Mi Paladar (Part 1)
(Editor’s Note: Many of you are familiar with Cortadito, Enrique’s 2014 book about Cuban cuisine. But not many have had the opportunity to read this article, the prototype for Cortadito, which appeared in a literary journal in 2013. “Mi Paladar” is long overdue to be read and appreciated by a wider audience . It is a culinary memoir, but it is more than that: a haunting, emotional and personal meditation on themes which preoccupied Enrique during his life: Cuban and Spanish culture, sexuality, longing, sabor. )
An old house in a colonial city of the Caribbean. Like most Spanish houses, it's built close to the street; the front door opens to a narrow sidewalk. Inside, shutters are kept closed to interdict the sun. But in the center of the house there's a patio filled with potted plants, some of them the size of trees. At noon, the veranda is set with dining tables, for the widow who owns the house takes in lodgers and serves them a big Creole lunch, the day's serious meal in a Latin country. The first course is always soup, a chicken or beef broth in which floats fresh herbs, pieces of meat, and tiny lumps of tropical tubers: yuca, malanga, ñame, boniato. Steam rises from the plate, intoxicating the diners, as the soup's aroma mixes with the scent of the patio plants and the humid heat.
I gag.
We live in the country's capital, at the other end of the saurian-shaped island, but we come to Santiago once a year on a pilgrimage to Cuba's patron saint, the Virgin of Charity, whose shrine is a short drive away in the mining town of El Cobre. When my sister fell ill to a supposedly incurable terminal disease my parents prayed to the Virgin and vowed to visit her shrine every year. My sister is cured so we have driven along the Central Highway to Santiago, the last leg a harrowing descent from the Sierra Maestra Mountains. We always stay in this boarding house; we always eat our lunches on the patio. I like the trip but I dread lunch.
I'm maybe ten years old and I hate criollo food. Too lumpy. Too seasoned. Too many flavors in each soup spoon.
Back home in Havana, my mother, a great cook whose skills will only increase with age, serves Spanish and Cuban dishes. I like her food, but it overwhelms me. And just like American movies, with their flattening of style and desire and purpose, comfort me, American food comforts me. Or I think it will because, frankly, I haven't tasted it yet. I am comforted by the thought, the possibility, the promise of American food.
Single notes. Surface. No texture. To a child, 'tis a gift to be simple. Complexity, depth - these are lost on a child's palate, or, worse, like on mine, rejected. A child loves American.
We have specialties that are simulacra, or so it will come to feel to me, of American models. We have hamburgers. We call them fritas, and they are sold by street vendors who cook them on propane-fueled grills in their carts. The ground meat is heavily seasoned; its juices run red with paprika. They are tiny and served in a small soft bun smeared with a tomato sauce, to which stick little pieces of chopped onion. The patties are topped with shoestring-fried potatoes and tucked in the bun. The last frita I had in my hometown gave me a stomachache that kept me up all night.
A new American-style amusement park has just opened, bigger and more extravagant than the small Parque Colón my parents have always taken me to. The new one is called Coney Island and it has a roller coaster I never ride because I'm afraid. I don't go on the other big rides either. The Ferris wheel is as adventurous as I get - or will ever get in a lifetime.
The park has attractions. Games of skill and chance, and machines that dig into mounds of shiny trinkets but come up with nothing. And it has food stands. One of them serves hamburgers. American hamburgers. What's in the patty? Nothing. Absolutely nothing but ground beef. Catsup and mustard to smear on it. Maybe onions and pickles. No shoestring potatoes. But mostly, the one-note of plain ground beef.
American beef is so good it doesn't need seasoning, the Yankee-phile father of one of my friends tells my dad. And he drives us to a butcher that carries American beef so we can buy some already ground - our kitchen always had a meat grinder – and make our own hamburgers. It's the fat in the beef that gives it flavor so it needs nothing else, my friend's father tells us. We are in awe of things American and I think my parents are already thinking of emigrating, so we believe him and buy the ground beef. I certainly like these burgers better than fritas.
