Receta

I call mamá for her budín de pan recipe.

First, break the bread into chunks.

I ask how much bread and what size chunks.

However much bread you have left over and the chunks not too big and not too small. Cover the bread in milk. Stir in the sugar.

How much sugar?

Enough that it’s sweet.

And so it goes. No measurements. No oven temperatures. No timings.

I recall her reciting the wartime rations of her childhood in precise detail. Each month, our household had to make do with one cup of sugar per person, just a half-liter of oil, and fifty grams of coffee!

Perhaps, en la abundancia de América, she no longer feels a need to measure.

Whenever I worry about raising a child on a writer’s income, mamá recites an old Spanish saying:

Dios manda a cada niño con una barra de pan bajo el brazo.*

The budín turns out as it should.

* God sends every child with a loaf of bread under its arm.

Gabriel Amor was born in Galicia, Spain. Chronologically, his first language is Spanish, but he has lived in New York since the age of five and holds a BA and MA in English, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish. Gabriel has published poetry in both languages and performed it in collaboration with musicians, actors, and other artists. He has also published translations of several Latin American writers. In 2016, he received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his manuscript on Juana I, which was published by Kenning Editions in 2018 and performed at The Poetry Foundation the following year. Gabriel was also a Producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary film The Woman Who Wasn’t There.