House Parties and Pastries

I’d never imagined that much like my grandmother, I would find myself as an immigrant in a distant land. The circumstances on which we both traveled were very different. She fled Portugal nearly a century ago to escape an upcoming dictatorship and its social and economic crisis and to look for opportunities with her husband and a toddler in her arms. I was pursuing a new phase in my adult life that included taking a leap of faith and starting a new career in another country.

A common thread between us was and had always been the love for cooking. As an adult, I enjoyed the early morning weekly trips to the farmer's market to get the best pick. The joy in simple things like sorting through the fruit and arranging them in ceramic trays on the counter. A love for cooking for myself and for others too.

The heart of a home is the kitchen, which wouldn’t be different in my own home. My countertops always had at least one tray with fresh produce and bread. The true love for cooking extends to caring for others, to the joy of having friends over and feed them, to laugh and share our favorite dishes. The only requirement to join my house parties has always been to come with an open heart. Not surprisingly, those who do so also bring something to share, to eat, or drink. I always made sure that everyone who entered my home was fed and cared for, and by the time they left, their hearts and bellies were full.

Then 2020 came, and we all know what happened. Although meeting friends in person was not an option, cooking was never interrupted. At first, those virtual parties were a novelty. We all found fun and unexpected ways to be together, and unprecedented was the word mostly used to the point that felt like a verb governing our lives.

The extra time allowed me to organize my physical space finally. I came across photo albums, letters, and keepsakes, including a little black book I started long ago, full of recipes, notes, and names. The little black book revealed distant relatives' names back in Portugal who my grandmother insisted I should reach out to. Going back in time, shortly before she passed, I was saving for a long-awaited trip to her birthplace in northern Portugal, but unfortunately, that never happened. I decided to try to find who those people that mattered so much to grandma were. After some digging, emails, and phone calls later, my efforts were compensated when I got a hold of cousins who were excited to hear from me. We held virtual family gatherings, connected through our social media, exchanged old photographs, recipes and memories. It opened the door to a part of my life I didn’t even know existed. It was a world of faces, names, and places.

The little back book was also filled with recipes long forgotten. I immediately started working on them, and an explosion of smells and flavors started to permeate the hallways in my apartment building. It didn’t take long for neighbors to notice that too, and in no time, I was distributing pastries, sweet and savory, and we were holding parties in our own private balconies, sharing food, drinks, and chatting for a few hours. It was just a matter of days before the requests start to come. What started as a neighborhood happy hour turned into an informal small business. I was placing large orders of flour with the local store, and before I knew it, I made labels, receipts and designed a logo for what became a make-shift home bakery. I called “Estrella,” a homage to my grandmother. The new enterprise was welcomed when my savings and unemployment were drying out fast.

Within a few weeks, I received a phone call in the middle of the night from a long-distance number. Apparently, some official from a small town in the province of “Trás os Montes” had tried to reach out to me for years and was finally given my number from one of the cousins from my little black book that I was able to connect with. He apologized for waking me up because of the time difference. Although this voice was foreign to me, it sounded warm and familiar. It must have been the same Portuguese dialect like grandma’s that I grew up with, or perhaps the dream quality of an unexpected conversation taking place at 3 am. He started explaining that my grandmother had left me a small property, and she planned to surprise me during that trip that never took place years ago. Barely awake and trying to make sense of what was going on, I could not help but think I was still dreaming. My face started to feel warm and wet as my tears started to fall from my cheeks, making me realize that I was fully awake and that was actually happening.

After our call, I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I headed to my kitchen, where my countertops were full of bags of flour and boxes of fresh oranges, apples, and tomatoes. Dry sausages and cheeses hang from my cabinet knobs tied up with herbs in what resembled a small deli. I put on a pot of french press, and my mind started a trip to old memories which I haven’t visited in a while. With no clear destination or linear timeline, the memories wandered through long afternoons of making biscuits, roasting chickens, seasoning bottles of extra virgin olive oil while petting the house cat, and watching my grandmother navigate the kitchen as she told me stories of strawberries that were sweet as candy and plum trees back in Portugal, that every family had an olive tree in their backyard as the source of their own olive oil, the grape leaves and chickens, the house dog, and geese that guarded the house. The thought of having a piece of that filled my heart with joy and hope.

Navigating the bureaucracy for the title transfer was surprisingly not over complicated. Then the decision of what to do with a property located so far away during these pandemic times came to me in what seemed as random as the property itself. A neighbor farmer who had been using the land to raise his cattle was eager to rent its use for a few more years.

With a healthy deposit of $20,000 in my bank account, what to do with the money seemed pretty straightforward, and "Estrella's Little Black Book Bakery" was officially born. Now I find myself happily waking up before the sun rises, putting that pot of French press on, raising and fermenting dough, making mixtures of fruits and herbs, and dreaming of days I can travel far and set foot on the land that was given to me. And yes, we are still holding those balcony parties, except that now I look up the sky, certain that one of those stars is grandma, smiling as she knows her gift to me was finally delivered.