Then one day I'm at the house of a school acquaintance. We kids are in love with American movies and American music; I listen only to the radio station at the end of the dial playing the most wonderful new beat, rock and roll. And we love English, which we study in school - I'm good at it and speak to each other with great affectation in front of other kids. I'm about twelve. The home where we have stopped is very much into American food. They offer me a dessert. Blueberries, from an American can. Topped with whipped cream, from another American can; with this one you bend the spout and the cream gushes out in a perfect foam.
I have never tasted blueberries. Didn't know blueberries existed. Never saw cream come already whipped from a can. It's all so marvelous. So American. I want this, more of this, lots of this. I want to live in a country where berries are blue and cream is whipped inside a can. And where these uncomplicated flavors exist.
Our own fruits are daunting. Papayas, which in Havana we call fruta bomba because papaya is the street word for female genitalia. Mamey, which is like a brown-skinned avocado with a similar big seed, a black one, inside, but the flesh is red and the flavor is sweet and tangy. Guanábana, which looks like what you'd get if you crossed a green apple with an armadillo. Tamarind. Mamoncillo. Anon. It's not just the papayas that look like genitals, these are all hypersexualized fruits; next to them, peaches and apples appear virginal. And taste them. Heavy with enzymes, tropical fruits stimulate the salivary glands. I don't think at the time that sex will taste like these fruits, but I will know it later, I will know that it tastes exactly like these fruits.
Not blueberries. And certainly not blueberries from a can- one day, hiking in Maine, I will taste wild blueberries, but by then I will no longer be a child and I will be living with a woman whose sex I have tasted. The first blueberries and canned whipped cream soothe me, and I was born to be soothed.
On one of our Santiago sojourns we make a side trip to the town of El Caney, renowned throughout Cuba for its fruit. Frutas del Caney is how some Havana vendors advertise their fruit, and I think there's a popular song with that name. We are going to taste the legendary frutas in their hometown. When we arrive we find few if any fruits. Few if any fruit stands, for that matter. And what little fruit we find are pathetic. The good ones are exported to Havana or the U.S., my parents conclude. Still, we are here so we must bring something back. We pick a big dark brown pod that we've heard has an unparalleled flavor but also an unparalleled stench.
It's called cañandonga, a word that already sounds disturbing. Caña is cane and the ndonga suffix denotes grossness, vulgarity. This is gross cane or cane that smells gross. Do we open one to confirm the legendary flavor, the legendary stench? I think we do but my memory is vague. I know we bring some back, possibly give it all away, except the one big cañandonga pod at home for a long time, never opening it, preserving it as an icon, a power item of sorts, speaking to visitors about its mythical status.
Cañandonga is about as far from blueberries in an American can as one could get. Its very appearance, that of an old machete sheath, is aggressive. Its presence in my home confirms my prejudices and my desires.
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What is Cuban food? In his seminal work from the early decades of the twentieth century, Fernando Ortiz, father of modern Cuban intellectual life, famously declared that “Cuba is an ajiaco.” He was referring to a boiled pot of Caribbean root vegetables like cassava and taro, as well as African imports like ñame (a Caribbean yam), corn, green plantains, dried beef, chicken. In Ortiz's metaphor, the great Cuban fusion is here, beginning with Indian foodstuffs – ajiaco comes from ají, an Indian word for chili, though, as Ortiz points out, the fusion begins when Spaniards replace the hot ají with their sweet bell pepper, to this day (incorrectly, I believe) called ají in Cuba. Spaniards also replaced the meager animal protein of the Caribbean (snakes and rodents) with their more substantial Eurasian domestic meats. But that's not all. Africa expresses itself through produce like yams, while French and Chinese immigrations contribute herbs and spices. In the end it all boils together for some time and we get Cuba. Or at least, the Cuban flavor.
The Spanish quotient is, more than the Indian, the strong base of this and all Latin cooking. And that base, according to Cuban-American food writer Maricel Presilla, is medieval. For as modern Latin writers, such as Cuba's own Alejo Carpentier and Mexico's Octavio Paz, have observed, Spain retained its Middle Ages into the modern era. Presilla identifies Spanish kitchen ways that are essentially medieval, such as marinating all meats before cooking them. A steady Spanish immigration to Cuba, well into the twentieth century, reinforced the Peninsular presence in Cuban cuisine, always modulated by the fusion of cultures and by geographical factors – the tropics. Today, I would argue, Cubans, certainly those from the diaspora, who have more access to various foodstuffs than those in scarcity-racked Cuba, dine on Spanish caldo gallego, from the Peninsula's northwestern corner, more frequently than on Fernando Ortiz's archetypal ajiaco.
