Oona Patrick
TOSTA MISTA/MIXED TOAST
On my first trip to Portugal, I ate tosta mista, or mixed toast, nearly every day because it was the only sandwich I knew how to pronounce. The mista distinguishes your order from cheese toast or ham toast—it says mix it up, this big spender will have both ham and cheese today. It’s a plain old grilled ham and cheese, but I don’t think of it as the same recipe anymore. Tostas mistas have been transformed for me by their name and locale, and improved by the quality of their ingredients: freshly baked bread or a flattened papo seco roll, smoked ham, and biting raw-milk island cheeses.
I ordered my first tosta mista at a café with red plastic tables by the gray stone waterfront in Ponta Delgada on São Miguel. It was slow to appear, and I began to regret it. Then it landed abruptly at my elbow, giving off a whiff of butter vapor beside my half-drunk coffee, the server already gone.
The sandwich had been pressed flat, toasted golden, and sliced on the diagonal. It sat on squares of wax paper. It wasn’t dripping with cheese; this wasn’t about the dominance of cheese like at home. The ham slices matched the thickness of the cheese. I sensed there were unseen standards at work, standards I didn’t know.
After that first order, tostas mistas became my compromise meal over years of travel. There’s comfort in being able to parse out the ingredients of such a simple dish. You could make it yourself, if the kitchen were suddenly abandoned by the cooks.
I didn’t know that day that my father’s family had originated within the city’s onetime codfishing neighborhood whose remnants lay yards from where I was eating outside a mini-mall. Then, all I had was the name of the island, which I’d found in old records on Cape Cod. My now Anglicized surname, and my heavy dark hair, blowing into my eyes in the wind as I ate, had come down from this side of the family. Even my dad’s skills in fishing and sailing and cooking seafood were of that neighborhood. All I knew about it was that it had been cut off from its waterfront, its harbor filled in to build a highway.
*
I am mista myself: half Portuguese and half Anglo. In mista I hear fragments of English: mist, mix, me. And it is what I always am, in the eyes of New England, if New England could be said to have a gaze of its own.
On my first day at a new school in ninth grade I sat cross-legged on the floor of a converted mansion near Boston. Women in purple and blue suits and gold brooches asked each new girl to talk about where she was from, and what that place meant to her. I told them that I was from a Portuguese community, that we had a strong work ethic, and I hoped this was a trait I could take away from there. I remember how the golden women sighed, and how one gave me a lingering smile she didn’t give the other girls. I regretted saying it.
Years later, when I gave a friend a ride from New York to Cape Cod, we ended up at dinner with the owner of his guesthouse. I’d mentioned that I had local family, but he hadn’t heard. He assumed I was a New Yorker and launched into a stale spiel about his life in hospitality on the Cape.
Somewhere during the man’s monologue, I realized he was saying that, as for the Portuguese community here, he and his friends “didn’t mix with them.” He wrinkled his face in disgust.
My body went cold. He seemed to intend this as advice—for me. I wanted to overturn the table and shout, “You’re mixing with me right now!” but I spared my friend a scene. He was looking down at his meal and said nothing. I gulped down air and anger.
The worst part was that I felt an old sense return: that the man was right. That it was a mistake to mix with that side of myself. That not only had I been hiding it well, but that I should continue, so that no one would be upset.
*
The test of a good tosta mista is how it all comes together under the heat and pressure. There are mistas that come apart, and there are mistas that feel fully merged. It’s in the joining of the cheese to ham. All the interior parts accept each other.
No one can see it, but something has changed me in my travels in Portugal. I can identify my own makeup, my own ingredients; I know where each came from. My mind has gradually stopped rejecting the separate parts of myself.
Taste and memory changed for me at that red café table, with the adventure of the afternoon spread out before me. Fueled by the simplicity of that sandwich, the one I knew how to say. The one I had finally been able to appreciate, after overlooking it in its overcheesed versions at home. To appreciate the fineness and antiquity of this bread, ham, and cheese is to say that mixed toast is good in all its parts.
There’s butter on my hands and on the napkins, thin as vellum, pulled from a red-and-white plastic dispenser. I get ready to walk again; I stand up and brush the spiky crumbs off my lap. I head uphill over the calçadas, and I’m shimmering with oil down to my soles. My way in this world smoothed by the knowledge of one simple order and one now familiar meal. Maybe I’m ascending to the poet Antero de Quental’s park, where he spent his final moments. Maybe I’m wandering to the edge of town, to see how far it extends. Maybe I’ll walk the old neighborhood streets that once led straight down to the sea.
Oona Patrick earned an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington and now works in publishing. Her writing has appeared in The Common, Hinchas de Poesía, Salamander, and elsewhere. She is the coeditor of the anthology Behind the Stars, More Stars: The Tagus Press/Disquiet Collection of New Luso-American Writing, and guest edited an issue of Springhouse Journal featuring women writers in translation from Portuguese. She lives in Brooklyn and works on the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon every summer.
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