Literary chef’s cookbook tours Latin America

Cuban-born Maricel Presilla – chef, restaurant owner, food historian, and world traveler – in her new cookbook Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, makes the connections between what people eat and who they are; between cuisine and cultural self-image.

Presilla operates a restaurant in Hoboken, N.J., and has a Ph.D in medieval Spanish history.  Her literary as well as culinary talents allow her nonfiction cookbook to unfold like Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s foodie novel, Like Water for Chocolate.  

Like Esquivel, Presilla combines personal stories with her recipes. She describes dishes she learned as a niña cooking with the mujeres in her family, like “My Grandmother’s Ajiaco,” a soup made with vegetables and dried beef. She writes about her encounters with housewives in their kitchens, with restaurant chefs, and with street vendors.

Her goal for writing the cookbook, she explains, is to “adapt and transform the elemental beauty and tastes of Latin American cooking to the modern kitchen, while respecting the food’s primary flavors, and to create earthy, intensely flavored dishes.”

She includes more than 500 recipes from Latin American kitchens, from the tropical root yucca to empanadas to flavorful varieties of meat dishes. All the recipes in this tome of tastes come with cultural and historical information, as well as her personal descriptions of the methods of preparing dishes that the cooks she visited shared with her.

In the town of Cuenca in Ecuador, chef Presilla discovered that she was chopping the onions for a spicy onion and tamarillo ají salsa the wrong way. She had been slivering the onions, but was told they should be “good and thick,” like the way the Cuencan cooks do it.

Cutting onions is a good example of how Latino cultures share the same culinary DNA, although it may differ from country to country. In the sofrito, a foundation sauce for Latin American dishes, the women from Cartagena, Colombia use graters for the onions. In Puerto Rico, cooks use blenders. While in Cuba, they chop onions finely with a sharp knife.

In the cookbook, Presilla observes how cooking has liberated many creative Latinas in Latin America and allowed them to thrive in food business environments dominated by men.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of The Splendid Table, American Public Media’s national food show, wrote that Gran Cocina Latina is “one glorious adventure the likes of which we’ve not seen in a long time…She know how (and why) women in the high Andres stomp their frozen potatoes with their bare feet because she’s done it with them.”

This comprehensive cookbook with its many colorful and beautiful photographs and illustrations belongs in every aspiring gourmet cook’s kitchen library.