The First Rice

A mortar of volcanic stone, hollowed out by hand, doesn't get used the day it lands in the kitchen. First you cure it. You pour in raw rice and you grind. For a long time. Until the stone stops shedding sand. That rice is not for eating. You throw it out.

I sat with that idea longer than it deserved: the first thing a new stone grinds was never meant to feed anyone. It's meant to purge it. You work empty, on purpose, on something that doesn't count yet. And the stone loses a little of itself doing it — a few grains of sand, a handful of dust. That's the price of it turning good.

The hollow isn't even. The tool that made it wasn't even either: these mortars are cut out of a block of basalt with another rock, for hours. Nobody signs that kind of object. All you know is that one hand dug it, and after that hand, many others wore it down.

A finished mortar isn't a smooth one. It's a mortar that has eaten. It keeps the garlic, the cumin, the chile ground into it — not the exact flavour, something lower than that, a base note that rises the moment you drop an avocado in. You never wash it with soap. You rinse it, you brush it, you leave it to dry in the sun. The next day, the first thing you crush in it already tastes of yesterday. That's its memory, and it's also its job: the two don't come apart.

I think we confuse two kinds of clean. The one that removes the sand — necessary, without it you break your teeth. And the one that scours until the stone smells of nothing at all. The first makes the object usable. The second makes it useless.

A stone scoured white is a clean stone, intact, and dead. It tastes of nothing. Nobody notices right away — it takes a sauce, one evening, to understand that something is missing and that you'll never know what.

What I keep from all this is not a lesson about me. It's the rice. Nobody remembers that first rice: it fed no one, it ended up in the bin. And that is exactly why it did its work.