Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity by Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra (review)

The original edition, Puerto Rico en su olla, ¿somos aún lo que comimos?, published by Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra in 2006, publisher Doce Calles, in Aranjuez, Madrid, was a rich tour de force by a food historian and Professor of Humanities in the Department of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao. He is an authority on the history of food, food habits and diet of Puerto Rico.¹ Now an excellent English translation is available, from the UNC series “Latin America in Translation.” The book includes a Foreword by Ángel G. Quintero Rivera, noted sociologist and historian on Puerto Rican and Caribbean music, culture and art, at the Center of Social Research at the University of Puerto Rico; an Introduction; and eight substantive chapters, glossary, notes and bibliography. Quintero Rivera introduces the reader to the author’s work, calling it not “a frivolous feast,” nor an example of “light postmodernism,” but rather, serious research into “the dynamic relationship between ecology, gastronomy, and society.”²

Ortíz Cuadra’s book is structured into major sections based on the Puerto Rican diet: “Rice,” “Habichuelas” (kidney beans), “Cornmeal,” “Codfish,” “Viandas” (native roots), and “Meat” (beef and pork). The other two chapters are reflective essays, the first titled: “Are We Still What We Ate?”, the fundamental question that frames Ortíz Cuadra’s research (and the book’s original title in Spanish, ¿Somos aún lo que comimos?); the second, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.”

In this excellent work, Ortíz Cuadra provides a socio-cultural and economic history of the main food items of the Puerto Rican diet which go into the making (cooking) of the olla (pot) of Puerto Rican cuisine. He begins his study with the fundamental Puerto Rican dish, the emblematic “arroz con habichuelas” (rice and beans), while underscoring the centrality of rice (white rice), without which Puerto Ricans cannot imagine a real meal.

In his culinary history of the Puerto Rican diet, the author relies on the work of Italian food historian Massimo Montanari,³ French social scientist Claude Fischler,⁴ who studies food from an interdisciplinary perspective, and Sidney Mintz, an anthropologist known for his work on the Caribbean, especially in terms of the definition of “cuisine.” From Montanari (2003), he takes the notion that food (and cuisine) is an extraordinary vehicle for self-representation, community, and identity.⁵ To this recipe, he adds Fischler (1995) and Mintz’s definitions of cuisine as: the familiarity with specific foodstuffs, techniques for cooking as the culinary rules of a given community, and the application of those rules in cooking.⁶

Ortíz Cuadra also concentrates on other central questions: On what are current Puerto Rican culinary choices based? And are they based on some nostalgic images of the past, or paladar memoria? He responds to these inquiries by stating that in order to understand what goes into the “Puerto Rican pot,” we must also look into information offered by many disciplines, not only on the history of food and cooking, but also studies on the political economy of food production, distribution and consumption.⁷

Throughout his marvelous culinary journey, Ortíz Cuadra provides the reader with a deliciously close look into the foodstuffs that shape Puerto Rican identity, which in addition to rice and beans, include yucca (Manihot esculenta), yautía (Xanthosoma), sweet potato, plantains, ñame (a yam-like tuber of the genus Dioscorea), pork, beef, and the ubiquitous cod (from salted to fried). His careful study traces the evolution of these foods, as well as the many ways in which they were prepared, and by whom, and in what specific socio-economic and political contexts. Among the values of his study is the use of, and information on, African food ingredients and cooking in the elaboration of the Puerto...