The Secret Was a Potato

On Sunday I caught the 9:15 train with my bike and a cloth bag my iaia had handed me on Saturday night, with no explanation, holding a kilo of ground almonds. "You take it, I've got enough to carry." My iaia was going to my mother's in the car of my uncle Vicent, the one who isn't in Germany, with a tub of roast sweet potato on her lap like someone holding a sleeping baby. I had the almonds. That's how work gets shared out in my family: nobody tells you what you're doing until you're already doing it.

On the first of November, at my mother's house, we make panellets, the little almond sweets that come out every All Saints'. We don't buy them. My mother says the bakery ones taste like sweet cardboard and cost as if they were made of gold, and she says it every year in the same kitchen, in the same checked apron, like a prayer.

The floury table

When I arrived, at half past ten, the kitchen table was already covered in baking paper, and there was a plate of beaten egg, a bowl of pine nuts, another of desiccated coconut and a jar of glacé cherries in a red that doesn't exist in nature. My mother had her back to me, at the stove. She said "Wash your hands" before she said "Hello", which in her language is the same thing.

My iaia was sitting at the head of the table, on the chair with the cushion, her reading glasses hanging round her neck. She hasn't kneaded in years, because of her wrist, but she does the coating. Coating is what matters, according to her: a badly coated panellet is a bald panellet. I sat down next to her and she pushed the bowl of pine nuts in front of me without a word.

We spent almost an hour like that. My mother rolled balls the size of a walnut, dipped them in egg and dropped them into my hand; I rolled them in the pine nuts and my iaia corrected me, squeezing my fingers with hers, which are smaller and stronger than mine. "Don't squash them, it's not Play-Doh. Put them on one by one." One by one. Each panellet takes about forty pine nuts. I know because by the third one I'd started counting, an occupational hazard: it's just like counting bars of rest, except they stick.

The tub

Around noon my mother scraped out the last of the dough and started a new batch. That's when my iaia passed her the tub of sweet potato, and my mother tipped it, peeled and mashed with a fork, on top of the almonds. I stared.

"That goes in the panellets?"

My mother and my iaia looked at each other like two people who've kept a body in the wardrobe for a very long time. "Of course," said my mother. "Sweet potato or ordinary potato. Otherwise they turn into rocks." My iaia added that at home, when she was little, they used potato because sweet potato was for eating, and that my grandfather never knew panellets had anything in them but almonds, and that he died like that, happy.

Twenty-seven years of eating panellets. Twenty-seven years of saying at weddings, when the tray of sweets comes out, that my mother's are pure almond. I felt cheated and, at the same time, let in on something. Like when someone finally shows you where the spare key is.

I asked my mother why she'd never told me. She shrugged, hands full of dough. "You never asked. You'd come, eat and leave with your violin."

She didn't say it angrily. She said it the way she says the price of pine nuts. But I went quiet for a while, coating, and my iaia gave my knee a little tap under the table.

The oven

My mother's oven does know what time it is. I checked, out of habit, and felt a ridiculous pang of envy. The panellets went in at half past twelve and came out ten minutes later, golden on top with the pine nuts toasted, smelling of something I can't describe any better than to say it smelled of November. My mother brushed the coconut ones with yolk, the pine nut ones too, and left the cherry ones for last because those are my uncle's favourites and he's always late.

We had arroz al horno, baked rice, which is what you eat at my mother's when there's something to celebrate and when there isn't. My iaia told the story of the cemetery ladder, and in her version I was the scared one and she was the one who climbed. Nobody corrected her. Uncle Vicent turned up with dessert already on the table and ate four cherry panellets standing up, with his coat still on.

The tray

In the afternoon, before my train, my mother made up a tray for Marta wrapped in foil and slipped it into the cloth bag, the one the almonds had come in. "Tell her they've got potato in them," she said. "She always says it's the almonds."

On the platform, while I waited, my iaia sent me a voice message from the car. It was eleven seconds long and nearly all road noise. At the very end you could hear her say: "And next year you're making the dough."

This morning I found a pine nut inside my sock. I have no idea how it got there. I've left it on the music stand, next to Encarna's crossword, the way you'd leave a note.