Puerto Rico Traditions

Intense flavour traditions

In New York City there is a huge population from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico.

The island became an American dependency in 1898 after the Spanish American war, when Spain ceded sovereignty of Puerto Rico to the United States.

Puerto Ricans are American citizens and there are more Puerto Rican people living in the US than in Puerto Rico.

I was lucky enough to become life-long friends with Norma, a New York Puerto Rican. We met a few years after I moved to the States and my entree to her family kitchen in the Bronx, is indelibly etched in my culinary brain.

The Bronx is one of the five boroughs that make up New York City, and its shops and markets are full of the foods of the Caribbean. Many of the items are simply not available here.

I learnt more about seasoning in that Bronx kitchen than anywhere else. I watched Norma's parents, Juan and Eva, grate coconuts, pound spices and herbs, and use peppers, plantains and other ingredients I had never seen before to produce dishes that tasted different from anything my naive palate had ever experienced.

It is in their kitchen I learnt to make red pepper salad long before it become commonplace and I remember coming back to New Zealand to visit, making the salad and watching people's eyes widen in pleasure.

Most of the time when I asked Juan and Eva for recipes they would say, "oh, you use a little of this and a little of that" – a hopeless task.

Fortunately, a few years back Norma gave me a great recipe book called Latin Flavours That Will Rock Your World, by Daisy Martinez.

The book contains many Puerto Rican recipes, along with others from Mexico and South America.

The food of Puerto Rico is heavily influenced by the plants of the region: plantains, green bananas, yucca, yautia (a starch like taro), calabaza (a type of squash), coconuts, peppers.

The peppers or chillis of the area are mild and flavourful rather than intensely hot. A plant called culantro is used in many recipes, a relative of coriander that is much more intense tasting.

One of the keys to Puerto Rican food is that it is not "spicy hot" but "rich in spice", with strong seasoning used in many dishes.

Several of these are key to the cuisine.

While all of the dishes can be made here, adaptation is necessary as we don't have some of the ingredients.

An important base ingredient is achiote oil, made from achiote or annatto seeds.

the merhoff post » Archive » Freedom in Pyrotechnics

I had never seen anything like it in my life. There was so much smoke everywhere it was hard to breathe and my eyes were watery. My hair was a little burnt from ash that had fallen on it and lights were bursting and flashing everywhere I looked. It may sound like I was in the middle of some chaotic disorder and I was. Fourth of July in Reykjavík was upon me and the pyrotechnics war had started. I walked like a drunk, zigzagging and swerving in attempts to avoid children aiming firecrackers straight at me, straight at everybody. I am used to fireworks being at the hands of the city council and not at the will of the population. Seeing all those tykes and champagne-wielding adults firing off made me nervous, although I have to say it was nice to see that everybody got to participate in lighting up the midnight sky and that it wasn’t just an officially organised affair. The type of Fourth of July celebration I am used to has quite a pathetic showing of fireworks that is aimed at tourists rather than locals. I come from a small, immensely beautiful island in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico . Our tradition there is to spend the hours up until midnight with the family, so people tend to be inside when the clock strikes twelve. The explosives display (I can’t even remember the last time I saw it) is conducted from Old San Juan : a relic of the past with faded blue cobblestones and Spanish architecture adorned with bold colours. However, very few Puerto Ricans will be walking around the old city to enjoy the few sparks visible in the sky. It is mainly a display to satisfy the sun burnt, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourists. Sadly for the people back home, it is illegal for individuals to buy or use fireworks, so people miss out on all the fun that Icelanders are entitled to. To make matters worse, with sparklers prohibited, an odd tradition has developed since some intellectually challenged individuals decided that firing bullets into the sky would be a great replacement for firecrackers, ignoring Newton’s law of gravity that what goes up must eventually come down. This year, the government had to spend money running campaigns titled: “Not one more bullet into the air!” in order to curtail this crazy twenty-first-century ritual.

Encyclopedia of multicultural psychology

Frommer's Puerto Rico

Frommer's Puerto Rico

Fodor's Puerto Rico

Let's Go Puerto Rico