Yet, these are not my concerns as a preteen about to set out for the northern territory, the land of blueberries and hamburgers.
My American quest intensifies in those years right before our immigration to the U.S., which would happen in December of 1956. They are marvelous years. Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante set his masterpiece - he insisted it wasn't a novel - Three Trapped Tigers in the hip modernist Havana of the period. The characters in his book, which I would read a full decade later, are what we kids would've liked to be, including their slipping into speaking English, mostly lines from American movies, to impress the ladies they were with (they weren't impressed) and each other (they were). Even though I'd been born and raised in colonial Old Havana, by the '50s we were living in Vedado, which was a wooded area back in the nineteenth century where misbehaving slaves were taken for summary beatings, but later was where the Cuban oligarchy built their mansions when they grew tired of the inner city, like a Havana version of Philadelphia's Main Line. I live in no mansion but in one of the many middle-class apartment buildings that have sprung up all over the quarter. I go to a private Catholic school in Vedado and have my first romantic crushes, unrequited, in the parks of Vedado.
On the ground floor of the modern building we have moved to, there is an American-style coffee shop, a counter with stools that sells wondrous new things, like grilled cheese sandwiches.
White square bread, pan de molde, has always been around in sandwich shops; in fact, it's an option for the original “Cuban” sandwiches, though they are not called that in Cuba any more than fries are called “French” in France. But pan de molde is more like French pain de mie, more textured than Wonder Bread. The latter has just arrived in Havana via a new American institution: the supermarket. It amuses me now to think that supermarkets were trendy once upon a time in my life, and that going to the supermarket was a thrilling experience that the new Cuban middle class indulged in. But so it was. A chain called Minimax has opened in certain upscale neighborhoods, where one can buy American canned and frozen foods, including, of course, the canned blueberries that have enthralled me, as well as Reddi-wip and other overpriced items my parents try to dissuade me from throwing in the cart.
The cart itself and self-service shopping are alluring novelties. In fact, the very notion of self-service is alluring. Cuba, like the rest of Latin America, Southern Europe, and actually most of the urban world, is a service society. A struggling middle-class family like my own has domestic help. Not the army of nurses, nannies, cooks, gardeners, maids, and governesses of the oligarchy, but a woman who lives with us and helps my mother keep house and watch over us. This is a necessity because my mother works full time, a necessity in itself if we are to sustain a middle-class lifestyle. In an affluent European country a family like ours would have had an au pair, but domestic help is inexpensive in Latin countries, so that's what we have. My parents are furiously egalitarian and unflinching left-of-center in their politics, so our criada, as a maid is called, does not wear a uniform (the horror!) nor does she take her food in the kitchen. She is not unlike an impoverished cousin or aunt one takes in, and does housework, not because that's how she pays for her keep, but because that's what women are supposed to do in a traditional society.
It's not our criada, but my mom, my dad, my sister, and I who make occasional treks to the Minimax. This stuff is expensive. But, oh, so new and marvelous. TV dinners, wow! Chicken pot pies. My mother, who all her life would try anything in her kitchen, learns to make chicken pot pies, probably from a cookbook. They are certainly tastier than the ones at the Minimax, but I think they are too heartily seasoned, have too much flavor. It's the bland frozen kind I crave. These tastes of mine distress my mother, who, rightfully, finds them degraded and degrading. Why, for example, would I want to take home moros y cristianos, Cuban black beans and rice cooked together, from the deli at Woolworth's, when she makes such amazing moros at home? The answer, which I cannot, nor would I dare, articulate is because it's precisely the tastelessness of this proto-fast-food Cuban dish that I crave. These moros have been Americanized by their very passage through the Woolworth's deli, and that is precisely what rocks my young palate.
