What to "Cook" in Flores

The restaurant next to the Petenchal Guest House in Flores was tiny and charmless and grubby, with sunbleached pictures of the World Cup teams taped to the walls. Even to backpackers, this was an inauspicious place, and we walked past it in our search for good local food one night. But "good" and "local" were almost mutually exclusive for me in Guatemala, as I remain unconvinced of the charms of beans and corn tortillas. Oh, how I craved fruit (forbidden by my Lonely Planet) and milk (impossible to find).

Flores is a pretty and colorful but tiny town on an island in the middle of Lago Peten Itza, so before long we were back where we started, in front of our guest house and the grubby restaurant. This time there was a older couple seated out front: Maya, by their dress. The woman had twinkly eyes, and when she saw us approach, she smiled at us. I thought, she knows something about this place that we don't.

Even before our food arrived, I was thinking of Thailand. When the Boy had taken his students to Chiang Mai six weeks before, he had signed them up for a cooking class, and come back with tales of searching the markets for spices with the chef, and tossing unpronounceable ingredients into exotic dishes. I was enchanted, and wondered why I had never thought of that in my travels. So when the waiter came over to chat (something I loved about Guatemala), I asked him if he knew where I could learn to make Guatemalan food. Within minutes it was settled--we were to come back the next day, and the cooks would teach us. Did we speak Spanish? No. The cooks spoke no English, would this be a problem? No, in fact, it was even better. And the food, when it came, was good, heavy, but strange--there was a tang to it, something familiar but wrong.

The next afternoon, the tiny kitchen was a hundred degrees. The cooks, Olga (in the picture) and Rosa, were younger than us, cheerful, and found us terribly amusing. They showed us how to assemble burritos, and put mayonnaise on top, much to my dismay. That's what the strange taste was the night before! They microwaved some pulled meat and had me slice up an avocado. That I could already do. They showed us how to mix corn flour and water and shape the paste into tortillas to cook on the griddle. They asked us (by showing us a menu) what else we want to learn, and I realized--this is why there are no cooking classes in Guatemala. There is hardly any cooking. So far in that country I had not eaten anything that was complex or well-spiced or sauced or slow-simmered. The meats were delicious and tender, but I suspected that any meat-preparation class would begin with the words, "First, catch a chicken."

Still wanting fruit and milk, I turned to look at the shelves, and saw plantains. I pickd them up and put them into the cold frying pan, saying, "Fry?" Olga and Rosa were pleased that I chose that, and showed me how to slice up the plantain and put it into extremely hot oil. I get speckled with little oil burns. Rosa got a bowl of white goo out of the fridge and offered me some. It tasted like a combination of cream cheese and frosting. "Queso!" she said. "Name of cheese?" I asked in my best Spanish. She shrugged. "Queso." I'll never know. Freshly fried plantains with sweet cheese turned out to be exactly what I needed in Guatemala, shared with two girls who laughed at every English word we said.