Reading Rosto in Texas

I recently went to Odessa, Texas and took part in Literary Death Match. You can read all about it here: https://www.chronicle.gi/chasingnelson-reading-rosto-in-texas/ (you need an account to read but it’s free)

I was thinking of a home to put my little short story out in the world, and what better place than here?

Rosto

This is how you make rosto. You won’t find it in a restaurant at 9pm on a rainy Wednesday night in London, which is when you’ll need it the most. You’ll have to learn to make it yourself, in your shared apartment, on what passes for a kitchen table.

First, chop the onions. Try your best to dice them as finely as you can but watch the outer skin slip off, and give up, because what your abuela did with a kitchen knife was magic. Then the carrots. Realise you can’t recall if they were chopped up into little cubes or sliced into thick, bright orange penny pieces. You remember them soft and sweet once they were cooked.

Look online for a recipe. Ignore the vegetarian reformations and the calls for beef. That is not rosto. Find one that looks about like what you think. Except for the mushrooms. You have doubts about the mushrooms. Work from memory. Slice the carrots into one-inch coins.

Go back to the store for olive oil. Try and find Spanish olive oil. Not so pale in colour like the stuff on the shelves. It should be golden, golden. The beginnings of an early July tan. Or the flecks inside your own eyes that nobody sees unless they come close enough and realise your eyes are not brown.

Spend about five times more than what you know this olive oil should cost.

Back in the kitchen, taste a tablespoon. Wait for the taste of something earthy. For a moment, you are in the back of the family car up the mountains of Southern Spain, past the rows of dark green trees with twisted branches.

Close enough.

When you ate rosto as a child at the family table, you pulled meat off the bone with your teeth, and it was tender. All the pork in the supermarket here is white and dry.

Call your mother. She stays up late, even with the time difference. Costillas de cerdo, she says, with no consideration to turn down the volume of the television. Your father asks who it is in the background. She ignores him. He asks louder. Ay callate, she tells him. You ask her for the rest of the recipe. She has walked away from the phone to shout at your father. You hang up.

Back to the store, which is about to close. You can’t find costilla de cerdo. At the apartment, you cut up thin, sad-looking pork chops and throw double what you think it should have into the pot.

The last time you tried to make rosto, the pasta overcooked and turned the entire dish to mush. You’ve watched a hundred videos on YouTube since then. A woman called The Pasta Queen cannot be wrong.

Rosto is not a marinara, you think, but the principles should remain. She said to cook the pasta al dente, then stop. You panic and cook it for two minutes in lukewarm water. It will cook in the sauce. Better to stop now than to go too far.

The sauce. You remember sitting in your abuela’s house once. She was telling the neighbour that you can’t use fresh tomatoes for sauce. What sauce, then? Your tongue scrapes the roof of your mouth as if there were a residue there of decades. It wasn’t thin like chopped tomatoes. Not soft, like passata. You bought a jar of pasta sauce. The slogan on the label urges you to “share some passion with your pasta!”

The picture on the front shows a swarthy family eating under a tree. The father in a straw hat with thick eyebrows. The mother, her hair in a bun, wearing an apron and holding up a pot of spaghetti.

You fight against this processed exoticism with crushed garlic, salt and pepper, lots of oregano. Now it’s your sauce. You throw the empty jar away.

You pierce one of the penne in the simmering mix. It feels done, but firm. That is better than before. That is an improvement.

You serve it in the best bowl you have. A ceramic one with painted lemons. Your flatmate once said the bowl is camp. She said the statue of the Virgin Mary beside your bed is camp too. Your flatmate eats avocado on toast and goes on a keto diet every spring in preparation for her girls’ trip to Ibiza. She pronounces it like that, Ibiza, but laughs when you struggle to say mayonnaise. Mayonnaise. Ma-yo-nnaise.

You sit and eat here, at what passes for a kitchen table. It tastes fine. Good, almost. It will be better tomorrow. Someone told you that when you were a child and now you repeat it constantly.

You forgot the shredded cheese on the top. You only have cheddar. It’s meant to be queso bola. What even is queso bola in English? You pick up your phone to call your abuela to ask her, and you scroll to her number, but it is no longer there. You put the phone back on the table. You eat the rosto in the silence and the near-dark of this late hour. It’s not as good as the one you remember. You’ll make it better next time.