Quimbolitos

When I moved to Ecuador, Quito was in the middle of an energy crisis. At its worst, the power would go off for hours, and we never knew when (or where).  That meant no lights and no hot water.

At first, I tried to live as I normally could, and shower when I normally showered. I tried, but the water that shot out the nozzle, freezing Andean mountain water, cut into my naked body like fire. So I began to wander around the city without bathing, dirty under my clothes.

Then the February rains hit with a violence that surprised everyone, unpredictable, rageful clouds. Since I never carried an umbrella, when the skies opened, I just ran. I ducked into bakeries, which were on practically every city corner back then. Inside, the windows shook. I shook behind them, stuck in my own frozen filth. 

The suspiros in these bakeries were arranged in cloud piles, and they cost just a few sucres. I regularly sank my teeth into those merengues, and they exploded into puffs of sugar between my teeth. My bite  sank deeper, and they were chewy, chewier, and, in that relentless rain,  more deeply satisfying that any nougat, any marshmallow. 

Whole sections of the city began to go dark at nighttime.  When it was our turn, Chelita’s house, deep in the shadow of the Volcano Pichincha, fell into a kind of blind oblivion.  The night sky seemed to swallow us whole. 

Chelita bought long white candles. She set them in the kitchen and crowded them on the long dinner table where we all sat to talk, and where we ate our meals. The flames lit the table up like an altar, but the dirty cold still clung to our bodies. I listened to criollo songs with Chelita, and I couldn’t stop shaking.

On one of those black nights, Kuki came for a visit. She burst through the back door, the one that led directly into the kitchen, carrying a wide roasting pan that smelled warm, and of plants. She always brought us heaps of food from her home in Latacunga. She cooked with a deep understanding of the volcanic earth, and of the harvests that rise from that soil. There was always a little bit of wildness in her food.

She laid the pan down in the kitchen. The sweet steam that escaped was unmistakable – quimbolitos. 

These dessert tamales are steamed cakes made of cornmeal, cheese, and butter, dotted with raisins, and bundled together using the leaves of the achera plant. Wrapped in those deep green leaves, quimbolitos look natural, as if they sprouted that way straight out of the earth.

Chelita boiled water for tea. We gathered around the table. We sat in the pressing darkness, against the candlelight, and the smells of the leaves were as strong as the earth beneath us.

I unpeeled the tamal with tenderness, treating the smooth, almost waxy leaves like giant flower petals. Steam rose as I opened it, bathing me with the nutty, grainy aroma of the corn, and the tangy bite of sweet cheese. My fork broke into the cake. Quimbolitos are the length of a coffee cup and as plump as a bird’s belly. They look timid, but they fill you up like nothing else. It’s as if they multiply in the belly, growing, expanding, falling into all the places inside that have felt empty for so long.