Love at First Soup
By Lindsay Sterling
Last weekend a friend in the
neighborhood, Marco Caceres, taught me how to make his favorite dish from his childhood
in Ecuador: sopa de pescado. It’s made
of a simple set of ingredients: white fish, fresh tomato, red onions, garlic, cilantro,
olive oil, and lemon. I was delighted to see how easy it can be to make a
fantastic seafood meal, and I was touched by the story of how Marco came to
make this soup here.
Marco grew up watching his mother
cook for his family of twelve in Cuenca, a city of about 500,000 people in the
Andes Mountains. Cuenca is known for having seventy-degree days year round, access
to Incan ruins, and stunning Spanish colonial architecture. The way his
daughter described Cuenca’s outdoor markets, they sounded like something out of
Alice in Wonderland. The coconuts are the size of basketballs. The papayas are two
feet long. And there are fresh mangos, pineapples, bananas, pomegranates,
apples, peaches, and a variety of corn whose kernels are the size of dried
plums.
When Marco
was ten years old, he took his first trip out of the mountains to the city of
Guyaquil near the coast. It was there that he tasted for the first time sopa de pescado, a tangy fish soup with
pale pink broth, studded with green cilantro leaves. As if he had shared his
love for this soup with the chefs in his hometown, soon after he returned home the
soup caught on in Cuenca and he got to eat it often.
When he was a young man studying
Andean pan flute, he fell in love with an American woman who was teaching
English in Ecuador. He felt like they would be together “for the rest of life,”
as he recalled. The time came, however, when she had to return to the United
States. He got an opportunity to play music professionally in Germany and Norway,
so he went. In Norway, his heart still broken, he secured a visa to visit his
love in the United States.
In New York City the relationship fizzled
in less than a month. He recalled telling his mother on the phone that he would
be coming back to Ecuador. His mother suggested, “Stay for a couple more months,
and then see.” He decided to take her advice. While he waited for something
good to happen in New York, he set about figuring out how to make sopa de pescado. He experimented with
different ingredients, methods, and proportions until he finally found the
combination that tasted just like home.
One day in the subway he met
another Ecuadorian musician who knew a handful of other players of traditional
Andean music. They launched a prosperous career playing live music and selling
CDs in the subway, museums, and fairs and festivals across the U.S. One woman
from France who heard their music in Grand Central Station was so captivated that
she went to see their next show at a museum, and then went dancing with the
band afterward. Marco and her got together another day. He made her soup. They fell
in love, got married, and moved to Maine to raise a family.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015
