Saran wrap stuck to the walls over the sink in the laundry room where my grandmother scrubbed Huggies baby wipes and Viva paper towels to reuse later. In the kitchen, the highest cabinet stashed plastic bags that were used to collect trash in the basket under the sink. Wrinkled Ziplocs held frozen meats inside an empty ice cream bucket in the freezer. A single drawer was filled with miscellaneous items like extra buttons, bobby pins and half-dried Bic pens that didn’t have a place of their own. When something went missing, it somehow found its way into that drawer.
These were the things my grandmother did with “disposable” American products, many of which were items my mother would bring to Argentina from the U.S.
She wasn’t just resourceful with packaging items. My grandmother, Nelida Gomez, maximized her food scraps for meals to feed a family of seven during Argentina’s dictatorship. The leftover mashed potatoes turned into ham and cheese stuffed croquetas — deep fried breaded potato balls. Stale baguettes became a custard bread pudding. Uneaten french fries were made into a Spanish omelet.
It was both an obsession and a talent to find use for what some would throw away.
And now, living through a pandemic, amidst an economic recession, hoarding is a way of preparing para las épocas de las vacas flacas, for times of thin cows.
My grandmother, known as Beba in our family, was raised with a single father. He was a cook at the same hospital where my mother was born, Hospital Alveares in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was quite the womanizer, bringing his dates to live in his home, many of whom took care of my grandmother and her older sister. The old folktales of the evil stepmother were very real for Beba. One of her father’s girlfriends had taken her out of the third grade to go beg on the streets. Beba was her father’s pride and joy, so when he found out, that girlfriend did not last very long.
Her father might have paid the bills, but Beba was the head of the house and she had one rule: no boys allowed. So when her father met a young man who came to Buenos Aires from Spain to escape the draft in WWII and was looking for a place to stay, it had to be during hours where she wouldn’t see him. He would leave to work before the crack of dawn and return to the house once everyone was asleep.
After a couple months, Beba sensed the presence of an extra body in the house and started to pay closer attention to see if she could catch the person her father had accepted into her home.
The day she laid eyes on the tall blond blue-eyed man with a thick Galician accent, it was love at first sight. That’s how Beba met my grandfather. They lived in the same house for several years, even after they were married and had three of their five kids: Victor, Miguel, Maria de los Angeles, Maria del Carmen, and my mom, Stella Maris.
Over the years, my grandfather was able to build his own hair accessory supply factory and finally moved out of the house. Back-to-school period was the peak of their season, where parents would buy hair ties and bobby pins for their daughters. Most — if not all — of the profit the factory made in that season was reinvested into the business. The employees were paid first, then supplies, then rent, and anything left over went to the household. As you can imagine, dry seasons could result in no income.
The hoarding was a coping mechanism. Even the best of times could bring scarcity in the near future. One of her phrases was pan para hoy, hambre para mañana:“You may have bread today, but there could be hunger tomorrow.”
Resourcefulness was necessary when you didn’t know what you were going to have at the end of the month.
Croquetas como las de la abuela
Grabbing a scoop of mashed potatoes with her wrinkly soft hands, my grandmother nudges a cube of cheese into the center and pushes the outer edges towards the middle shaping it into a ball. Swiftly but delicately, in a bowl of beaten eggs, she gently tosses the ball into dry bread crumbs and sets it aside to finish molding the rest before repeating the process of dunking and rolling at least three more times.
Creating a protective barrier of crust when the ball goes in the hot oil, everything inside stays intact, leaving an outer layer you can hear as soon as you cut into it and see the cheese ooze out.
These, my friend, are croquetas and they were a go-to in my family, whenever we had enough left-over mashed potatoes.
In my particular household they were stuffed with a semi-soft cheese like port salut or cuartirolo and formed into ovular shapes about the size of an older woman’s hand (traditionally, my grandmother’s).
Croqueta or croquette comes from the French word croquer, which means quite literally, to crunch. France likes to take credit for the creation of these fried potato balls, but it seems every country in the world has their variation. In India it’s aloo tikki, in Japan krokke, and in Dutch, kroket. They come in a variety of sizes from disks to spheres and can be filled with anything from minced meat like in Russia, or ham and cheese in Central America.
My grandmother would make over 40 in a sitting to feed my family of 11, including my three teenage cousins who ate like it was a buffet.
While they’re absolutely delightful to enjoy fresh out of the fryer, they are super messy to make. The mashed potatoes can get mushy, if you don’t let them rest long enough between layers. And, if you don’t have a thick enough coat, the cheese will seep through the sides and you’ll be left with an empty fried potato — which isn’t terrible, but definitely disappointing when cutting into it.
Even though they taste the best hot out of the oil, they’re also one of the few fried foods I’ll eat the next day or the day after. Is it the cheese? The carbs? Definitely the memories.
In Argentina, people live in a constant state of uncertainty. Inflation rises several times a year. Most people live paycheck to paycheck barely — if that — make it to the end of the month. Época de las vacas flacas is a common expression from a biblical verse used in Argentina to describe a time of famine. So it became a habit to save for las èpocas de las vacas flacas.
In Beba’s case, the household income was seasonal. Sick of having to depend on my grandfather for money, she found her own way to provide for her family. Beba started working at a daycare with kindergarteners where her young children could also be watched over. At the time, her eldest son was five, the middle son four, and baby Maria was threee. Little did she know that a scout would try to recruit her dirty blond blue-eyed daughter for commercials and advertising. This would become another supplementary income for the family, until her kids were old enough to manage their own wages.
By the time my mother was born, Maria had a full-on acting career and my grandmother was her manager. My mother has few memories of her oldest sister, but she remembers her mom buying her a pair of new shoes every year, saying that a good pair of shoes will last longer and then seven pairs of bad ones, because lo barato sale caro. Cheap things are expensive.
That was also a time when Beba had to make due with whatever income the factory brought. But even though business was more regular than before, Beba was the last to get a piece of the pie. Don’t get me wrong, my grandfather hated telling her he didn’t have any more money in his wallet, but at the end of the day that’s what it came down to. Probably frustrated with the rejection everytime she needed to buy groceries, Beba did the best she could with what he did provide, which also meant saving for a time when he couldn’t.
But her techniques somehow skipped a generation.
My mother didn’t adopt those customs when she came to the U.S. In her mind, she could afford to buy exactly what she needed, so why take the time to do it herself?
She didn’t want to live through her mother’s stress at dinner time. After seeing how my grandfather prioritized the business over the household, my mother adopted a new principle that she stands by to this day: in times of famine the food budget is the last thing we cut.
Between having to deal with my grandfather’s inconsistent income and the country’s unstable economy, my grandmother learned that when good things come, it’s important to make sure there is some for tomorrow, por si acaso — just in case. Because you never know if you’ll need it more then, than you do now.