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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. Nothing ancestral here it’s just extremely delicious, and makes use of the island’s bounty of fruit.Ībove all, these dishes exemplify a deeply creative people, who make food that is flavorful and soul-nourishing. 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.
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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.Īnd then there are completely modern dishes that reference what has always grown on the island. 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. On the island, there’s an entire stretch of highway through densely forested Guavate - La Ruta del Lechón - dedicated to pork made with precision by families committed to the craft. Take pernil, the coveted garlic-and-herb-marinated pork shoulder that is traditionally slow-roasted whole over coals.
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They are stories of creativity and tradition, blending colonial ingredients with ancestral cooking techniques. You see that story in dishes like yuca con mojo, a humble celebration of the root vegetable that was once the cornerstone of the Taíno diet. These recipes tell the story of that spirit - of an Indigenous Taíno population believed to have been exterminated, but still living in the mitochondrial DNA of thousands of Puerto Ricans. Because while much has been done to subjugate and disrupt Puerto Rico, its spirit remains. The more I study the impact of colonization on bodies and ecosystems, the tremendous violence that occurs when monoculture replaces biodiversity, when enslavers replace Indigenous cultures and cosmologies with their own, the paradox of loving a place as difficult and complex as Puerto Rico becomes clearer. I am a journalist, oral historian and professor of food studies in North Carolina, and, in these roles, I look closely at the global scale of imperialism, and investigate similarities among island cultures. 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.” 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. For others, essential might mean nourishing to the body, or a meal that fills you ahead of a long day of work. 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. But what is “essential” is subjective, so I believe it’s about what fulfills a need. 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. 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. 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. Despite the fact that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, those on the island have long struggled with inequities that can make life there extremely difficult. For her, Puerto Rico is chaos, rife with machismo, economic instability, crumbling infrastructure and bad memories. My mother, in fact, hasn’t been back to the island in 11 years. But we don’t always love the places we’re from. It’s where my heart lives, where my mind wanders at night when I can’t sleep.