Grandmother’s Recipe, Version Fourteen

Card 1 — 1968, blue ink, unfaded

Adobo. Soy, vinegar, garlic, peppercorn, bay. Pork shoulder. Simmer 45.

That's all of it. Nine words and a time. My grandmother was twenty-three, newly married, writing for nobody but herself, and she did not need to be told what adobo was.

Card 3 — 1974

3 cloves — Ramon says 5.

Ramon was my grandfather. This is the first appearance of another person on any card, and it takes the form of a disagreement about garlic, which is the most accurate summary of their marriage anyone has produced.

Card 5 — 1979

Do not use the good vinegar. Any vinegar. It doesn't matter. It has never mattered.

I like to imagine what prompted this. Someone asked. Someone kept asking.

Card 6 — 1981, different hand

This one is my mother's, aged fifteen, and it is a disaster. She has written the ingredients in the order she found them in the cupboard. She has spelled peppercorn three different ways. At the bottom, in my grandmother's writing, small and dry:

Not bad. Too much bay. — Ma

Card 8 — 1986

Double it. They eat like horses now.

Card 9 — 1991

Halve it.

Nothing else. No explanation. I know the explanation. My mother left for Manila in 1990 and my aunt in 1991, and card 9 is a woman cooking for two people in a house built for six and adjusting the quantities.

I did not understand card 9 until I was thirty-four and had to make a smaller pot of something myself, and then I understood it in a car park, alarmingly.

Card 11 — 1998

R. cannot have the salt now. Use half soy, add water. He will say he can taste the difference. He can. Do it anyway.

Card 12 — 2001

Ramon says 5 cloves. Use 5.

My grandfather died in November 2000.

Thirty-three years of three cloves. Thirty-three years of him saying five and her saying three, which was not about garlic and both of them knew it wasn't about garlic.

And then card 12.

Card 13 — 2009, shaky

Pork shoulder. Not loin. If the shop has no shoulder go to the other shop. This is the whole secret and nobody believes me.

Card 14 — 2014

The last one. She was sixty-nine and her hands had gone and my cousin wrote it down for her while she talked, so the handwriting is wrong, and the voice is completely right:

Soy, vinegar, garlic, peppercorn, bay. Pork shoulder. Simmer 45. Five cloves. Any vinegar, it doesn't matter, it has NEVER mattered.

Whoever is reading this: it is not a hard dish. If it is not working you are rushing it or you have bought loin.

Do not double it and freeze it. Make it small and make it often. That is not about the food.

I have all fourteen cards in a tin.

I have made it perhaps two hundred times. It is not a hard dish; she was right about that, as she was right about the shoulder and the vinegar and, eventually, the garlic.

I make it small and I make it often.

That is not about the food.