#16: If you asked me about cakalang rica
I would tell you it’s my favorite dish in the whole world, even when it’s so spicy it literally makes me cry. But if you ask me on a deeper level, I’d tell you that it’s the dish my Oma would make me every day growing up. The dish I’d have for dinner while watching “Jin dan Jun” with Opa on a school night. The dish I had some 20 years later after rushing home in the middle of work one day upon hearing news of Opa’s passing. The same dish on the table the day Oma moved abroad for good not long after. Through deaths, births, departures, returns, and many a change in the family, the dish remained a constant. It’s the dish that my dad’s wife would go on to perfect and turn into an admirable hustle. If my much younger siblings grow into the kind of travelers who pack sambal botol in their carry-on, whoever they introduce their mediocre bottle of sambal to on the road will have this dish to thank for raising spice-loving adults. I’ll tell you it’s a dish you’ll find at restaurants, or on your food delivery app, but few get right. Certainly none as right as the one from home.
It’s the dish I’ll think about when my grandparents’ house finally gets sold. When the dreaded but inevitable move arrives and we dispose of decades’ worth of family belongings. This home is older than I am. A witness to lives far before mine and families beyond the faces I know by name. There will come a day when the house is no longer a “saved address” on every app with a map on my phone. When the zip code I’d learned to memorize when I was six joins the pile of useless information in the back of my head. When the neighborhood printed on my KTP will come up in conversations as a marker of time, nothing beyond the context of nostalgia.
I may find myself driving past the old house then, just for fun. It may be unrecognizable. Perhaps it will no longer be standing, some other family with a shiny new home in its place. I’ll wonder who they are and if they have grandparents who tells them “I love you” as often as they tell them “don’t get fat”. Is their family lore as complicated and weird and maybe kinda fun? Do their kids grow up guilt-ridden faux-rebels? I don’t know if being there will make me sad but it will definitely make me hungry. I can see that feeling coming from a mile away. A craving in my stomach only one dish can satisfy. I’ll wonder what this new family in this new house where my old family house used to be are having for dinner? Because I can tell you with complete certainty that whatever it is will not be as good as our cakalang rica, which truly is the absolute bomb. 🌶️🌶️🌶️
P.S. Uhhhhhh yeah this post is (inspired by?) a TikTok trend I’d fully intended on joining, except in true “me” fashion I ended up taking it way too seriously and writing way more than I was supposed to. Definitely way more than I could fit on the app, lololol. I swear to god I was going to keep this funny or cool or something in between, but alas I am only ever cheesy and cringe (or something in between). I really do love me some cakalang rica, you’d think I’d have learned to make it at this point. Maybe soon. 🥴