I thought so much about my grandmother, Vovó Cleide, on my flight home from Brazil. I’d spent the holidays with her and most of the maternal side of my family in her hometown, Currais Novos, a small mining village in the arid Northeastern region.
Aunts, uncles, and cousins included, the head-count came up to about twenty of us all together. I must say, too, that we did a spectacular job of choreographing all of our many bodies in her tiny home, and even more so in the kitchen because, of course, that is where everyone always wishes to congregate.
Late in the evenings we’d all part ways and sleep in various pousadas around town but during the days, which we’d all spend at my grandmother’s (unless otherwise adventuring), some of us would eat our meals standing up or share a chair. Instead, we might just wait our turn, kicked back against the side of house in the shade with an ice cold Skol and a handful of cousins, watching the townspeople go by. The most entertaining person to people-watch with is my grandmother herself. She has a knack for turning small-town gossip into myth or legend.
As for the coziness of our family reunion, it could not have been more welcome. After all, even back to my early memories I cannot once recall so many of us together in the same room. My mother and half of her siblings moved their lives to California years ago, baby cousins born in Brazil made travel difficult, and my grandmother would never dream of leaving behind her little dog Pituxa, whom she considers her youngest daughter.
My Vovó Cleide remains very much an enigma to me – a woman truly unique in all of her idiosyncrasies. Staunch, tough, proud, FULL of true love, and with a sense of humour that stands up to the most dry, crass, and crude of any man’s. She beats anyone to the opportunity to make a dirty joke. I have had many, many good laughs in her presence.
On the days surrounding Christmas, she fed the lot of us until we were stuffed to the brim, with her children’s favorite foods: lamb puxado in cilantro sauce, crispy-skinned chicken with her pimenta macho, and moqueca de peixe e camarão (a seafood stew with coconut milk and palm oil). The staples were fluffy Brazilian rice and Rio-style beans, feijão Carioca, and farofa (toasted manioc flour with peanuts and fresh corn kernels). For dessert, fresh cashew fruit juice and watermelon slices. She’d give us the signal to help ourselves to the midday lunch feast, and once we were all settled with our plates and scattered in conversations around the house – reminiscing, storytelling, joking, teasing – she would observe with a quiet contentment like a proud mother hen.
Vovó Cleide herself is very ritualistic and particular when it comes to mealtime and likes only to eat out of her deceased uncle’s white tin camping bowl. Her favorite foods include the likes of olho de peixe (fish eye), bola de galo (rooster testicle), and coração e rabo de boi (cow heart and tail). I watched her gobble up each with apparent delight. She is also known to love anything cooked in chicken blood and small prairie dog-like mammals of the region known as preá. My mother swears to this day that Vovó served their pet rabbit for dinner one night.
What I can’t stop daydreaming about, though, is a much tamer food – feijão verde. Fresh beans, grandma-style. These are green shelling beans, similar in flavor and appearance to black-eyed peas, only too appropriate for summoning good fortune for the new year. It’s a dish that could not be simpler nor more delicious. Cooked slowly in a light broth of onion and tomato, she’s brings it together at the very last minute with a swirl of creme de leite. Hearty but not heavy; fresh and earthy, these beans make you feel a sort of Sampson strength, the kind that could make you live for one hundred years.
