Written July 22, 2010

 In El Salvador, at the end of the chicken bus route, about 1.5 hours away from San Miguel, lies the small canton of San Jeronimo.  It is there that my daughter, Jordan, is a Peace Corps volunteer, and the place where I was introduced to Beatriz.  Beatriz, 22, lives with her mother, a 9 year old sister and her 99 year old grandmother.  Her uncle lives in a house next door.  San Jeronimo is a “remesa” village, where relatives live in the states and send money back each month.  They live pretty good here compared to other areas.

Her kitchen is fairly well equipped with a stove and a refrigerator.  These are items not usually found in many homes in El Salvador.  It is decorated in the typical El Salvadoran style, with colorful tablecloths and wall decorations.

Beatriz is a well educated woman in El Salvador.  She finished high school , which is extremely uncommon, and is not married, which is REALLY uncommon.  The university costs too much, so she’s decided to stay and live with her family in this small canton.

She tends the chickens and makes corn tortillas.  She makes about one hundred every other day and has been at it since she was eleven.  She is either making the tortillas from scratch, or warming them up on a toaster “plancha” on the stove.  Tortillas can take up a majority of a woman’s day in Central America.

Tortillas take up much time, but also lots of wood for the fire.

There is quite a problem with the lack of trees in El Salvador and tortilla making contributes to the tree problem, believe it or not.

A fire is built in some type of iron or heat proof container.  Many of these fires are right in the house, obviously with much ventilation.  A “comal” sits on top of the fire.  A “comal” is a gigantic iron skillet-with-no sides apparatus that is curved and shallow.

When I arrived at Beatriz’s cinderblock house, she was ready for us.  She had already made the dough for the tortillas, which consist of cornmeal and water.

She places this beach ball sized dough on a rock with legs called a “piedra”, which means rock in spanish.

There is a pan of water beside it.  She expertly measures a small amount and makes a ball.  She kneads the ball of dough back and forth between her hands until she is ready to start shaping it into a round.

With her left hand on the bottom and her right hand on the top she begins to flatten and expand the disc.  It is very important, apparently, to rotate the disc toward you and not away from you, which I was scolded for many times.  Apply pressure to the top while shaping it and move it with the bottom hand.  It’s always important to have the correct wetness as well.

This is as complicated as it sounds.  My hands seized up after making about eight of these little monsters.

The best part of the day was when grandma started laughing hysterically, pointing and saying in Caliche, “She’s learning, she’s learning, she’s learning…..”

It was so funny to her that I’d never made a tortilla, like I was some sort of freak.

In all of her 99 years, she’d never met a woman who didn’t make tortillas.  Jordan joined in the tortilla making, so that took the pressure off.

Jordan had learned to make the thicker tortillas from another family in the west of the country.  Corn tortillas in the east/oriente part of El Salvador are larger “mas grande”  and thinner than in the west/oxidente.  The ones in the east are thicker and about the size of your palm.  Personally, I like the thinner ones better.

Once the disc is the right size, then you wet your left hand, place the thick disk into it and start slapping it and twisting it with the other hand.

Another way to do it, is to slap it back and forth between your hands.  I picked this way, due to the fact that I liked to tear them the other way and couldn’t quite get it right.  Once the disc is about as big as a DVD, you put it on the comal.

Beatriz greased an area of the comal with a scrap of someone’s denim jeans dipped in oil, and placed the tortilla on it.  After about two minutes, she flips it with her fingers.  To hell with spatulas.  Another two minutes, the tortillas start to puff up and she removes them the throws them into a large plastic basket with holes.