The Family Table: A Celebration of Home, Family, and ‘A Love That Remains’
Readers share their treasured recipes
Submitted by Cara Colon-McLauchlan, Raleigh, North Carolina
Rice and beans meant home to my dad. No matter the occasion, they were his way of celebrating the place he knew and longed for always.
As a child, I grew up listening to the stories of tenacity from his homeland of Puerto Rico. His memories of losing everything during the Great Depression and selling food in the streets were hard to imagine as an ordinary American kid. For him, banding together as a family wasn’t simply a nice idea, it meant survival. Each sibling before him worked hard, saved money to go to college, then found a job in order to send money home for the next one to do the same. This pattern repeated over and over until it was his turn, the youngest child of nine children.