The Ingredient Was Time

For about six years I could not make my mom's chicken adobo taste like my mom's chicken adobo. This is a dish with basically five ingredients. Soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves, pepper, chicken. That's it. There is no secret ingredient. I asked her a hundred times and she'd say 'you just do it,' which is the most infuriating recipe in the world. I moved to Denver for work in my twenties, which is not a place with a lot of Filipino food, and I got homesick in the specific way where you're not homesick for a person, you're homesick for a smell. Vinegar and soy hitting a hot pan. So I called her and wrote down what she said and made it and it was wrong. Too sharp. Then I'd add more soy and it'd be too salty. Then too sweet because I overcorrected with sugar she never mentioned using. I made bad adobo for years. My roommate got sick of being the test subject. I brought it to a potluck once and a guy who'd never had adobo said it was 'interesting,' which we all know what that means. When I flew home for Christmas I finally just stood in the kitchen and watched her instead of asking. And I figured out the thing she never said, because to her it wasn't a step, it was just how you cook. She doesn't measure the vinegar and soy separate. She pours them in and then she lets it sit and cook down way longer than I ever did, until the whole thing goes quiet and dark and the sauce gets thick and almost sticky. I was rushing it. I was eating it at twenty minutes. She lets it go closer to an hour, low, and walks away, and does other things, and it turns into something else while she's not watching. That was it. Time. The ingredient was time. I felt like an idiot and also like I understood my whole family a little better. Mine's good now. Not exactly hers, I think you never quite get your mother's version, there's something in the pan or the water or her hands. But it's close enough that when I make it in my apartment the smell fills the place up and I'm eight years old again doing homework at the table while she cooks. My kids like it now too. They think it's mine. I don't correct them, but it isn't. It's hers, and her mother's before that, and I'm just the one holding it for a while.