The Ballard Bridge is closed for construction again this weekend, which quiets down the neighborhood and Brewery District. Today, I passed the same unhoused man three times: once at Fred Meyer, once on the corner of Market and 15th, and once near Gemenskap Park.
El and I go to Obec for a beer and grub from a Salvadoran food truck. She notices a slaw dish, curtido, served with pupusas and wonders if it originates from Europe.
The conversation turned to Adolph Eichmann, a nazi who was responsible for the deportation and death of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews. After the war, he escaped to Argentina, so that is why we thought, perhaps, escaping Jews and nazis may have settled in El Salvador -hence the cabbage.
Curtido’s origins date to the Indigenous Pipil and Lenca tribes, who made curtido to ferment vegetables and preserve foods before refrigeration. Various vegetables are used, some influenced by Spanish colonizers over the centuries. Cabbage is a modern ingredient influenced by European settlers in the last century.
In 1960, Eichmann was captured outside his San Fernando home, a town outside Buenos Aires, and brought to justice, his SS tattoo surgically erased from his body. A Nazi scar remained.