Diasporican Read online

  In 1898, after almost four hundred years of Spanish colonial rule, Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain to the United States following the Spanish-American War. The colonial reshaping by the United States focused on instantly monetizing the island’s year-round fair weather by producing more valuable crops on an industrial scale. Money, money, money, moneyyyy…mooooneyyyyy. For decades, experiment stations, as they were called, popped up all over the island, dabbling in plant propagation and determining which crops would fare better in various locations. In 1910, sugarcane planters built an experiment station in Río Piedras (adjacent to San Juan) that was taken over in 1914 by the United States–enforced Board of Commissioners of Agriculture. This station was of considerable importance in plant introduction work with the creation of the Jones Act and the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, which imposed onerous restrictions on domestic maritime trade. And because most things (water, produce, medicine) come to Puerto Rico via ship, the Jones Act was spilling out of people’s mouths during Hurricane Maria. It was an act that fucked with how things work in Puerto Rico long before the devastating hurricane.

  The Jones act requires that any vessel engaged in the commercial transportation of goods between two ports within the United States be (a) owned by U.S. citizens and (b) registered under U.S. flag. To be registered under U.S. flag, a vessel must be built, although not maintained or refurbished, in the United States. However, under the Tariff Act of 1930, if a vessel undergoes maintenance or repairs under non-emergency situations in a foreign country, the United States imposes a 50 percent duty on the work performed abroad. Additionally, the U.S.–flag registry requirement triggers another law that requires the U.S.–built vessels to be staffed by a crew primarily consisting of U.S. citizens.

  In short, the Act has four basic requirements for a vessel engaged in coastwise trade: that it be (1) owned by the United States, (2) built in the United States, (3) repaired in the United States, unless the carrier is willing to pay the tariff penalty, and (4) crewed by citizens of the United States. The historic justification for these onerous restrictions touches on both national security and commercial interests. Hell, most of the grocery-store chicken sold for consumption in the United States doesn’t have to follow these strict guidelines (a lot of that chicken is bred in the United States, processed overseas, and then flown back to be sold in stores)! How the fuck are you gonna impose these restrictions on an island in the middle of the ocean and not on rubbery-ass, frozen, Super Bowl chicken wings?

  Besides its politics, another colonial reshaping took place when the United States occupied Puerto Rico: new dietary habits. United States’ comestibles made such an impression on generations of Puerto Ricans that cheddar cheese and ketchup would appear in places they had no business turning up, like on top of pasteles—our traditional tamale-like dumplings made of green bananas, plantains, sometimes yuca, sometimes rice, and always filled with a slow-cooked meat stew. I don’t eat ketchup on my pasteles, which take hours to make and require multiple hands. It could possibly be one of Puerto Rico’s oldest precontact recipes. I can never figure out why anyone would want to ruin that hard work and the essence of a pastel by squeezing ketchup on top—a sort of colonial Stockholm syndrome.

  My grandparents came to Sacramento from Puerto Rico in 1956. So, my grandma didn’t adopt many of the gastronomic influences that the United States had on Puerto Rico; if we had ever added ketchup to her pasteles, she’d have lost her fucking mind. Many people ask, “Why’d your family choose the West Coast/California/Sacramento?” Like other Puerto Ricans during the great migration in the 1950s, my grandparents left the island to seek bigger opportunities. (There were also rumors about my grandpa’s decision to split from the island; political tensions were mounting during a nationalist movement for independence.) Unlike most Puerto Ricans, they bypassed the East Coast. A great deal of my nana’s family lived in Philly, including her sister, my titi Rosa. (According to Titi Rosa, she and my grandpa dated each other for a while. How they broke up and he decided to marry her fourteen-year-old sister, my nana, is a little foggy.) Anyway, why would he want to move to a place where some of his skeletons lie? While the information about the familial love triangle is direct from Titi Rosa’s mouth (may she rest in peace), the rest is my own theory.

