GOURMET: Let’s start in this country. Do you think that Latin food in the United States ever improves on the original?
Maricel Presilla: Well, when I serve my own version of the Cuban fresh-corn tamal to my Cuban friends and family, I don’t hear complaints. In fact, everyone wants the recipe! So the answer is yes. But cuisines lose their essence when cooks are careless, and it is true that much Latin food in the U.S. has been dumbed down. Our food, you see, is all about layered flavor and elbow grease, and each regional cuisine has a particular flavor palette. Use less fat in your cooking, play with presentations if you like, but do not alter those regional flavors gratuitously.
So how can we make sense of all the flavor palettes in Latin America?
It helps to look at culture instead of at specific countries. When the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, they carried with them memories of a world built on fusions of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish culinary traditions. They were influenced not only by the pre-Columbian civilizations they found, but also by the Africans they brought in as slaves, although we can’t speak of African cuisines being transplanted intact to the Americas. What Africans kept were general attitudes about food and seasonings. Asians (thousands of Cantonese and Hakka arrived in the 1800s) and Canary Islanders have long been a part of the mix, as have other Europeans, such as the Italians who came in great numbers in the 19th century. Every Latin American—from the potato farmer in the highlands of Peru to the Yanomami in the Venezuelan Amazon and the black matron who makes a living frying black-eyed-pea fritters in the streets of Salvador do Bahia—has been touched by Iberian colonialism.
Geography is another huge factor. Take the Hispanic Caribbean. To me, it’s more than Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. It’s a broad region defined by its mixed Iberian, Native American, and African heritage, and it stretches to the Caribbean coast of Central America and on down to Brazil.
We’re glad you brought up the Hispanic Caribbean. Can you help us sort out the cuisines of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico?
The three islands, which share the same geographic region, developed under Spanish colonial rule, which accounts for the similarities in their cooking styles. Cuba, in fact, had very strong commercial ties with Spain and was a major importer of Spanish olive oil until Castro. (Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic relied more on lard and vegetable oils.) Many of the differences stem from sofritos (cooking sauces) and adobos (marinades). A Cuban sofrito is milder and less aromatic than a Dominican or Puerto Rican one (which are both rich in cilantro, an old-world herb; culantro, a similiar tasting new-world herb; and the tiny pepper known as ají dulce), although all three rely on the long, sweet, light-green Cubanelle pepper, which is often called an Italian frying pepper here in the States. The acid in a Cuban adobo is generally the juice of the bitter Seville orange, while the other two islands rely on vinegar. Taste our big tuber-laden soups, the Cuban ajiaco and the Puerto Rican and Dominican sancochos—three siblings born of the marriage of the Taíno Indian pepperpot and the Castilian olla podrida. The ajiaco is thicker, milder, and lighter in color than the earthier sancochos, which are tinted red by achiote and taste of cilantro and culantro. Cubans living in the United States seem to be closer to Americans in their red-meat-eating preferences; they often shun tripe, stomach, and brains, which are considered delicacies by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.
You also have to realize that when Cubans left their island, they settled not only in Miami but in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and in parts of the U.S. where Puerto Ricans and Dominicans lived, like upper Manhattan and Hudson County in New Jersey. They opened the same kind of restaurants there that they created in Miami, based on the café culture so important in Cuba. So in some of the Puerto Rican and Dominican restaurants in the States, Cuban sandwiches and black-bean soups happily coexist with Puerto Rican cuchifritos (fried tidbits) and Dominican mangú (plantain purée).
Could you describe the significance of sofrito in the Latin world?
Sofrito is a medieval cooking preparation that came to Latin America with the Spanish and Portuguese. Think of it as the DNA of the Latin kitchen, carrying a basic flavor code. It’s a mélange of aromatic vegetables—most importantly, onions and garlic—sautéed in lard or oil. (The fat used determines much of the flavor.) To this, Latin Americans add pork products such as bacon or ham, herbs and spices, chiles and tomatoes, cheese, or coconut milk, according to regional preferences. A sofrito is incorporated into rice dishes, soups, stews, and braises, or it becomes a sauce in its own right, as in a Mexican mole.
Can you tell us about the different forms that corn takes?
Fresh corn is enjoyed as a vegetable in Latin America, but dried corn has many more uses, and the way it’s processed has a big impact. In Mexico, parts of Central America, and the Andes, it’s treated with an alkali such as slaked lime (cal) to remove the hulls. This is called nixtamalization (from the Nahuatl, or Aztec, word nextli, which means “ashes”), and it also affects the chemical composition of the kernels, making them more digestible and nutritious. Nixtamalized corn has a peculiar taste that reminds me of a gush of rain on hot pavement, and an earthy quality that is a seal of identity. It can be eaten in a bowl of pozole (called mote in the Andes), cooked further with various ingredients and sauces, or ground into a dough (masa) to make tortillas-, tamales, and all kinds of appetizers. While cooks in rural Mexico still make masa by hand, grinding it in a three-legged stone metate, most city people—and Mexicans in the U.S.—use preground commercial brands.
