DIVERSE & DELICIOUS CUBA
Cookbook highlights country’s culinary favourites ... old and new
If there’s a single dish that’s symbolic of Cuba’s history and inhabitants, it’s a thick and luscious stew called ajiaco.
It’s made of a wide array of components — assorted cuts and types of meat, vegetables and spices. Noted Havana anthropologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández once declared, “Cuba is an ajiaco.”
According to authors Madelaine Vázquez Gálvez and Imogene Tondre, this is a fitting metaphor.
Ajiaco’s primary ingredients represent Cuba’s culinary past and feature contributions from its major ethnic groups: Indigenous peoples (local ají pepper), Afro-Cubans (yams, plantains, taro root) and the Spanish colonizers who imported pork and livestock, spices and stewing as a method.
“There’s always been an emphasis on stews and beans and wet, juicy food,” says Tondre.
“Cubans will often say something like ‘mojar el arroz,’ which means to wet the rice. Meaning you don’t want dry, white rice; that’s boring. You want juicy (rice).”
In writing their 350-recipe tome, Cuba: The Cookbook (Phaidon, 2018), Vázquez Gálvez and Tondre prioritized home-cooking classics such as ajiaco to preserve them for future generations.
A final chapter highlights contemporary takes on traditional Cuban fare, some of which are by chefs in Cuba’s paladares (familyrun private restaurants).
“A lot of the traditional recipes are not super common today, partly because there’s sometimes an issue with scarcity or they might have just been lost over the years,” says Tondre, adding that the succulent stew can be hard to find today.
“But (ajiaco is) still something people know … and some of the newer restaurants are starting to make it, which I think is great because it’s delicious and it’s very traditional.”
Vázquez Gálvez, a chef and restaurateur, has a remarkable collection of Cuban cookbooks and printed material.
Tondre says that poring over her library was key to uncovering some of the customary recipes that have fallen out of use.
“A lot of people are familiar in the sense that there’s almost this nostalgia — ‘Oh! My grandmother made that recipe’ or ‘When I was a kid, we used to eat this’ — but it’s getting lost over time,” she adds. “We wanted to rescue and preserve some of that patrimony.” Recipes adapted from Cuba:
The Cookbook by Madelaine Vázquez Gálvez and Imogene Tondre (Phaidon, $59.95, June 2018)