  My mother, Carmen (my mami), was three years old when my grandparents arrived Stateside, landing along the muddy banks of the Sacramento River. They bought a house in Oak Park, a historically diverse neighborhood that is now undergoing aggressive gentrification. They lived parallel lives to the Mexicanos with whom they worked the fields and lived alongside. And soon our food and language came to reflect that. My grandma would make handmade tortillas and menudo on Sunday mornings, and I never questioned the Puerto Rican-ness of her cooking.

  Oak tree, Rancho Llano Seco, Butte County, California.

  Left: Northern California foothills; right: Piglets, Rancho Llano Seco, Butte County, California.

  At 3:55 on an April morning in 1981, when the thick fog made its advectional creep into the valley, leaving the grand oak trees mere silhouettes, I was born at Sutter Memorial Hospital (now demolished) in Sacramento. I grew up in a tiny one-bedroom casita on the corner of 37th and Wilkinson in the Avondale neighborhood (now also demolished) of South Sacramento. My generation rode bikes, gambled Pogs, smoked candy cigarettes, played in fields, drank Clearly Canadians, found food stamps on the street, wore acid-wash overalls (with one strap up and one strap down), and bought cigarettes for our elders with handwritten permission notes. All of it was okay as long as your ass was on the porch by the time the streetlights came on. If I heard Mami’s two-finger whistle reverberate on the horizon, it was too late for redemption. Famously, she told me, “Whether you’re five minutes late or an hour late, it’s the same ass whoopin’, so make it count.”

  If you don’t know much about Sacramento, there isn’t much to tell. It’s the capital of California. A cultural wasteland. A dust-bucket town that may give birth to creative types but doesn’t nurture them. And it’s only a matter of time before they must flee or fail. One of the greatest things about Sacramento is its surrounding bounty of fertile farmland where some of the nation’s best produce flourishes. The area grows 80 percent of the world’s almonds and 100 percent of the United States’ commercial almond supply. The dusty backroads of Northern California are emblazoned in my memory. My mom worked the fields when she was young and would later become a nut sorter on the processing line for Almond Growers, a company now known as Blue Diamond. I consider myself lucky that I know how almonds are harvested. (A machine shakes the shit out of the trees, bringing the nuts to the ground, where they’re raked into rows and scooped up by a “pick-up” machine.) Above all, I’m fortunate to have grown up with some of the most beautiful crops in the world readily accessible in my backyard—persimmons, walnuts, pomegranates, oranges, Meyer lemons, grapes, wild blackberries, and more.

  Sacramento is promoted as one of the most diverse cities in the nation, but it’s incredibly segregated. I did not grow up in the Lady Bird version of Sacramento. I did not grow up on the wide tree-lined avenues of Midtown or the Fabulous Forties, as the neighborhood of grand homes east of downtown are called. I grew up in the unincorporated county of South Sacramento, a place that often feels forsaken. It was a neighborhood where you could tell what time of year it was by the activities being performed: cluster mailbox break-ins meant it was income-tax-fraud spring, drive-by shootings were for summer, aggravated battery came with autumn, and robbing season ruled winter. It was a working-class part of town consisting of a diverse immigrant population and a dining scene that reflected it. The smell of charred chiles and cooking tortillas and the sound of a wooden pestle pounding against a kruk would escort you on your evening walks home. All smells and ingredients that would inevitably end up in my Californian–Puerto Rican, or Cali-Rican, cooking style.

  And that’s why this is not a Puerto Ric
an cookbook. This book is for the Diasporicans—the 5.5 million people living Stateside who continue to cook the food of our homeland. This is for the tribe of Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá (“not from here, not from there”).

  Peach blossoms, Twin Oaks Farm, Placer County, California.

  Clockwise from top left: Empanada de cetí, El Nuevo Guayabo, Arecibo, Puerto Rico; Adoquines, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico; Longaniza and morcilla plate, El Rancho de Don Nando, Naranjito, Puerto Rico; Diasporican pantry provisions.

