By Olivia Romano

Capirotada: a warm Mexican bread pudding eaten during Lent (the r flips up on the tip of your tongue. Capirotada, capirotada, capirotada). 

Ingredients:

Bread––the body of Christ, or so your mother tells you. 

Piloncillo––not quite brown sugar, not quite molasses, thick as blood when melted. 

Cloves––nails on the cross.

Cinnamon sticks––the cross. 

Cheese––the Holy shroud.

Step-By-Step:

  1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 
  2. Scroll through pages of food bloggers’ life stories and family histories to find a recipe you can stomach. 
  3. Melt the piloncillo over medium heat (you have to look up that word, and then you repeat it to yourself like the recitation of a prayer. Piloncillo, piloncillo, piloncillo.) Some innate part of you knows how to shape your mouth around each syllable, but the sounds you produce are hollow. Do you lisp the c into a th? Does the ll become a y, or do you slur it into a shh––which quiets you, as you disclose how little you know. You repeat it in a circular rhythm, and your hand stirs in sync. Breathy confessions quiver the rising steam, no screens or shriving pews between you. 
  4. Combine it with the cloves, cinnamon sticks, and water. When the mixture melts into something placid and caramel-colored, the spice has been absorbed into the sugar, burned into its very composition. Piloncillo, piloncillo. 
  5. Spread the chunks of bread and cheese in a greased baking dish. The bread is the body––the body is more than the house for a soul; it’s a sponge for everything around it, soaking up the sapidity of the piloncillo. There are unbreakable bones in that body, but the bones are not in the bread. The bones are your bones, hardened and strong, the anatomy of which you inherited from your parents. Pay attention: phalanges clutching the spoon, scapulas bearing weight, hunching you into position. You inherited your mother’s small hands and feet but also her resolve, passed through generations of women who had no choice but to be solid and unmovable.1
  6. Add more spice to the piloncillo if you wish. A hallmark of Mexican food is its courage to explode with spice. It subverts expectations, combining hot chili and decadent chocolate, biting tajin sprinkled on fresh fruit (it took you a while to appreciate this anomaly. On Heritage Day in sixth grade, a heat-swollen day in spring, you brought a box of your favorite Mexican candies, carefully selected to include a variety of flavors and textures. One girl, blonde and thin, made a nasty face when you offered some to her. Her wrinkled nose and pursed lips cauterized into your memory.) You do not know how to wish.
  7. Pour the piloncillo over the mixture’s sleeping form. Gently fold into the staling bread and cheese so that everything is evenly coated. The cheese is pure and soft. Don’t think of a burial cloth, that white color, covering body and blood out of respect or something like shame. The cheese dilutes the pungency of the cinnamon and cloves, but the baker reveres the spices nonetheless. 
  8. Bake for 40 minutes. Ponder this superficial connection to your past. Listen to your mother tell you about your great-grandmother making this every Easter in Mexico. You never met her, nor have you been to Mexico, nor can you speak Spanish. Mull over that while the bread soaks up the syrup, permanently entangling itself with the piloncillo, body and blood. 

Serve immediately.

1My grandmother, devout, strong-willed, and decidedly independent, personifies capirotada. The dessert itself is unique, even in Mexican cuisine. When you take a bite, it’s unlike anything you have ever tasted, the texture not quite the milk-soaked, moist bread pudding we have in America. The cheese is chewy and adds a strange, savory flavor. It does not hide its outlying features. My grandmother, on the other hand, has built her life around her outlying features: exalting them, auto-apotheosis. Her streaks of sovereignty rule her very being. She came to America to live independently from expectations placed on women where she came from, and honors that goal today. She is not afraid to share her opinion on anything, tongue running circles around politics and feminism which Latin American country has the best food (her answer is always Mexico). Our blood runs as thick as piloncillo.   

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Olivia is a junior in high school from New York City, and she has been writing and creating ever since she could read. She has two dogs and two parakeets, who all battle for attention.