By Easter Sunday 2021. The first real gathering in a year. Not the pandemic Christmas with its open windows and its masked compromises — a real gathering, a warm gathering, a spring gathering where the door is open to the April air and the April air is mild and the house is full of people who have been apart for twelve months and who are together now and the together is so ordinary and so extraordinary that the word itself has changed weight, the word together now means something it did not mean before March 2020, the word together is now precious in a way that only loss can make a word precious.
The table: me, Eduardo, Mami, Sofía, Miguel Jr., Jenny, Lucas (almost three, verbal, opinionated, a Delgado in every way), Isabella (nine months, crawling, tasting everything, beautiful). Rosa and Carlos drove up from New Haven. Ten people. The table seats twelve. Two chairs empty — David and James, in Brooklyn, unvaccinated, FaceTiming from David's kitchen where he is making pernil on the same schedule as mine, two pork shoulders roasting ninety miles apart, connected by a phone screen and a recipe and a son who learned from his mother.
I made the full Easter spread: pernil, arroz con gandules, habichuelas, tostones, ensalada de coditos, flan. The food was not different from any other holiday. The food was the same food I have been making for thirty-two years. But the eating was different. The eating was — I do not have another word for this — holy. Ten people at a table eating food that a woman made with her hands, after a year of eating apart, after a year of food left on doorsteps and babies met through windows and mothers held at distance. The eating was communion. The eating was church. The eating was the sermon and the prayer and the response, all of it, in one plate of pernil.
Mami sat at the head of the table. She was confused about some things — she called Carlos 'Eduardo' once, she asked where David was three times — but she ate everything. She ate the pernil and the rice and the habichuelas and the flan. She ate with the appetite of a woman who has been eating alone for a year and who is, for this afternoon, not alone, and the not-alone was visible in every bite, in the way she held the fork, in the way she looked around the table at the noise. The noise. The blessed, holy, beautiful noise of ten people eating together. More garlic, she did not say. She did not need to. The garlic was perfect. Everything was perfect.
Before the pernil came out of the oven, before Mami took her seat at the head of the table, before Lucas decided the tostones were his and only his — there was a moment where Rosa handed me a glass and said, we made it, and that was the toast. If I could bottle what that afternoon tasted like in its first ten minutes, before the food, before the noise, it would taste like this: guava and coconut and a little rum and the sweetness of something you almost lost. This Guava Coconut Rum Cocktail is what we raised before the prayer, and every time I make it now, April 2021 comes right back to me — the open door, the April air, the ten of us finally, finally in the same room.
Guava Coconut Rum Cocktail
Prep Time: 5 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 5 minutes | Servings: 2
Ingredients
- 4 oz coconut rum
- 8 oz guava nectar (chilled)
- 2 oz coconut cream
- 1 oz fresh lime juice (about 1 lime)
- 1 cup ice cubes
- 1/4 cup toasted shredded coconut, for garnish
- 2 lime wedges, for garnish
- Pinch of salt
Instructions
- Prepare the glasses. Moisten the rim of two rocks glasses or lowball glasses with a lime wedge. Press the rim into toasted coconut to coat. Fill each glass with ice and set aside.
- Mix the cocktail. In a cocktail shaker, combine the coconut rum, guava nectar, coconut cream, fresh lime juice, and a pinch of salt. Add a handful of ice.
- Shake well. Seal the shaker and shake vigorously for 15—20 seconds, until the outside of the shaker feels cold and frosty.
- Pour and garnish. Strain evenly over the prepared ice-filled glasses. Garnish each with a lime wedge and an extra pinch of toasted coconut on top.
- Serve immediately. Enjoy while cold — this one goes fast at a full table.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 215 | Protein: 0g | Fat: 4g | Carbs: 24g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 18mg