PUPUSAS, POR FAVOR

Food disappears at an alarming rate at Anita Hoyos’ house, a fact more amusing than disturbing to the mother of five children, ages 1 to 17. The native El Salvadoran loves to cook and is grateful for hearty eaters.

 Making Pupusas“I make a big pot of meat and vegetables” — seasoned El Salvadoran style. “By the end of the day, there’s nothing left,” she said as she prepared pupusas in her northeast Columbia kitchen last week. The kitchen is the center of activity at the Hoyos home.

Anita and her husband, Hernando, often cook the food from her native El Salvador or from his homeland, Colombia. They also experiment with Asian-Latin American-American fusions in their kitchen collaborations. “We are open to so many cultures and foods,” she said.

Among family and friends the favorite treats are Anita’s pupusas. Pupusas — pronounced pooh-POOH-sas — are to El Salvador what hot dogs are to America. The fresh, hot, stuffed masa flatbread is sold in pupuserias or by street vendors throughout the country. They are often served with a pickled cabbage, onion, carrot and hot pepper slaw known as curtido or encurtido, and sometimes with a fresh tomato salsa.

At Anita’s house, pupusas are commonly stuffed with a mild, soft cheese or with pork that has been stewed in spices for hours, until the meat is just barely fibrous. After the pork has cooked, pureed fresh vegetables are blended into the mix. In El Salvador, other popular fillings include refried beans, green plantains, minced vegetables or cheese blended with an edible flower called loroco.

Early last Monday afternoon, while Anita’s youngest boys, Henry, 1, and Leo, 2, napped and while Brant, 9, Thaeda, 15, and Mark, 17, were in school, the house was calm and quiet. It was a good time to make pupusas and curtido without interruption.

“When I make these, I usually make a huge batch. I would use two or three bags of this,” she said as she poured the masa harina bag into a bowl of warm water. She has made as many as 300 pupusas in a day, for family and Missouri friends who beg for them.

Anita, who is 34, left El Salvador when she was 17, but she didn’t start making pupusas until 10 years ago, when her mother came to visit. Together, the mother and daughter tried to duplicate Salvadoran pupusas with American ingredients — so Anita could have a taste of her culture in Missouri. After her mother left, Anita practiced until she had perfected her pupusas. She claims it took her two years to get them to “hold up” right.

Generally, she gets started with the process by stewing a 5-pound pork roast with spices. It can take six hours to cook down to the proper consistency.

For the tortilla portion of the dish, Anita kneaded the masa harina in a bowl of warm water sitting in the kitchen sink. “Not too wet, not too dry. It needs to have the right feel, a little like pizza dough,” she explained. Pizza seemed an apt comparison. Her mother often cooked Italian food for the family while Anita was growing up. “She worked for an Italian woman, who taught her,” Anita said.

As much as she savored her mother’s San Salvadoran version of lasagna, Anita admired her grandmother’s ability to make giant tortillas by hand. The grand tortillas always bring back fond memories. For two weeks each year, she and her sister left the big city to visit their grandparents in the country. “We always had to be guarded in the city,” she said. But in the country, “we were free to roam.”

My grandma would get up every morning at 4 a.m. She would break up the corn and grind it to make tortillas. She always made a big pot of coffee or hot cocoa. We ate tortillas with hot milk, seasoned with cinnamon and sugar. Then she would make breakfast. By 8 a.m. we would be done with breakfast, she would clean house and then get ready for lunch.” If chicken was on the menu, her grandma sent the kids out to chase down the chickens. “We even helped with the plucking,” Anita recalled. Those visits were “the best time of the year.”

Anita grew up in the midst of a civil war while living on the outskirts of San Salvador. She recalled seeing city buses burned after a battle in the 1980s between the military and the guerrillas. Without transportation, she remembers a time when she was walking through the city with her father. Armed soldiers once stopped them and told them to walk, hands in the air, single file.

Although as many as 75,000 people were killed in the war, Anita’s family of four survived. In 1992, the civil war officially ended when peace accords were signed by both sides at the United Nations. The same year, Anita was granted political asylum and came to this country.

After so many years of violence, she said, “My parents decided it was important for me to get out. I think everybody wanted to get out.”

Hoyos moved to California and then 12 years ago came to Columbia to be near her sister, Laura Bentley, who married a Missourian and also has five children.

Anita eventually was granted residency in the United States and is now eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship.

For the past three years, Anita has lived in a neighborhood she describes as “quiet.” She sells Mary Kay cosmetic products from her home, cares for her children — and loves to cook in her bright, roomy kitchen. Her English is as perfect as her pupusas, perhaps because she loves studying language, “looking up the words in Spanish and English.” Although she enjoys modern conveniences, such as her cell phone, she also prefers to do some things traditionally, like her grandmother. Anita’s kitchen is free of many modern kitchen gadgets. She utilizes a hand-cranked food grinder as her food processor and makes tortillas and pupusas with her hands.

Last Monday she made both cheese and meat pupusas and stuffed the pupusas queso with a whole-milk mozzarella cheese. The cheese most closely mimics the soft consistency and flavor of the cheese used in El Salvador, she explained. After grating the cheese, she kneaded it with a little sour cream until it looked like ricotta. She took a handful of dough, formed a disk, then a cup in her palm. After she pressed a bit of the cheese into the center of her palm, she folded it like a round purse and twisted the top off to form a ball. She patted the ball into a thick tortilla with both hands, brushed it with vegetable oil and placed it on the cast-iron griddle. If a little cheese escaped the masa during the cooking, she did not fret because it added crisp fried cheese to the dish. While Anita was busily making pupusas, a friend dropped by to say hello. “Save me some for later?” she asked Anita, who nodded and smiled.

In late afternoon, Anita’s daughter, Thaeda, walked through the door. “Can I have one?” “Yes,” her mother said. Meanwhile, the youngest boy, Henry, woke from his nap. Hernando set the smiling boy in his high chair and offered him bites of pupusa. While Anita finished cleaning up, everyone in the house ate pupusas. They were delicious with the curtido and tomato salsa made with freshly cooked tomatoes, peeled and blended with Mexican oregano and salt.

Before nightfall the tower of pupusas would disappear.