Sofia watched her father cradle a withered olive between his forefinger and thumb. The light from the Huelva sun reflected off the land and fell through the kitchen window, sprawling itself onto their kitchen table like an inverse shadow in the dark room. His elbows were propped up, and he stared hard into the dry, leathery skin of the Picual olive.

“Mañana, habrá lluvia.”

He said it as if he were a judge sentencing August for its crimes against the land. But Sofia knew that the rain would not come. The heat was strong, resolute. And there was no wind to carry in clouds from the coast or down from the north where the summer had begun to ease. In the south, the drought in May had caused the olives to flower early. Through June and July they had not grown green. The olives bloomed only to the size of Sofia’s pinky nail and then, as though overnight, had shriveled. The heat of summer had snatched the moisture out of them and let it steam up, an immolation to the sun.

Through the months they had stared at the sky entreatingly. As weeks passed, Sofia watched the enervation in the land reflect on her father’s face – his wrinkles, now, were deep and marked ridges on the bark of olive trees. Sitting across from him, she could see that they were even more pronounced than they had been yesterday; the lines in his forehead furrowed and creased as he moved his lips silently. He was talking to himself, she thought. Or praying.

“Haré la cena esta noche,” Sofia said, hoping to snap her father out of his daze. She saw his lips stop and purse. But all he did was shift his seat to the left and hold the olive in the dust-swirl charged stream of light spilling in through the window.

~

Noonday teetered on top of the mountains. Dipping her hands into a bowl of water and garbanzo beans, Sofia imagined her mother’s hands on top of hers, guiding her fingers in peeling the skin from its bean. Her mother had taught her the importance of removing the translucent shell gently, as to leave the garbanzo whole. Sofia rolled them between her thumb and forefinger and watched as they fell to the bottom of the bowl. She sank her forearms into the water and held them in her hands; the permed shells skimmed the surface and collected around her skin.

Hija, con cuidado.

She let them go and lifted her hands out of the water, the garbanzo husks clinging to her arms.

April had taken away her mother and the rain. August had brought heat and waiting to carry away her mother’s absence, but it filled – Sofia could feel its weight in her hands and in her father’s steps on the sunbaked soil; Her mother’s death had taken away the olives and left only their shells, hanging.

Through the window, Sofia watched her own father’s hands; they grazed the branches of the trees, his fingertips pressing into the grooves of the bark. He carried bucket and bucket of water from the well to the tree.

“Bebe,” She heard him say, “Tienes que beber, amor.”

Sofia walked outside, her feet stirring up dirt and dust whenever she stepped. She followed her father to an olive tree and called after him.

“Papa,” Sofia said, “Cena estará lista en una hora.”

He turned around at her and sighed.

“Bien, hija.” He set the bucket down by the base of the tree, wiped the dust from his hands, and sat down with his legs crossed. “Ven aquí.”

Sofia knelt down by her father; a root pressed up against the front of her ankle.

“Un hombre vino ayer. Quiere comprar la casa y el olivar.” Her father coughed and looked down at the ground. Sofia listened to his breathing; it was steady, calm.

“Qué le dijiste?” Sofia felt the heat caught in her throat. It grew then shrank then grew again. She swallowed it down into her stomach. Her father looked up at the sky and tilted his head, his face a question; his eyebrows lifted and eyes sloped downwards. He is praying again, Sofia thought.

“No, hija. Yo no sé.”

~

In a pot, the garbanzos weltered in the water with two potatoes, a bay leaf, and salt.

A veces, no habrá agua, pero siempre habrá sal.

Her aunts, uncles, and cousins had always told Sofia she looked like her mother; their skin was milk and honey, eyelashes thick and dark, arching over their eyes like a curtsy. At seventeen, standing at the stove, she was her mother. But she had her father’s will – steady, patient, persistent. Sofia saw it when they both sat at her mother’s bedside through the night, when they folded her things and placed them in a chest beneath the bed, when they went to visit the grave every Sunday after mass. She felt it in the way her father carefully carried water to each tree, and in the way she brought the water in the pot to a boil, slowly. It had to matter, Sofia thought. Siempre habrá sal.

~

The sun moored itself beneath the hills. Sofia and her father ate in the silence of space.

After carrying their empty bowls to the sink, Sofia kissed her father on his cheek. “Mañana, habrá lluvia,” she said. She pressed her face against his and felt the heat of the day suffuse into her skin. There were no olives to collect, no bottles to prepare for their pressing. There was just the brittle earth and the sun and the heat and Sofia felt it through her father’s face. This is what it looks like, Sofia thought. The weariness of worry and waiting; the two of them sitting in a gloaming kitchen, sallow faces pressed hard against each other. Her father blanketed his exhaustion with a smile.

