Food Memories: Empanadas Salvadoreñas

Always too hot.

The first bite was always too hot. I had appointed myself as my mother’s taste tester and could never wait for that first empanada to cool off. As a child I would forgo forks and patience and roll the treat on brown sugar, my fingers stinging. Mom and I are balling up the mashed plantain. Fat circles of flavour. She puts three more to float in the oil and puts more dough in her cupped hand.

My mother’s empanadas, with their smell of warm milk custard and fried plantain, were enough to bring uncles, cousins, and the occasional neighbour to the table. But it remains our favourite treat, in those afternoons where we sit at the table with forks, sharing the plate of piled empanadas, musing about the child I used to be, about El Salvador, about me being “far away,” as my mom likes to call the 45 minute plane ride that is our distance.

The empanadas now hold for us not only the milk custard and the ‘canela’ sticks that boil with it, but also symbols and smells of my mother’s childhood and my adulthood. They show up as surprises when we’re grocery shopping and I pick up the ripe plantains and silently put them in the cart, or when my mother asks, looking at her scribbled grocery list if we should “cook up something nice”. And though we now split custard and plantain dough duties, and I set two forks over the plate on the table, that first empanada never has time to cool, and my stinging fingers make my mom laugh. This is the taste of home, the memory we brought from the land we left. It tastes of dark nights drunk with the glazed eyes of my uncles’ old stories; I consume them every time I bite into another empanada. It tastes of the brown sugar that coats the inside of my mouth and the too hot custard on my fingers.