  Cooking Traditions and Flavors

  There are a few habits and terms to which our people subscribe. They may be superstitions. They may be cautionary techniques learned along the way from a time when certain procedures were essential due to a lack of refrigeration. Either way, here’s why we do what we do…and don’t do.

  Washing Meat

  This technique requires a person to run their proteins (fish, chicken, goat, pork, and beef) under the running water of a faucet or partially submerge in water in the sink, essentially giving the protein a bath. Some people will go a step further and use vinegar to “clean the meat real good.” The vinegar isn’t always a bad idea because it can help to tenderize some of the tougher cuts. And I do rub my poultry with vinegar. Pero, I don’t “wash” my meat. However, I do pat it dry with a paper towel so the seasonings can better adhere to it. If you feel like washing your meat is keeping you closer to your ancestors, wash on, Sis.

  Washing Rice and Why the 2:1 Ratio Is Bullshit

  In California, rice grows in water patties that are fertilized with the shit of migrating birds. Then the rice is processed, polished, and sometimes stored in silos in large facilities. Depending on where you get your rice, it can also contain pebbles and other impurities. I think Puerto Ricans wash their rice for these reasons way more than to remove the starch. It could also be a method that’s a holdover from the time when they mostly used short- and medium-grain varieties, which would be ultra-sticky unless you removed some of the starch. I wash my rice twice. I allow running water to pour into the bowl of rice, submerging the grains. I give the rice a couple of swishes with my hand and dump the water from the bowl, using my hands as a sieve to capture any strays—the same way that I watched my mother and grandmother do it. Not all the water will be removed, but when you get ready to add the rice to the cooking vessel, use your hand to add most of it and then drain the remaining water from the bowl. Throw the rest of the rice into the cooking vessel.

  And the 2:1 Eurocentric ratio most of y’all have been taught is a fucking lie. I knew it was bullshit when they told me in culinary school, “If you use this ratio, you should be fine.” The ratio depends on the type of rice and the texture that each culture prefers. Hell, some Asian people will also tell you it depends on the weather the day that you’re cooking the rice.

  Soaking the Beans

  I don’t remember Nana or Mami ever soaking their beans. Not overnight. Not for a few hours. They placed the dry beans, onion, garlic, and ham hock directly into the pot and let simmer for hours. Never once did they remove any of the original liquid (no dumping of the “soaking” liquid allowed).

  Frying Sofrito

  Most Puerto Ricans tend to add sofrito to the heating oil as the first step of a recipe, just as one might add spices to the oil to allow them to bloom. The pungent sofrito kind of gets lost and subdued along the way in the cooking process. It’s my own personal preference to add the sofrito toward the end of cooking because it contains fresh cilantro, and I like that fresh herb flavor to pop! I treat it as I would pesto. Sometimes, if I’m cooking for a Puerto Rican, I’ll add the sofrito to the oil for ceremony and toward the end for flavor. Putting the sofrito in first reminds me of the start gun at the Olympics—sofrito is the pop that lets everyone know the event has started. But it’s the sofrito added at the end that wins us the gold.

  Peeling Guineos and Plátanos

  For any recipe, you’re always going to peel guineos (unripe green bananas) and plátanos (starchy big bananas) the same way. Removing the peel without wearing gloves might turn your fingers black—you decide whether to glove up. Cut off the stem and the bottom tip. Piercing through the peel down to the flesh but being careful not to pierce the flesh too deeply, drag your knife down the natural grooves of the peel, from top to bottom. Slide your thumb under one of the peel slits, separating the peel from the flesh. You may have to occasionally use your knife to remove the peel. This is a more difficult way to peel them, but it ensures that your guineos and plátanos remain firm.

  Another way to peel guineos or plátanos is after soaking them in hot water. Use a pot that you do not care if it becomes discolored, because sometimes the sap of the guineos and plátanos will blacken the edges of the pot as well as your hands. Bring a pot of water to a boil and then turn off the heat. Make the slits in the peels and place, still in the peels, into the pot of hot water and let sit for 5 minutes, then remove and peel. (I think this technique softens the fruit, which I don’t like.) My nana and mom never used the hot-water trick; they just peeled the raw fruit and placed the exposed interiors in a bowl of salted water to prevent blackening.

