Picking Up Pupusas
A Salvadorian cooking
lesson
By Lindsay Sterling
I met twenty-seven-year-old Herson
Peraza by the tomatoes at the supermarket. He was speaking in Spanish to an
acquaintance of mine. I asked him where he was from. When he said, “El
Salvador,” I just about invited myself over to his house for lunch. Well,
actually I did invite myself over to
his house for lunch. How embarrassingly forward. My only excuse is that I am on
a cooking quest to learn how to make a favorite dish from a native of every
country in the world. And I was on the cusp of completing Central America.
On his day off from managing the
kitchen at Boda restaurant, he and his sister, Erika Lopez, showed me how to cook
their favorite dishes from home: pupusas,
thick tortillas stuffed with refried beans and cheese; taquitos, pulled chicken rolled in a tortilla and fried; curtido, a salad of chili
and shredded cabbage; and salsa de tomate,
a warm red sauce.
When Herson and Erika were kids in
El Salvador, their grandparents raised them for seven years while their mom worked
in Maine picking crabmeat in a seafood factory. Erika and Herson grew up eating
their grandmother’s cooking, but didn’t learn how to cook from her because she
wasn’t fond of people being in her kitchen—“Especially men!” Herson added. On
weekends Erika and Herson liked spending their allowance going out with their friends
to get pupusas at restaurants.
Pupusas are fat tortillas stuffed with
different fillings like pork, refried beans, and cheese. When I say stuffed, I
don’t mean like a taco or a burrito. The pupusa filling is sealed inside the
tortilla itself. A pupusa is like a tortilla that’s pregnant with a refried-bean-and-cheese
baby.
When Herson was 14 years old, and Erika,
19, they joined their mother in the United States. Herson went to Portland High
School and Erika started her adult life here. The nearest Salvadorian
restaurants were in Boston, so Erika set out to learn how to make pupusas
herself. The first time she made them they were so bad she threw them away. (Indeed,
my own first attempts were lumpy, wobbly, cracked, and oozing.) Over time she tweaked
her method. Now she pats her hands expertly and throws perfect saucer-shaped
discs onto the griddle.
Herson learned how to cook in professional
restaurant kitchens. He worked for a year at the Japanese restaurant, King of
the Roll, and for the last four years at the Thai restaurant, Boda. “At some
point in the future I would like to open my own restaurant,” he said. Erika
works at Boda, too. It just goes to show, you don’t have to be Thai to cook
great Thai food. Likewise, you don’t have to be Salvadorian to cook
Salvadorian. You just need someone to teach you. As Herson sees me pick up my
fork, he laughs. I ask him what’s up. He explains. “Eating a pupusa with a fork
is kind of like eating a hamburger with a fork.”
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015