Woolworth’s is my temple. In my very early teens, its toy department feeds my addiction to model airplanes, which in retrospect I suspect might also have been an addiction to the heady vapors of the glue used for fitting the plastic pieces of a B57 together. But even before I become a model airplane (or glue) junkie, Woolworth’s is a side benefit of another addiction: cartoons. Every Saturday afternoon a movie theater in what I would now call downtown Havana runs a cartoon matinee, with a heavy dose of my favorites, Tom and Jerry. Plus I get my mother all to myself. I am a young Marcel longing for maman.
Afterwards, she takes me to Woolworth's lunch counter, where I always order the same: a chicken salad sandwich and a chocolate ice cream soda, which, without having to be asked, they have the good sense to make with chocolate ice cream. Even today I will have Proustian flashbacks when I eat a chicken salad sandwich with crunchy iceberg lettuce on white toast. But it's the sodas I love, their intoxicating mix of cream, sparkling water, and chocolate. Ice cream sundaes I first taste at a shop next to another downtown movie theater, where I go with my parents on weekend nights, spoiling their evenings together I now understand, to see first-run American movies. The ice cream is vanilla, but that is only the base. Dripped all over it are two sauces, chocolate and marshmallow, and it's topped with a generous mound of whipped cream on which sit pieces of walnut, which spill down the side of the sweet mound. The flavor is divine - I love chocolate - and very intense.
These American treats come to me from the same place as the wonderful American movies I love. From some magical land of Oz. I will one day visit England and taste its truly awful food before the culinary revolution made rock stars of Brit chefs. And I will understand, because it's explained to me by an English intellectual I befriend, how the Industrial Revolution turned the sensuous feasts I find in a Fielding novel into such tasteless horrors as tinned potatoes. That very revolution made its mark with even more force in the States, begetting the plasticky tastes that delight me as a kid. And the British penchant for overcooking vegetables will translate into the mushy veggies of the American heartland, until Julia Child teaches her compatriots to cook comme il faut.
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Food is culture and all culture is embedded in history. But that history is not yet taught in my classrooms, either in Cuba or later in the States. How history interacts with what I put in my mouth is something I do not even consider. I am a child, unsullied by knowledge. I know what I like. And much of it comes from the “cruel and brutal north” Marti warned us Cubans about.
As I begin to reach adolescence, my ardor for model airplanes cools, and I now go to Woolworth's for another passion. American music. This is the heyday of Cuban music. The great Beny Moré is all over the radio waves in Havana, where, without air-conditioning, open windows turn the streets into a movie with a tropical soundtrack. And Celia Cruz, who is regularly on television - another American marvel that has us Cubans hooked. Still, I could care less. I want to hear music in English. Most of all, rock and roll. Across the big avenue where my father works in an office, there is a Woolworth’s with a record department that plays nonstop American 45 RPMs. Teens older than me hang out there, wearing blue jeans, another American beauty, or slacks without pleats. I want to be like them. Cool, a word I don't yet know exists.
And a new American food is sweeping the city. Pizza. Nominally Italian, but truly American. Or Italian/American, a mix that I conceive of as two very modern cultures, never mind Italy's ruins of antiquity or its Renaissance. Italian movies are competing with American ones, and, in fact, surpassing them in allure. The Hollywood bombshells, like Marylyn Monroe, are being outdone in erotic pull by curvaceous creatures whose sexuality is far more explicit. And competing with the rage for blue jeans and plain-front pants, there are now to be seen on the streets of Havana tight Italian suits and light Italian shoes. Some Italian songs, like Arrivederci Roma, are running along American tunes in America's own hit parade, and we are hearing them as well.
Pizza is part of this rage for things Italian. We take to it enthusiastically - and will continue to do so; today there are still pizzerias in Havana, and there are some in Miami that advertise “Cuban pizza.” Of all the hungers of my Havana years, the yen for pizza will remain with me forever.
American burgers and ice cream sodas and upscale supermarkets and blue jeans and rock and roll. Italian movies starring women bursting with sexuality. Young men strolling in slick suits and shoes. Pizza. Havana of the '50s. La dolce vita cubana.
Even though we are still living in a service society, the appetite for American modernity finds another object of desire. The self-service cafeteria. This is truly revolutionary, the idea that you help yourself - or ask someone behind the hot plates to help you – instead of being waited on. So American. So modern.
