Working Conditions

“Could I make the dessert for tonight?” I asked Carmen. We were hosting yet another dinner party.
“What were you planning on making?” she replied.
“A pie, with nuts.” My true plan was a tart with maple cream and a pecan-pie filling except with walnuts, but seeing as pecan pie doesn’t exist here, that explanation wasn’t going to translate well.
“Well someone will probably bring some sort of dessert, a trenza or something like that. But another night,” Carmen said.
I was disappointed: I’d wanted to show off my cooking skills. I’ve been on a roll, between the éclairs from a few days back to the chili-chocolate vegan cake and the pizza I baked for a lunch with friends yesterday. I had been looking forward to testing out this recipe of my own creation – instead, I’ll be making rice with peanut sauce, also good, but I made it just a week ago. “Could you pick up some ginger at the store?” I asked Carmen this morning.
“Why?”
“It would be really good in the rice dish,” I explained.
“But you didn’t put it in last time, and it was wonderful!” she said. I appreciated the complement, but didn’t know how to explain that I would have utilized ginger last time, I just didn’t have any.
Back to the pie idea.
“So you wanted to make something like yesterday?” Carmen asked, referring to the cake.
“No, something with dough [I motioned to the pie pan I’d brought out] and nuts on top.” There is a fatal flaw to the Spanish language: the baking vocabulary is very limited. First off, a verb for “to bake” doesn’t exist. I’ve been using “hornear”, from the word “horno” for oven, which literally means “to bake” but isn’t actually used.
“So what do people say?” I’d asked Carmen.
“Oh, that they’re going to make a cake, or algo así,” she’d answered. Or at least I think that’s what she said. Another difficulty, for me, is that the word she used, “pastel”, means “cake”, “pie”, and “pastry”. However, since pie as something sweet doesn’t really exist here, it more refers to quiche. The other options are similarly ambiguous: “tarta” means “cake”, “pie”, and “flan”; “caramelo” doesn’t just mean “caramel” but can also be used for any candy. The word for pudding, “postre”, also means “dessert”. Of course, I’m being a bit prejudiced: I’m trying to apply Spanish words to English desserts. Walking into a pastelería here, the labels for the gorgeous pastries are incredibly specific. This morning, I ate cabello de ángel, and Thursday afternoon I tried my first palmero. The first was baked by my abuela (and she must teach me someday!); the second, however, was bought, not homemade.
And purchasing seems to be the method of choice for desserts, pastries, and bread. Seeing as I wanted to make my own pizza dough for lunch yesterday, I needed to buy yeast. Another vocabulary problem for me: the dictionary said that yeast was “levadura”, but baking powder is also “levadura”. What I didn’t know, until I finally found yeast half an hour after commencing my epic search, was that in Spain at least, yeast is “levadura del panadería”. First I enquired in the small grocery store near school, where I found cocoa powder but not yeast. They told me that the only place to get yeast was at a bread shop. I walked to the nearest panadería and inquired there, but they told me that bread shops didn’t sell yeast, but the big supermarket would. I then walked to the big Corte Inglés, a department-store/supermarket chain whose largest location is 5 minutes from school and just as many stories tall. I was first led to the baking section, where the supermarket lady showed me the baking soda. She sent me to the bread section when I clarified what I was looking for (but not before a woman with a basket of items overheard me attempting to describe what I was looking for and came over to “help”.)
“I’m sorry, Spanish isn’t my first language,” I had explained, after saying that the levadura I was looking for was “alive” and “for bread”.
“Have you bought this here before?” the supermarket lady asked.
“Of course she hasn’t!” intervened the shopping woman. “She’s a foreigner!”
The bread lady sent me to the “specialty foods” section, where I found gluten-free baking powder, brewer’s yeast, and nutritional yeast. Before resigning myself to the fact that I’d have to make another dish for lunch, I asked one more supermarket person. She led me to the section that the first lady had shown me, reached up to the top shelf, and handed me exactly what I was looking for.
“Muchísimas gracias!” I thanked her. And the pizza came out perfectly. In fact, it rose exceptionally well. I make it the night before, and after letting it rise for an hour, wrapped it tightly in plastic wrap, as directed, and stuck it in the fridge.
When we arrived after school, very hungry and ready for lunch, I opened the refrigerator to take out the dough. It had broken through the plastic wrap and overflowed in a rising frenzy! No problem. We peeled the plastic wrap off of the rest of it, rolled it all out, added vegetables and spices, and placed the pizzas in the oven – which I think was at the equivalent of 350 degrees F. The oven only has a few numbers: a line, then a centimeter, then 170, then another line about a centimeter away, then 210…and no ready light. I never really know what temperature the oven is at; however, everything so far has come out well, so I must be guessing right.