San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cocina Boricua
Christmas, Puerto Rican style.
Four Puerto Rican cooks — three women and one trans chef — cooked a Puerto Rican Christmas dinner at New York’s famous James Beard House last month.
As the first Puerto Rican food columnist writing about Puerto Rican food for a newspaper in the United States (at least as far as I know), I needed to be at this event. Not just to document the first trans chef to cook at the Beard House, Paxx Caraballo Moll, but to support an event that highlights Puerto Rican gastronomy.
With the help of my Instagram community, I managed to raise my money pool goal within 48 hours. I booked my flight and my room in the Lower East Side — so I could walk to Casa Adela every day — and I purchased my ticket to the dinner. I felt like I had the power of community behind me, and I was going to make it happen. I had never been to New York City, though I had followed its arts from afar for years. My teen years were spent studying the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, ingesting the poetry of Miguel Piñero, inhaling the music of the Fania All-Stars, modeling community ideals after the Young Lords. My twenties were for fawning over Nora Ephron’s Upper West Side. Nueva York was the place where young Nuyoricans contributed raw art and seething prose to the landscape. What Nuyoricans were to the East Coast, Chicanos were to the West Coast. The Nuyoricans were the closest thing I could identity to in the Puerto Rican world of ni de aqui, ni de alla.
And so, during my visit, I sought out this Nuyorico ... only to find that it seems to exist solely as a relic of itself. It’s there. But it’s immortalized in murals on 104th and Lexington. It’s there in the shadows on the bricks of the buildings in Alphabet City, where the corner of Fifth and Avenue C smells like rice and beans. It’s in Justo Marti’s black and white photos documenting Puerto Rican bodegas in Spanish Harlem, which are now in the archives of the Center for Puerto Rican studies. It’s in the cuchifritos where mangu and mofongo have become interchangeable with salami because the fondas are now run by Dominicans. It’s there, but not there. Tangible and intangible. It’s made room for new Latin American immigrant groups, adding to the salsa. But it’s not the flavor of fire, wild abandon, frustration and elation in carving out enclaves. As I explored the city, I felt like the salsa had gone mellow to be all-inclusive.
Meanwhile, the visiting chefs from Puerto Rico — Maria Grubb of Gallo Negro, Kelly Pirro of Mai Pen Rai, Natalia Vallejo and Paxx Caraballo Moll of Jungle BaoBao — had been shopping and prepping for a few days. When I saw them the night before the event, they were elbow-to-elbow in the intimate kitchen, alive with the hum of familiar informality. Each passing person helped out to ensure the toothpick held a thinly sliced platanos for the piononos that Kelly Pirro was assembling. Natalia Vallejo tested her patience with frying rice cakes in a temperamental deep fryer.
And it seemed like everyone paused to watch bartender Ninotchka Daly Gandulla make coquito, a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas drink. Glugs of Don Q rum were poured into a large cambro filled with coconut milk, cinnamon and coconut cream. Evaporated milk was supposed to be added, too, as soon as someone could track down a can at the local market. The making of the coquito meant that it was definitely Christmastime. The kitchen was full of women talking loud, talking fast, talking s—, all in a
Spanglish dialect in a campo cadence. And now coquito was being made.
In an instant, it was the closest I’ve been to my childhood Christmas holidays spent at my nana’s house. It was magical.
Puerto Ricans often start celebrating Christmas immediately after Thanksgiving (my family always got together a few days after Thanksgiving to make the pasteles), and the festivities don’t wrap up until a few days after Dia de los Reyes Magos on Jan. 6.
There are traditional foods on every holiday table: pasteles, a dough made of mashed green bananas, platanos and yautia. Pernil, roasted pork shoulder marinated in oregano and garlic. Arroz con gandules. Pitorro, a high-octane moonshine made from sugarcane, sometimes cured by adding tropical fruits (my grandma added tamarind) and buried underground to ferment. And coquito, to which pitorro is often added.
But at the James Beard House, these chefs were cooking their ambitious versions of traditional Puerto Rican Christmas classics. While guests gathered around the cocktail table to collect flutes of cinnamon-scented coquito, the waitstaff carried trays of canapes through a crowd. There were little skewers of trumpet mushrooms and microscopic coconut arepas. The most memorable canape was Grubb’s pasteles, filled with a rabbit, yuzukosho and saffron rillette and topped with a pickled Fresno chile; they were named for her mother, Barbara, who made the masa.
Then came the main courses, starting with a gargantuan prawn that waded in a shallow bouillon of sofrito broth. Pernil and arroz con gandules appeared in the form of a braised pork belly on a disc of achiotestained sticky rice with “popped” gandules strewn about. But what seemed to garner the most fawning was the dessert, the humblest of cazuelas. Cazuela is essentially a crustless pumpkin and sweet potato pie. This was a sliver of the silkiest custard in a pool of coconut and ginger cream with whiskey-soaked sultanas. That cazuela took me right back to Loiza, Puerto Rico, where a woman named Lula serves pre-colonial recipes. She cooks her cazuela on a plantain leaf, shifting it around the buren (a large flat metal cooking surface) to control the temperature and cooking speed, until it’s golden brown and smells of gingerbread.
Satisfied murmurs and raucous laughter spread throughout the dining room. There was salsa spilling out of the speakers, people were warmed with libations, there was dancing. The energy was electric.
Near the end of the dinner, the bashful chefs appeared and received the wild applause that they deserved.
These chefs weren’t Puerto Rican relics. They had cooked Puerto Rican food in New York on their own terms and a new type of Nuyorican emerged. A Nuyorican type of food where a four-hour flight can turn a traditional pernil and arroz con gandules dish into an annatto sticky rice in a sofrito broth. A Nuyorican type of food that can summon the flavors of an arcane cook re-creating precolonial foods in a barrio on the island.
These four chefs represent our ancestors’ dreams, whose sacrifices allowed us the freedoms they weren’t allowed. Our ancestors had to dilute their voices, their ideals and their food to satiate the palate of “the others” and to make ends meet for their children.
So when I hear someone like Andrew Zimmern, who insulted Chinese restaurants when he described them as “these horseshit restaurants masquerading as Chinese food that are in the Midwest,” go into savior mode and try to educate the Podunkins of the land on what “authentic” cuisine is, I remember that this is why it’s important for Puerto Ricans — and every other immigrant community — to share our own narratives.
Our ancestors might not have had money or land to leave to us, but they had stories and recipes. These recipes are our legacy. The dishes represent generations of struggle, history, love and resistance. This isn’t a food we “fell in love with” or felt the need to give it “homage.” These recipes, whether in their traditional state or evolved, run through our veins.
Reluctant to go home, some of the dinner guests lingered in the Beard garden or crammed in the golden foyer at the bottom of the staircase. And although optimism and the hope of something new seemed to be on the horizon, everyone in attendance left feeling like old friends and family. Or maybe that’s just the coquito talking.
Illyanna Maisonet is a first-generation Puerto Rican and a cook. She sometimes writes about food, too. Her column, Cocina Boricua, explores and preserves traditional Puerto Rican recipes. She extends special thanks to Alicia Kennedy and Cesar Ramon for having the insight to gather these chefs together in New York. Twitter: @eatgordaeat Email: food@sfchronicle.com