Beans and Tortillas

Corn, maiz, or ixiim

Sugata was out getting groceries one evening in the open market and could not find the girl that sold the  tortillas. He stopped to ask a bread-seller where else he might find some. She directed him to a door on one of the side streets. Upon entering he climbed the stairs, walked down the hall and entered into somebody´s large, dimly lit kitchen. A pile of wood was stacked against the wall, and atop the wood, slept a black and white cat. A wood-burning stove made the room warm and a woman flipped fresh corn tortillas atop the stove. Corn sat soaking in plastic tubs on the floor. Two other women graced the room--one much younger than the tortilla flipper, and one much older. It felt strange, to be sure, walking into what appeared to be someone´s private residence, but there were the tortillas.


"I would like to buy tortillas," Sugata said, in his masterful Spanish.
"How many?"
"Three quetzales worth." 

By this time he knew the market price: one quetzal for four tortillas

"We have beans too," one woman said as he left.

But we were determined to cook our own beans.

Avocados, yet another delight!

We had purchased dry beans at the market and I had soaked them all day. In the eveningI began to cook them on our gas burner. After an hour and a half, I sampled them. Still quite crunchy. Another hour and a half and I still wasn´t satisfied, but gave up and had slightly crunchy beans for the evening.  I´d cooked beans plenty in Portland, why did it take so long here? And why especially since it was such a staple? I balked at the idea of using so much gas just to cook beans, so I gave up not only for the evening, but for my stay in Guatemala holding to the hope that there were cooked beans aplenty.


The next time at the market we went we brought along an empty pot for beans. The youngest of the three generations of women began chatting with us. What are your names? Where are you from? Sugata made her guess his country of origin and was pleased when she first thought Mexico. She had a young son--a year away from starting school. Later that evening hollered and waved at us from the window as we shopped for avocados just below his house. We are regulars now.

But the market is somewhat far from our house, and very much uphill from us. We are occasionally lazy and
so on one of our lazy days, Sugata began asking around the neighborhood where one could buy beans and tortillas. 

The interesting thing is that so many people sell these essential food items from their homes. We took some time to follow directions to a house just up the street from us. We squeezed through the alley which opened into an area where clothes had been hung out to dry. A small girl played nearby, her mother still busy hanging T-shirts. "Hola. Vende frijoles y tortillas?" The woman assures us that yes, she sold beans and tortillas. We produced our pot and the little girl ran to fill it with seven quetzales of beans. 

The next day when we bring our pot for our daily bean ration, they aren´t selling beans and direct us to another house a block away. Once again we must poke our heads into someone’s dark kitchen and ask for a few beans. I still haven’t gotten used to it, though the intimacy of the experience fascinates me.

According to my Spanish teacher, most people here do not have refrigerators and use wood burning stoves to cook their food. The smell of wood smoke begins to waft into the air at around 6 a.m. and is thicker than I care for, though now I seem to have become desensitized. The challenge of being without a refrigerator is that you cannot cook too many beans all at once. My teacher tries to cook only enough for two days, heating the beans well the second day to kill anything that may have tried to developed. If the beans are not finished by day two, they likely go to waste. 

I learned about this because I asked my teacher "Como estas?" one morning and she actually answered honestly. She was fine now, but the night before she hadn’t had time to cook beans and her husband had gone to the market to buy some. Neither seemed to noticed that the beans were a little foamy, a little glue-like, a little whiter than they should have been. “There was no odor,” she said, but that night she was sick to her stomach most of the night and had to take some medicine to settle it down.

Ever since I have looked carefully at the beans we buy. For the most part we have gone back to the women just next to the market.

For several mornings we have woken up to a sound of something curiously similar to a diesel generator. What was it? For the longest time we didn´t know, but Sugata verified that the sound could be reliably used as an alarm. He claimed it started at 5:25 a.m, but I have since caught it as early as 5:00, and there are many more sessions of the sound later in the morning. On a walk one morning, we found that the sound was coming from a mini-mill. Women bring tubs of dried corn that has been treated with lime and soaked overnight. They grind the corn there at the mini mill for those daily tortillas we find in the market and in homes around the town.

I love watching them make tortillas here. The lump of dough, scraped from the tub, the sound of a tiny applause as they pat the lump into a tortilla. The applause continues in my mouth after they take it hot off the stove. One more round of applause for the wonder of fresh, hot tortillas.