Like the self-service supermarket, these spots open in upscale sections of Havana. Many Cubans of some means are well acquainted with the U.S., for they were often sent to school there. Not my family. To us, these emporia are supposed to be representative of the more perfect scene up north. Cubans we know who have traveled to New York speak of the Automat, where, beyond self-service, a kind of magic allows for money inserted in a slot to morph into freshly made food - or that's how I conceive it. Curiously, given what would happen later, it is not Miami we who crave modernity want Havana to become. It is New York. In the '50s an apartment building of thirty-two stories is built in Havana. We call it a rascacielos - a skyscraper.
There is another suave modernity I get glimpses of. It's an ice cream and sandwich shop called El Carmelo, where I go after school to buy comic books in English - they cost twice as much, twenty cents instead of ten, but I struggle with this language I love and, of course, feel the cachet, or illusion of cachet, these American imports accord me. But my family seldom if ever goes there. They are aware of class differences and how out of place they'd be among the club swells and society ladies. Plus it's too expensive for us. In spite of our awe of all things American and of our growing hope of emigration, we are thoroughly Cuban. And Spanish.
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My maternal grandmother is Spanish. She married her first cousin, both from the same small town in northwestern Spain and from middle-class families. It's not poverty that sent them to the New World, but my grandfather's ambition and taste for adventure. My grandfather came to hacer América, as Spaniards call it, emigrating across the ocean to get rich quick in the land of opportunity, which for Spaniards was not the U.S. but their former colonies, particularly Cuba. Not my granddad. With no real head for business, he died young and penniless, though I think having lived a colorful life - he was a ladies' man and my grandmother told me she rued the day she married such a handsome lad.
Abuelita - as I always called her, for I only remember her aged and wrinkled, her long white hair up in a bun, but as spry and energetic as a young girl - she was the greatest cook I've ever known. My mother was awesome in the kitchen. I'm no slouch. But we both always agreed she topped us, and we strive sometimes to approximate the flavor of her cuisine, this from a woman who never read a cookbook, made her food on a coal-fired stove, and was poor and had nine children to feed. My mother tells me that Estrella - for that was her name, Star, although that glamour was mitigated by her thoroughly common maiden name, Pérez - would go to the butcher, in the days when butchers butchered, carving a steer carcass into cuts of meat. Although Cubans eat tripe, which we call mondongo, it was not sought after, so the butcher would throw away the cow stomach. My grandmother would hustle it for free, then go home and cook a marvelous tripe dish, seasoned with capers and olives.
For abuelita was earthy. I remember watching her kill, bleed, and skin the rabbits that one of her sons, who made a living from the tiny truck farm he owned outside the city, brought her. Then she'd make a rabbit fricassee the taste of which I've never in my life enjoyed again, or anything close to it. My mother worked two jobs, the only way my parents could afford the middle-class life we were aspiring to, but they did not bring in enough for a criada just yet. So I was shipped off to one of my grandmothers' apartments to be watched. Estrella lived on the rooftop of a building in Old Havana, in a very modest apartment with curtains for bedroom walls and oilcloth on the kitchen table where we ate. There was washing hung out in the big common roof patio and, of course, my uncle's rabbits dripping blood into a bucket
Though I've been and am finicky and easily repulsed, I was not troubled by the dead rabbits. Nor, least of all, by Estrella's tale of how blood sausage was made in her native Asturias. It was this story that fired my passion for gastronomy, meaning not just for food but for talking about food, leaming how food was made, reveling in the culture of food.
My grandmother would describe how in the time of the matanza - the slaughter of farm animals - pig's blood was boiled down with the pig's bones until it thickened into what could be fit inside casing to make morcilla, the blood pudding of her native Asturias, and the meat cooked in the region's important bean soup, fabada asturiana, made with big lima beans called faves. Estrella's storytelling skills captivated me. To this day I love blood sausage, not just Asturias's morcilla, bur morcillas from Argentina, Colombia, Puerto Rico, never mind the sublime boudin noir of France. I love all sausage, really, but my taste for morcilla is positively vampiric.
