Lost in Translation

Last night my friend Andrew was passing through so I offered to make pumpkin soup and cornbread for him for dinner, if he brought me some cornmeal and red pepper. He said it would be no problem and picked up a box of ‘maicena’ and a packet of red pepper. When he arrived I put them on the kitchen counter.

At dinner time, I was simultaneously cooking soup, making cornbread batter, and catching up with Andrew about life. When I opened the box of cornmeal, instead of being the grainy, yellowish stuff, it was a fine, very white dust. I was confused, and we looked at the box for awhile, trying to figure out what this stuff was. The only thing listed in the ingredients was a Spanish word that I didn’t recognize that had ‘corn’ as its root. Sometimes ingredients in Panama look different than they do in the States. Salt is courser, sugar is not white nor brown but something in between, and red pepper is named for the Afro-Antillean culture that stereotypically uses it, ‘black pepper’. So I was willing to forgive this cornmeal for being different.

We concluded that he must have bought some kind of corn flour instead of cornmeal, but that since I was halfway through making the batter and the store was closed, we could use it anyway. So I added 2 cups to the mix.

The batter tasted bread-like and it smelled like cornbread while cooking, so I thought it would be ok. However, it was a nightmare to remove from the pan and had a very weird, dense texture. It was rubbery and super white. We were very perplexed but cut it up to eat with the soup anyway.

Second bite in, Andrew says, ‘it tastes kinda like play dough,’ and the light bulb went off in my head. I suddenly recognized the texture, smell, and consistency of that powder before. I’ve made play dough several times as a kid and the main ingredient was…OH NO.

CORNSTARCH. Maicena.

I essentially made baked play dough bread, and it tasted just like it. The only thing it lacked was fun colors. We laughed about it for a long time and then gave the remainder of the “bread” to my new four-legged canine roommate Mango.

Second languages, man. They’ll get ya.