“Sí, hija. Sueña de lluvia.”

In her bed Sofia could hear her father’s sighs blowing out the candles. She closed her eyes and imagined olives, green and plump and sweet. She could taste their brine of water and salt and feel herself sucking them to the pit. She could hear the raindrops like drums beating on the earth. And she saw her mother, her father, and herself dancing beneath an olive tree’s waxed leaves to the pulse of rain.

Sofia opened her eyes, but all she could see was a ubiquitous night.

She turned her face to the frame of her window and watched midnight teeter on top of the mountains, a cloud pulling itself across the sky.

I bought dozens of ears of corn from the farmer’s market and carried them home on my back. I ate raisin fennel sourdough. I walked braless in Baltimore heat and stood in the shower for hours, the skylight casting a rainbow through the water. I sat in a sun-smoked attic barefoot with instruments and listened. I rode the bus downtown and up. I rode the bus to New York and back. I ate leftover ribeye from diners’ plates and passed around bottles of half-drunk, Spanish wine. I met a boy when I shouldn’t have. I met a boy at my doorstep, sleepy-eyed and all Tennessee smile. I snuck down South and fell in love with a boy strong with screams. I cried to a friend at Otto’s, a fork in hand to carve a path. I bought second peaches by the bushel. I ate them cold, bruised, and sweet.

Baltimore in the summertime carries with it a kindred kind of heavy heat. Cursed by and cradled in, the city heaves itself down its own streets through June, July, and August. It holds no exceptions for anyone. Soupy and sweltering, everyone is in it together.

The summer of 2014, I had started a job at Fleet Street Kitchen, a white tablecloth restaurant slipped into the Inner Harbor’s row of chains — Fogo de Chao, Hard Rock Café, obligatory Cheesecake Factory. It felt like a beacon of culinary; we sourced our ingredients from our farm twenty miles north. We poured cold water and held the ice. We served foie gras with maple banyul. It was thoughtful and thorough and something sort of sublime.

During the day I would arrive early, helping prep for that evening’s service — smoking duck breasts for charcuterie, clipping micro greens for garde manger. At night, I was support staff — hosting, bussing, assembling amuse-bouche and cutting bread for service until midnight. I worked for free in the mornings and for tips at night, just determined to be immersed in it all; happy to just be a part of it.

At 21 I was very much aware that this time next year, I would be out in the thrust of the real world. I wanted to spend this last summer teaching myself that I really didn’t need much, that saving mattered, and that as long as I was fully engrossed in food I would be happy. And I was.

My summer became a weird, food-fueled accretion, the center of which was my time at Fleet Street and orbiting around it was everything I could taste, make, consume.

I allowed myself $10 in groceries every week and to spend it only at the farmer’s market down the street from my college row house. Every week was the same — I would spend $3 on a dozen ears of corn, $1 on a pound of kale, $2 on seconds from the fruit farmer (most of the time peaches, but strawberries if I was lucky), and $4 on something new I had never tried before. I bought garlic scapes and made pesto, gooseberries which I ate by the handful and later made into jam, Cherokee Purple tomatoes so sweet I bit into them like apples. I would eat my farmer’s market finds for breakfast, devouring bowls of raw corn sprinkled with old bay. I’d lay on my blacktop roof to burn, biting into a peach in one hand, soft and sweet and cold. I would then go to work and subsist on family meal, taking its leftovers to eat on the bus ride home. The chefs would let me carry the remaining loaves of bread home and freeze them, hand them out to other students braving Baltimore’s sweltering summer.

Something in me began to shift – the way I lived, the way I talked, the way I thought and felt about food. That summer I fell in love with everything — with the corn I ate every day, with Baltimore’s weird, with riding the bus at one in the morning in my uniform, my lap stacked with loaves and loaves of bread.

That July I also met my fiancé, Tyler, at a post-hardcore show in a tiny Korean club hugged in that same heavy, heavy heat. It was only fitting that it was there and then that I dove, head and heart first, into love in that same heavy, heavy way I had with everything else around me.

I can never thank this city enough for the roots it planted within me, to the city that laid out so clearly for me these things I cherish so much. So this is my love letter to Baltimore – to its heat and its heart, pumping unhurried but hard beneath its movements and spaces that make it, truly, The Greatest City in America.  I love you, and when I return and walk your streets, I’m sure of it that I’ll cry.

Below is a recipe that embodies a lot of who I was that summer. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did making it. I made a sauce for it that of course I didn’t write down, but it had shallots and white wine, shrimp stock and old bay, crab fat and cream.

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Corn Agnolotti

Little purses of sweet corn and creamy ricotta, agnolotti is perfect in a cream sauce or just tossed with some brown butter. 