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Cuban cooking is heavily Spanish. Even after Spain lost the island in the Spanish-American War, immigrants from the former metropolis, like my own grandparents, kept crossing the ocean - Estrella pregnant with my mother. From Estrella and my mother's stories I know my grandfather was a sensualist. "We never had money but there was wine every day at the dinner table," my mother says at my own dinner table, where her father's grandson, who is also without funds, pours wine every day. And his love of good food and my grandmother's skill made a dent on the other side of my family. On my father.
My paternal grandmother, Cuban for many generations, was, according to my parents, a terrible cook. I wouldn't know. Here I am, at her table, enjoying a chicken fricassee that my mother would say "is mostly water." Maybe it's because she has made it with love, with love for me, her favorite grandchild, that I find it delicious and comforting It's a typical Cuban/Spanish dish, the chicken cooked in a sofrito of onions, green peppers, garlic, and tomatoes - and all that water my mother scomed - until tender, and served with white rice. With my fork I mash the potatoes into the rice to produce a kind of seasoned mush. I can think of nothing finer. For the rest of her life, my grandmother, who like most of my family moved to Florida, will insist on making me chicken fricassee. Maybe it's the same childish reflex that makes me favor American or Americanized food over my mother's intense cuisine. The blandness. A mash of potatoes and rice flavored by a very watery broth is basically baby food.
In truth, my grandmother only makes one dish really well: masitas de puerco. This is an old Cuban peasant dish, possibly from the same provenance as the Asturias morcilla my other grandmother tells me about. In Cuba, when the pig is butchered, some of it is cut up into smallish bits, which are marinated in sour orange juice, garlic, and onion, and then fried slowly in lard from the very same pig until cooked through and tender. The masitas (little meat bits) are allowed to cool in the cooking lard and then stored as such. In France, this process is called a confit and meats thus cooked and stored are a staple of cassoulet. In the tropics, the preservation of meat is a tricky business, for it's summer all year round. This one works. My grandmother keeps the lard-preserved masitas in a glass jar, and when ready to serve them, she fries them again in the very same fat. They are really quite good.
Then there's arroz con pollo. It's one of the signature dishes of the Cuban menu, but truthfully, it's really Spanish The Cuban version is not colored with saffron, which is too expensive, but with annatto seeds. Otherwise, it's the Spanish sofrito, rice and, of course, chicken. Served for company, the casserole in which it's cooked is topped with asparagus, pimiento, and petit pois, all out of cans. Cuban cooks will do something heretical to foodies. Instead of draining the can juices and rinsing the vegetables, they will add the liquid to the arroz con pollo. I admit I like it. There is a version of this dish called arroz con pollo a la chorrera (dripping rice with chicken) that is very, very moist, not quite a soup like its cousin dish, Puerto Rico's asopao (literally "soupy"), but pretty wet. This dish is finished with a whole bottle of beer and in some recipes I've seen some wine and even rum. No need for cocktails here.
My paternal grandmother, whose name is Concha but I call her madrina because she's also my godmother, makes arroz con pollo, typically bland. Estrella makes it too and it's delicious. And my own mother also makes it; of course, it's one of my father's favorites, though not mine. It is, again, the intensity of flavor. Estrella's cooking is hardly bland, but something about it hits the right spot, even with my childish palate. Mom's I simply don't like for quite some time. I suspect there is too much tomato, sometimes I wonder if it's the bay leaf that overwhelms the flavor. But these are an adult's conjectures over a remembered taste sensation. Perhaps. though, it was simply that she was young and only beginning to cook, while my grandmothers, the good cook and the bad, were veterans of the kitchen and fixed dishes unself- consciously, instinctually. As with a musical virtuoso during a performance, there was no activity in the frontal lobe of the brain. Only moves that had been done over and over for years. Only that sacred moment we call art.
Still, if someone was not impressed at all by my paternal grandmother's cooking, which he had to eat every day at home, it was my dad. Then he met my mother. She was. from her photos and my childhood memory, a true beauty. But it was the food at my mother's home that clinched the deal. Invited to eat at his girlfriend's house, my dad found culinary delights he had never imagined. And knowing the young woman he had fallen for was in the kitchen, he never left. I owe my existence to the good food at the de Llano home and its marked difference from the same old fare at the Fernández's.