Von Diaz Cooks Her Way Through Puerto Rican Cooking Classic Cocina Criolla (Newsweek - May 15, 2014) #Harlem/#ElBarrio/#RockThoseReads News EXCERPT: “Meet me in front of Cuchifritos on 116th Street in Spanish Harlem,” texts Von Diaz. I arrive a few minutes early, and I’m pretty sure I’m in the wrong place. The window display in this takeout spot is filled with trays of fried chicken, fried plantains, fried balls of masa stuffed with spiced meat and fried bacalao (codfish fritters). This is Puerto Rican food, and frito (or “fried”) is the operative word here. I’m supposed to be meeting Diaz to talk about nueva (or new style) Puerto Rican cuisine, and this place looks about as old-style as you can get. “Don’t freak out,” Diaz tells me as we enter. “I just thought we’d start here and sample some traditional fried food.” Diaz, 32, a Puerto Rican journalist who grew up in Atlanta, is obsessed with her native cuisine. Much like the story Julie Powell wrote about cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Diaz is working her way through a Puerto Rican classic. Cocina Criolla, by Carmen Valldejuli, a kind of Puerto Rican Joy of Cooking, is a thick cookbook that, according to Diaz, “every Puerto Rican owns.” Looking for a way to help her understand Puerto Rican culture and her own identity, Diaz starting cooking from “the bible” several months ago. It’s a sentimental project: following the well-worn, stain-splattered pages of her grandmother’s copy of Cocina. “Memories of my grandmother in her kitchen, peeling yucca in her flip-flops with her hair in rollers, came flooding back as I held the book in my hands, charmed by its ugly front cover with bad drawings of tropical fruit,” writes Diaz in a multimedia blog series on the site Feet in 2 Worlds. Diaz’s grandmother, whom she calls Tata, is now living in Utah and battling Alzheimer’s. Diaz misses her cooking and her stories, but as she fries surillitos (cigar-shaped fritters) and braises cow tongue, she is comforted by the memories of her childhood visits with her grandmother in Puerto Rico. When I told Puerto Rican-born chef Carmen Gonzalez about Diaz’s Julie/Julia/Von/Carmen experiment, she laughed. “Wow, I sure hope she has some friends who are carpenters, so they can make her doorway wider! That girl is going to gain some serious weight!” Gonzalez, who made her reputation on the television show Top Chef Masters and through her restaurants in Miami, New York and Portland, Maine, says, “I love that book. I grew up with it. We all did. But man, is that unhealthy food.” Diaz had no intention of changing jean sizes, so she decided to attack the book with a new focus. Her goal? Make Puerto Rican classics with a lighter, fresher and healthier touch. After we taste the fried stuff, we move on to a local bodega to shop for fresh chicken, chorizo, cilantro, avocados, mangoes and lemons. Diaz has invited me into her minuscule (but highly organized and efficient) kitchen in the Spanish Harlem apartment she shares with her partner, Marin. She puts on mellow Latin music, and we set out to work.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 22:22:17 +0000