  Empanadillas versus Pastelillos

  There are hundreds of Puerto Ricans prepared to throw hands if I call empanadillas empanadas. But that’s what empanadillas are and they originate from the same cuisine. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to take one look at this deep-fried pastry pocket, filled with meat and sometimes crab or a sweet offering, to recognize its Spanish ancestor, the empanada. Depending to whom you speak and on which part of the island, the empanada is called an empanadilla if the dough is sturdier and the decorative seal is rope-style. It’s a pastelillo if the dough is delicate and flaky and sealed with fork tines. By the way, it’s called a taco if it’s trifolded like a letter. There’s also a puff pastry dessert that has neither a rope- nor a tine-seal that is called pastelillo de guayaba.

  And if you were my Puerto Rican grandma living in Sacramento during the 1950s, you would just use a tortilla in place of the dough and deep-fry it for your own version of a taco. Although that would be called a chimichanga. I don’t pretend to understand these things. Much like if you’re trying to flex that one year of high school Spanish you took and order “salchichas” from a Puerto Rican food stand or restaurant, you will not receive sausages but rather Vienna sausages. Oh, Puerto Ricans.

  Puerto Rican Flavor Lexicon

  It’s hard for me to wax poetic about the seasonings and ingredients that are the workhorses of the Puerto Rican flavor lexicon. (I know, me having a hard time babbling?) To those who are unfamiliar with Puerto Rican food, these seasonings and ingredients might appear unremarkable. Yet, most Puerto Rican dishes would cease to be recognized without the following essential components, most of which go into a good chunk of the savory dishes of Puerto Rico, appearing differently and developing diverse flavor nuances in each of them. The red sauce in a fricassee (usually a light broth made with white wine), for example, is going to be entirely different than the red sauce in a guisada (braised for hours until the tomato sauce deepens in both color and flavor).

  Achiote Oil

  For a long time, I’ve been researching whether Africanos combined achiote with oil in an attempt to re-create something similar to the palm oil they used back home, or if achiote oil was simply a replica of the Spanish practice of adding azafran saffron to their cooking. Either way, achiote oil gets a workout during the holidays as the old-fashioned way of giving our iconic foods their orange hue. It makes an appearance in almost all our celebratory Christmas dishes. We use it to season and color pernil and lechón. We pour it on banana leaves before we spoon on the masa for pasteles; the oil also ensures that the masa doesn’t stick to the leaves. If watching beans cook was my first kitchen task as a child, my second task was watching achiote seeds sizzle and dance in a pot of manteca, making sure they didn’t burn. (Ask any Puerto Rican about burning th
e achiote seeds. We all have a story.) If you don’t want to use the lard, you can use canola or olive oil, and the achiote oil will be more shelf-stable.

  Alcaparrado

  Capers are called alcaparras in Spanish, right? Alcaparrado is a mixture of olives, pimientos, and capers sold together in one jar, and it’s my worst enemy. (Yes, I am an olive hater—it’s a textural thing for me.) But alcaparrado is extremely helpful when you want to double the pungent brine power in a dish.

  Mayoketchup

  Mayoketchup seems to be the newly chosen sauce for dipping frituras. I’m not a huge fan of ketchup…or mayonnaise. But I do agree that sometimes things such as tostones need a dip. I doctor the usual apathetic combo of the two condiments by adding both fresh and dried garlic (fresh gives the punch, dry coats your mouth) and lemon to brighten everything up.

  Pique

  People often ask if Puerto Rican food is spicy. It isn’t. But pique is. Pique is a rustic hot sauce you might find on home and restaurant tables; it’s spicy from chiles and sharp from vinegar. Pique is often necessary when Puerto Rican food can seem heavy or cumbersome. (Hello, double starch and meat.) When my orange and tangerine trees are heavy with fruit, I replace the pineapple chunks in my recipe with 1 cup of orange or tangerine juice.