It seems to me that every culture have their own rituals of passage. And not only to enter something, like adulthood, a club or a sect. There are also rituals for us, the ones that leave, the rituals of passage of the migrant. Have you ever known a Venezuelan migrant that do not owns Scanonne’s “Mi cocina, a la manera de Caracas”? I known plenty of people that living in Venezuela themselves, are always about to buy it. They talk about it, they even exchange tips to find it. After all, a book with all (and I mean all) the recipes of food that can be called venezuelan food, is a thing that all venezuelans should have, no?
Actually not.
When you get to look at the recipes, you will see that they are detailed to the point of impossibility, or absurdity. Scannone book is a little bit like “Le petit larousse ilustre”. You know that pretty much all the words are there, but the descriptions are so convoluted that they are a pleasure in themselves to be read, even though you might not be the wiser after you read it. And anyhow, it doesn’t matter if the recipes are very good. They can’t be perfect, actually. As it happens with any other traditional food, the recipes are slightly off. Of course, they have to be: your mother or your aunt would use a bit more of chilies and a bit less of sugar, and you would recognize the difference. So no, not everybody living and cooking in Venezuela owns a copy of our cooking bible.
But us migrants? We all have it.
My dear friend M., happens to live here in The Netherlands too. She is quite an impressive cook, and I hear with pleasure her own description of ideas for new dishes, or crucial detailes in known ones that I was unaware of. Also now and then she would give me a copy of one or another Scannone’s pagina, to anchor up a point as a preacher will tell tell you to go an look such and such passage in the bible. At the time she arrived in The Netherlands Amazon existed, but it was still a bit of a strange thing for me. A book via the mail? I wasn’t sure about that. So I waited for M. to visit her family back in Venezuela, and I asked her to bring me a copy of Scannone. When I asked, there was a moment, a pause that we both recognized. Now it was for real, now we knew I wasn’t coming back. So she brought one for me, which is still in my shelves, being used as canonical reference for pretty much everything that I want to cook that I ever eat in Caracas.
So today I heard that Scannone, the writer, has died. Now, for me it is very obvious that he could not die, nor that he ever will. How could he possibly? Right now, all along and across this silly world of us, there are hundreds of Venezuelans touching up a dish that remind them of home, that was described in the book. Thanks to Scannone we, the ones that left, never really left totally.
Such a man can’t die.