Servings 6

Ingredients

for the ricotta

• 1 gallon whole milk, not ultra-pasteurized
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 80 ml (4 Tbsp + 4 tsp) distilled white vinegar

for the dough

• 560 grams (4 cups) all-purpose flour
• 4 whole large eggs
• 8 yolks from 8 large eggs
• 2 tsp kosher salt

for the corn filling

• 4 ears of corn, kernels removed
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 2 medium shallots, diced
• 1 clove garlic, diced
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 2 1/2 cup fresh ricotta (see above)

Instructions

for the ricotta

• Fill a pot with the milk. Stir in salt, if using. Heat over medium heat until milk registers 185°F (85°C) on an instant-read thermometer. Add vinegar or lemon juice and stir briefly to incorporate. Curds should begin forming almost immediately; stop stirring as soon as they've formed throughout the pot. Without stirring, continue to hold curdled-milk mixture at 185°F for 20 minutes. It's okay if the temperature fluctuates down to 175°F (79°C) or up to 190°F (88°C), but try to keep it in that zone for the full 20 minutes.
• Line a fine-mesh strainer with paper towels or cheesecloth. Using a slotted spoon, transfer curds to strainer and let stand until excess liquid has drained away (*see recipe notes). Exactly how long to let it drain depends on whether you want a moister final product or a drier one. Do not try to pour all the milky liquid through the strainer, as this will clog it and prevent the liquid from flowing through.
• Drained ricotta can be refrigerated, covered, for up to 2 days, though it is best when freshly made.

for the corn filling

• Heat a pan on medium heat. Add butter. Once butter is melted and hot, add the shallots and cook in translucent. Add the garlic and corn kernels and cook for 5 minutes, stirring. Add the white wine and cook until mostly evaporated. Set sautéd corn aside to cool.
• In a food processor, puree the mixture until smooth.
• Fold in the ricotta and chill until ready to use.

for the pasta dough (*see recipe notes)

• On a large, clean work surface, pour flour in a mound. Make a well in the center about 4 inches wide. Pour whole eggs, egg yolks, and salt into well and, using a fork, beat thoroughly. When combined, gradually incorporate flour into the eggs until a wet, sticky dough has formed. Using a bench knife, scrape excess dough from fork and fingers. Begin to fold additional flour into the dough with the bench knife, turning the dough roughly 45 degrees each time, until dough feels firm and dry, and can form a craggy-looking ball, 2 to 5 minutes.
• Press the heel of your hand into the ball of dough, pushing forward and down. Rotate the ball 45 degrees and repeat. Continue until dough develops a smooth, elastic texture similar to a firm ball of Play-Doh. If dough feels too wet, add flour in 1 teaspoon increments. If dough feels too dry, add water slowly using a spray bottle. Wrap ball of dough tightly in plastic wrap and rest on countertop for 30 minutes.
• Meanwhile, place a sheet of parchment paper on a tray or cutting board and dust lightly with flour. Unwrap rested dough and cut into quarters. Set one quarter on work surface and re-wrap remaining dough. With a rolling pin, flatten the quarter of dough into an oblong shape about 1/2 inch thick. Set pasta maker to widest setting and pass dough 3 times through the machine at this setting. Place dough on a lightly floured work surface. Fold both ends in so that they meet at the center of the dough, and then fold the dough in half where the end points meet, trying not to incorporate too much air into the folds. Using rolling pin, flatten dough to 1/2-inch thick. Pass through the rollers 3 additional times. 
• Narrow the setting by 1 notch and repeat. Repeat once more (the dough should now have passed through the third widest setting). Continue passing the dough through the rollers, reducing the thickness by 1 setting each time until you reach the thinnest setting. It should now be very delicate and elastic to the touch, and slightly translucent. Place rolled dough onto a work surface or baking sheet lightly dusted with flour or lined with parchment paper; sprinkle with flour.

assembling agnolotti

• Fill a piping bag with a 1/2" tip with the corn filling.
• Cut your pasta dough into 3" wide strips.
• Lay out one strip and pipe filling 1/3 up from the bottom. Fold over the dough and press down, making sure to press tightly against the filling. Pinch the agnolotti (*see recipe notes). Using a ravioli cutter, roll the entire length of the pasta strip where the fold meets. Using the same ravioli cutter, cut the agnolotti where you pinched them off.
• Place cut agnolotti on a tray lined with parchment paper. Dust with flour and either place in your refrigerator (if eating with the next two days), or freeze!

Notes

• I like to keep the ricotta whey and use it to add another layer of depth to stocks, soups, and sauces.
• The pasta dough recipe is a double batch of the fresh pasta recipe from Serious Eats.
• This Youtube video is great to watch if this is your first time making agnolotti.