Hunting the Elusive Guanabana Juice from In the Time of the Butterflies · 26 February 2007
Food is used to nurture, to love, to sustain. In one of the first scenes of remembrance, Dedé recalls how her Mamá tells her to drink guanabana juice, that “it’s good for the nerves.”
When Minerva brings home her beau for the Day of the Lovers (Valentine’s Day), young Mate prepares a special meal for the two them, themed red in honor of the holiday. The pleasure she feels in cooking is evidenced by her excited tone, first “We’re expecting Minerva and Manolo any minute. The way I can’t sit still, Mamá says, you’d think it was my own beau coming!” and later “”Manolo just loved my cooking! That man ate seconds and thirds, stopping only long enough to say how delicious everything was.”
Alvarez doesn’t let us forget that these are young women who, apart from everything else, are dedicated to taking care of their families and to the commonplace activities that entails.
For this intermediary post, I wanted to recreate the feeling of the offhanded relationship that the girls have in the beginning of the book, where food, love, and life are taken for granted, where a simple glass of juice can be a balm for the spirit. I went out in search of guanabana juice, in part because it was used as a catchall minor remedy to the little worries in life, and in part because I couldn’t get anyone in my life to believe that there was a fruit that sounded as silly as the guanabana (it’s a bit silly looking too).
Sometimes it’s just not possible to find the things that you are looking for. I spent quite a bit of time looking for guanabana juice (also called soursop juice). I visited countless Hispanic markets (where I found myself tongue tied with three years of high school Spanish failing me miserably) in search of the mythical guanabana pulp to make my own, combed the internet, and still didn’t find anywhere I could get the juice or pulp before making this post.
Sometimes you just need to recognize what you have and make do. Sometimes you need to exult in what you do have, even if it’s not exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes you need to realize that a glass of juice, or any one thing, can’t be the remedy to all your worries, or even to the littlest worry of what you will write about for a day. So when today came and I still hadn’t found any guanabana juice to drink, I poured myself a nice rum (Brugal of course in honor of the book) and coke instead and called it good.
Searchable keywords/ Technorati tags: Dominican Food, Juice, Rum, Soursop
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