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CONNECTIONS | MAGAZINE

My grandmother taught me many things. How to cook, however, was not one of them.

I feel like a failure when I try to cook my abuela’s food. It also brings her back to me.

Portrait from Cristina silva; Recipes from keilani rodriguez; Remaining from adobe stock; illustration by keilani rodriguez/globe staff

The mixture in the cake pan sloshed around as I gave it a little shake. After three hours of baking, my flan remained a liquid, not a custard.

Friends were coming over and I had promised a Cuban feast, the kind my grandmother had made with ease and precision at every meal. I had spent hours boiling yuca and chopping garlic, cilantro, peppers, onions, and tomatoes for the black beans and meat. I melted sugar into caramel and beat together the vanilla and three kinds of milk into a frothy concoction. But somehow I had fallen short.

I studied flan recipes on the internet, desperate to figure out where I had gone wrong. And then it hit me: I had forgotten the eggs. The eggs in the flan. The eggs in the flan that made the milks turn into a solid.

Qué vergüenza. How embarrassing.

My grandmother Yolanda Seemann Calzado taught me many things, among them how to pray the rosary and recite the poetry of Cuban hero José Martí. She did not, however, teach me how to cook. And she died when I was 24 years old, before I could ask her all the questions I wish I could have asked.

Like why does her arroz con pollo taste like every good memory I have of being cared for as a child, and not just chicken, rice, and cumin? And how did she make her mojo sauce feel like the kiss of the Caribbean sun, when mine merely tastes of sour orange, olive oil, garlic, and dried herbs?

After her death, when I was a married woman living far from my hometown of Miami and the Cuban community there, I scoured the internet for the recipes of my childhood. Well-meaning friends would take me to Cuban restaurants in their cities when I visited, but the food was often inedible. The chicken lacked flavor. The fried yuca was bland. The tres leches cake was dry.

I craved lime, garlic, cumin, plantains, beans, and guava, dishes prepared with Spanish, French, Middle Eastern, Taino, and African influences.

In time, I learned to let the yuca boil just long enough, to drench the soft tubers in mojo sauce, and to set aside leftovers to make yuca fries the next day. I spent hours preparing ham croquettes — something you can cheaply purchase in every other restaurant in Miami — rolling logs of ground ham into bread crumbs and frying them. I roasted pork shoulders and created Cuban sandwiches with whatever bread I could find, because I could not find Cuban bread outside of Miami.

Friends and family praised my cooking. But I knew it wasn’t good enough for her.

Abuela never made a mistake. Abuela never needed a recipe. She prepared stewed meats, fried bananas, rice and bean dishes, Caribbean chicken noodle soup and cakes and puddings in her tiny kitchen without same-day grocery delivery or food bloggers guiding her way.

She cooked her arroz con pollo not in water but in broth she made before church each Sunday, turning chicken legs, bay leaves, carrots, and onions into magic as we slept. She retrieved sugar cane, limes, avocados, mangos, sour oranges, and pineapples as needed from the trees and garden in the backyard, and fed our souls with as much of our culture as we could stomach in a country distant from the island she called home.

During every meal, as we sat around the table, shoveling forkfuls of rice, beans, and ground beef studded with olives and raisins into our mouths, she would ask: What do you think? Do you like it?

On many days, I remember these meals and how they made me feel loved and nourished. I wish I could explain to her just how good her food was, how many hours I’ve spent chasing it in my dreams and in my kitchen.

Sí, Abuela, todo está muy rico.

Cristina Silva is the managing editor for local news at The Boston Globe. Send comments to magazine@globe.com. TELL YOUR STORY. Email your 650-word unpublished essay on a relationship to connections@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue.

Read more from the My Boston History issue:

Cristina Silva can be reached at cristina.silva@globe.com. Follow her @cristymsilva