Intensely green, verging on chartreuse, plantains hang like
chandeliers from tall broad-leafed plants across the Caribbean. The botanical
name is Musa paradisiaca, the second word meaning “of paradise.”
اضافة اعلان
The plátano is generous, and can be eaten in all stages of
ripeness. In Puerto Rico, the greenest ones can be fried, smashed and blended
with garlic, olive oil and chicharrónes — pork cracklins — to make mofongo, one
of the island’s best-known dishes. When their peels turn bright yellow,
speckled with dark spots, plátanos can be fried and served alongside rice and
beans for that signature agridulce flavor, sweet and salty. And when they
finally become black and squishy, seemingly past their prime, their flesh can
be boiled, then blended with butter, and then pressed into a pan to make
pastelón, a casserole layered with sofrito-laced beef.
I was born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, but raised in the
suburbs outside Atlanta. My family traveled back to Puerto Rico often — not
always the case for those of us on the US mainland — and I was fascinated by
those plantain chandeliers. I lived in two worlds in my mind: a lush, loud,
exciting tropical wonderland, and a seemingly cultureless, strip mall-laden
labyrinth of subdivisions.
The Times asked me to write about some of Puerto Rico’s
essential dishes, to choose and share 10 that both resonate with me and reflect
the island’s people. It’s challenging, even audacious, to distill a cuisine to
any number of recipes, and, because of Puerto Rico’s complex colonial history,
it’s particularly difficult to describe its food in simple terms. And so I
chose to look closely at dishes that express the innate hybridity of the
culture, and celebrate the foundational techniques and ingredients that make
its food so compelling, and satisfying.
The cuisine is a culinary mejunje, or mix, of Indigenous,
African, Spanish and American ingredients and techniques. In “Eating Puerto
Rico,” food historian Cruz Miguel Ortíz explores how Indigenous herbs and root
vegetables; African plantains and coconuts; Spanish olive oil, pork and
tomatoes; and American canned foods form the mestizo or Creole cuisine
exemplified on the island. And the culinary bricolage of the island continues
to expand as a younger generation of farmers and chefs insist on modernizing
the cuisine.
“Porque es vivo,” Ortiz said. “Y simple.” The cuisine is alive,
in flux, he said, yet simple and intensely flavored. Its foundation is sofrito
— a blend of garlic, onions, peppers, and recao or culantro (cilantro’s earthy
cousin, which thrives on the island). Even in the darkest times, the smell of
sofrito sizzling in olive oil is a balm; blended with tomato sauce and rice,
its flavor conjures comfort.
Sofrito, for me, is essential. But what is “essential” is
subjective, so I believe it’s about what fulfills a need. For some of us, that
need is nostalgia. A dish may be essential because it fills your heart with
joyful memories, of smells and flavors, of your grandmother loudly playing Juan
Luis Guerra, teaching you to dance, her hair still in rollers. For others,
essential might mean nourishing to the body, or a meal that fills you ahead of
a long day of work.
The dishes below are essential to me because of the stories they
tell, the ways they embody my people’s strength and creativity, and how cooking
them has helped me make sense of the brutality of my island. As Jessica B.
Harris wrote of African enslavement in her 2011 book “High on the Hog”: “It
must be looked at in all its horror and degradation, complicity and confusion,
for it tells us where and what we have come from.”
These dishes celebrate the contributions of the tens of
thousands of Africans taken to the island in bondage, who introduced processes
like deep frying, among many other things, and who are credited with
cultivating rice, the cornerstone of the Puerto Rican diet to this day.
Fritters such as alcapurrias de jueyes — a blend of green banana and yautia,
stuffed with delicate crab — hark back to Loíza, a town on the northeastern
coast with rich African ancestry.
And then there are completely modern dishes that reference what
has always grown on the island. In pastelillos de guayaba, guava — the epitome
of tropical flavor — is balanced by crumbly, salty queso en hoja, fresh cheese,
which is baked into a beignet and delightfully dusted with powdered sugar.
Nothing ancestral here; it’s just extremely delicious, and makes use of the
island’s bounty of fruit.
Above all, these dishes exemplify a deeply creative people, who
make food that is flavorful and soul-nourishing.
What I want to suggest here is that, instead of holding European
foods and cooking techniques as the highest standards, we look to the cuisines
of islands, of places that have struggled, to gain inspiration from how they
managed to make things taste so good against all odds. This is old, deep
knowledge, and we can all learn from it, regardless of background, and find
ways to integrate this way of thinking into the way we cook.
As you explore and prepare these recipes, I encourage you to
consider the blends of flavors. That combination of yautia and green banana
with the sofrito and crab in alcapurrias is unmistakably earthy and robust,
salty crispness balanced by delicate seafood. The richness of the chicken
thighs in pollo en fricasé, simmered in tangy tomato and white wine, punctuated
by briny olives, immediately conjures Mami’s kitchen for many Puerto Ricans,
just as the smell of pernil roasting in the oven transports us to every family
Christmas and Thanksgiving we ever attended.
You may notice there aren’t many vegetables in this collection.
That is not a reflection of how most Puerto Ricans eat today. On my last trip
to the island, just as COVID-19 was setting in, I ate whole ají dulce peppers,
flash-fried tempura style, at chef Natalia Vallejo’s restaurant Cocina al
Fondo, which will soon reopen. At Vianda, I had locally sourced radishes with
grapefruit and XO sauce. At Bacoa Finca + Fogón, I was enthralled by a spread
made from local beets.
But growing up, and in the cafeteria-style Puerto Rican joints
I’ve frequented here on the mainland, the most common vegetable accompaniment
to our food is a simple side salad. Oftentimes it’s forgettable: limp iceberg
lettuce with tomatoes, canned green beans or peas, dressed with olive oil and
vinegar. But salads are the perfect pairing for Puerto Rican dishes — they balance
the richness with roughage — so I often pair these recipes with a simple salad
of mixed greens, avocado, tomatoes and hearts of palm in a cilantro
vinaigrette.
The dishes I present here were foundational to my understanding
of flavor, and everything I cook springs from them. In my conversations with
fellow Boricuas of all ages and walks of life, both here and on the island,
these were all mentioned. Above all, I love each one of these dishes, and I
hope you will enjoy making them too.
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