the whole of a day, sometimes longer.

After a time, she moved the water with the corn to the stove, adding a sprinkle of salt and a green onion, and she set it at low heat. And simmered it for hours. The floral scent of warm raw corn would fill up the kitchen.

The rest was stirring, and often. In the kitchen, in front of the stove. Like risotto. Women like my grandmother spent their days doing it. They did it with gentle persistence, scraping off the starches that stuck to the bottom. I don’t have that elegance of spirit.

The stirring lasted until the morocho relaxed, and collapsed between the teeth.

After a time, the morocho plumped up. Two cups of dried corn swelled to almost ten cups of morocho. The parable of loaves and fishes comes to mind. At this point, the contents of the pot were divided up. One half for cereal, the other, for soup.

For the cereal – Mama Sarita boiled five cups of milk with a cinnamon stick, raisins, strips of lemon and orange zest, and cloves. Then a few cups of the fat morocho went into the milk. That mixture bubbled for another hour.

My grandmother drank it in a tall glass cup, with a scoop of panela at the bottom. She looked rosy, golden while drinking it. It warmed her through – that was its purpose. On the coldest Andean mornings, morocho lit the sun inside her.