Interview with Rosalina Ticas, top chef at Sacred Heart’s Pupusafest
Every spring, Washington’s largest Roman Catholic Hispanic parish holds a big celebration to mark the day the church is named for. But this Sunday’s Feast of the Sacred Heart will be especially tasty, as parishioners have turned it into Pupusafest, an official grand festival in honor of a signature dish from El Salvador.
While pupusas have been part of the the Shrine of the Sacred Heart’s annual fiesta for many years, this year will be a particularly scrumptious affair, according to chief cook Rosalina Ticas, who says this special “Day of the Pupusa” will have more types of this traditional meal, a dish that has been part of Central American cuisine since pre-Columbian times. Ticas ticks off a list of the pupusas on the menu: beans and cheese, shrimp and cheese, pork, loroco, among others.
“Many local residents are just interested in the food…that’s why it has to be delicious!” according to Ticas, who says the pupusas are usually all gone by the end of the day and “we thank God that there’s nothing left over no matter how many people plan for.”
Cooks use the same traditional recipe every year taken from the Sacred Heart recipe collection. And, every year too, Ticas leads the kitchen operation with the occasional instruction from the Shrine’s Pastor Fr. Moises Villalta. She arrives at 5 a.m. to prepare the ingredients, cooks throughout the day along side other members of the parish, with clean up stretching into the night.
After so many years, she says she knows the recipe as if it was her own. Though it is hard work, the cooking brings her joy because it’s for a good cause, she adds. Proceeds from the fest will go to the small village of Morazan in eastern El Salvador and to help pay for the church’s programs for the poor and homeless, English classes and other parish programs, says Charles Kovatch, a church member who says he came up with the idea for the Pupusafest last year after attending the annual lobster festival at a church near Gros Morne National Park in Cow Head, Newfoundland, Canada.
The homemade lobster dinners “tasted delicious and it was so charming, it just made me think of Sacred Heart. We have such great, great cultures (at the church). I thought, ‘we can do it. We can share our gift and share it with the community,” Kovatch says. Then, he says, he went to Hola Cultura’s TamalFest DC earlier this year, which only reinforced the idea.
With its five Spanish language masses, Sacred Heart has also been at the heart of D.C.’s Catholic Hispanic community for many years. About three-quarters of its parishioners are Latino, Kovatch says, but the church also has masses in English, Haitian Creole and Vietnamese. Some people drive an hour each week to attend mass at the Byzantine-style church on 16th Street NW, he says, because of the warm and lively atmosphere. “There is always something going on there.”
Ticas has been making pupusas nearly her entire life. From a young age, Ticas’ mother would wake her up very early in the morning, sometimes at three a.m., in their home in El Salvador. She would help grind corn for their daily tortillas, she recalls. It was laborious work, but she can still hear her mother telling the neighbors: “Everything I teach her will be of use to her someday.”
“She showed me how to cook since I was bout 10”, says Ticas says, but there’s always more to learn, she adds. “You can’t learn without asking questions,” which is the way she learned to make pupusas.
Like many of her fellow parishioners, Ticas is originally from El Salvador, arriving in the United States in 1984. The Catholic Church helped her find a community and family here. Soon, she was helping to plan events much like the one taking place at the church this Sunday.
She recalls the first of these celebrations she ever participated in. A friend from the church taught her the basics. In the years since, she says she’s mastered the art of pupusa-making or at least certain secrets to making them even more delicious.
“Well prepare the meat and curtido de San Vicente,” she advises, referring to a type of relish similar to coleslaw with onion, cabbage and carrots served as a topping.
But, she says, the real secret is to make sure that the chicharro used as filling is “nice and golden when cooking,” though she also stresses the importance of measurements as key to making good pupusas. “The hardest part is defining the precise amount of chicharron and masa needed.”
She expects the festival will be a big hit again this year, even bigger given the increasing interest in the Salvadoran community.
“We are a part of a Ministry that works together for everything to turn out just right,” Ticas says. “I think that is why Sacred Heart’s pupusas are so famous, it is because we work together.”
—Lucia Jimenez
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