You won’t find nixtamalized corn in the more Iberian-influenced regions of Latin America like the Hispanic Caribbean, the northern part of South America, or Brazil, but you’ll see cornmeal—mostly used in porridges—and cracked dried corn, used for arepa and tamale dough.
What different beans are used in what parts of Latin America?
In my own island home of Cuba, stewed red beans are a staple in the east, while black-bean soup rules in Havana and the western part of the island. Black beans are also popular in Venezuela and in Veracruz, Mexico. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans favor pink beans and red beans as well as green pigeon peas, which came from Africa; like other African ingredients, they were brought not by slaves, you understand, but by the slave traders. Fava beans, another old-world legume, compete with native common beans throughout the Andes. Canary beans, which have a lovely golden color and are cooked with Andean peppers and cilantro, are a specialty of the northern coast of Peru. On the southern coast of the country, particularly in Ica, a pisco-producing area, the lima bean—an ancient bean named for the city in which the Spaniards found it—is preferred.
When I was studying medieval history in Spain years ago, I once cooked black-bean soup for a couple from Havana I had befriended. Not really used to cooking black beans, I used a red-bean recipe I had learned from my aunts in Santiago de Cuba. I thought my friends would be pleased. They ate in silence, and when they were ready to leave, they thanked me for my red-bean soup. Then they proceeded to give me an unforgettable lesson on how to cook black beans properly, which ended with a menacing tone and an accusing finger pointed at me: “Cooking black beans with a tomato sofrito is a sacrilege.”
What about chiles? They’re indigenous to Latin America, but much of the food isn’t hot.
Chiles play a more dominant role in regions with sizable indigenous populations, such as Mexico, parts of Central America, and the Andean region. In parts of the Andes like Ecuador, though, chiles are seldom added to food while it cooks, but instead are stirred into table sauces so people can modulate the amount of heat in their meal. In the Hispanic Caribbean, where there’s a stronger Iberian influence (the indigenous population was virtually wiped out by conquistadores), hot chiles are used sparingly because, in Spain, milder, aromatic seasonings have always been preferred.
But some chefs in the U.S. are adding chiles to Hispanic Caribbean dishes.
There are a few chefs who practice what I call cocina de autor, which can be loosely translated as “personal” or “creative” cuisine. When this cocina de autor has integrity, I applaud it. What troubles me is when it is labeled “traditional” or when a food writer comes along and holds it up as the standard of excellence against which traditional cooking should be judged. However, borrowings are inevitable in a multicultural pan-Latin context. Here in the U.S., many Latins are coming together for the first time, and we have begun to learn from one another. I know I now use more hot peppers and cilantro in my cooking than ever before. But I have not started adding them to my Havana-style black beans.
How do you see the pan-Latin culinary scene developing in the U.S.?
Visit any Cuban-owned supermarket in Union City, New Jersey, and you will find a complete selection of Mexican chiles. Go shopping at a Mexican market in Los Angeles, and you will find yuca and plantains. In South Florida, fields of yuca, malanga, and plantains coexist with new luxury condos. So the idea of a pan-Latin cuisine is no empty label. We’ve wholeheartedly embraced foods that were once the domain of particular countries or geo-graphical regions, foods such as churrasco—the generic name we have all chosen for the grilled skirt steak (entraña) doused with chimichurri sauce from Argentina and Uruguay; the Cuban sandwich, Cuban black-bean soup, the Mojito, and the concept of the Cuban cafeteria; the Mexican and Central American tortilla; and the Peruvian cebiche. Together with the ubiquitous dulce de leche, which everyone loves, these have become foods that belong to all of us. My two restaurants, Zafra and Cucharamama [in Ho-boken, New Jersey], are pan-Latin be-cause I find that concept liberating. Imagine a meal that starts with Peruvian-style potatoes in a creamy Andean pepper-and-walnut sauce, followed by Uruguayan grass-fed rib eye served with chimichurri, Cuban fried green plantains, and thinly shredded kale sautéed with some garlic in the style of Minas Gerais in Brazil—all washed down with a Susana Balbo Malbec from Argentina or a Montes Syrah from Chile. Finish with dulce de leche ice cream and Venezuelan hot chocolate or smooth Colombian coffee. At the other end of the spectrum, though, the very nature of the immigrant experience often pushes us to look inward and use food as a way to preserve our national identities. I don’t discard the idea of opening a truly authentic Cuban restaurant one of these days!