New Latin American cookbook features Ecuadorian salsas and soups inspired –and revised– in Cuenca

Jan 15, 2013 | 0 comments

By Sarah Zielinski

Chef and culinary historian Maricel Presilla owns two restaurants and has written many cookbooks. But her new book, Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, is her attempt to give fans a heaping helping of the many cultures she blends into her world.

"It's my whole life," she tells National Public Radio Morning Edition host David Greene. "There are recipes here from my childhood, things that I remember my family, my aunts doing. But also things that I learned as I started to travel Latin America."

Greene recently invited Presilla into his kitchen to whip up a batch of yuca fries with cilantro sauce, a dish served in many Cuban restaurants. The fries are authentic, but the now-common sauce isn't, Presilla says. "It's my recipe," she told Greene, created while she was a consultant for Victor's Cafe in the 1980s in New York and Miami.

Inspired by an Indian cilantro chutney, she created an aioli with garlic and cilantro to accompany yuca fries on the restaurant menu. "Everybody who tries that thinks it is a traditional Cuban recipe when, in reality, Cubans don't like cilantro that much," she says.

You don't often get yuca fries without the green stuff on the side these days — at least not in the U.S.

As the pair prepared Presilla's famous sauce, Greene asked her about the value of sitting while cooking, something she calls the "Zen of the Latin kitchen."

Presilla says chores like making tamales or grating coconut don't require standing up. "So you can sit down. You can even lie down in a hammock." (We'd like to see that one!)

She writes in her book that this Zen comes in part from the time when the floor was the chief work space for cooks, but it can also be "a realistic way of coping with the time-consuming demands of artisanal Latin cuisines." That leisurely way of cooking can even be seen in some restaurants. Presilla visited one in Cartagena, Colombia, and found the female cooks sitting at a large table and chatting as they grated coconut.

But she does stand while she chops onions "because we're doing something with a knife."

She and Greene also work on a recipe she discovered in Ecuador, a spicy onion and tamarillo salsa that is call ají, or "pepper," in the town of Cuenca. The dish calls for sliced onions, but when Presilla was visiting a friend's mother, a woman well-versed in traditional Cuenca food, she discovered she was doing it wrong.

In her book, Presilla writes that she had been slivering the onion finely but was told "they should be good and thick, a style popularized in Cuenca by a woman who owned a successful shop called La Gorda de los Sandwiches," which translates as "the fat woman of the sandwiches."

To write her encyclopedic tome, Presilla traveled across Latin America. "I went looking for housewives and street vendors and just regular home cooks," she tells Greene.

And she found a cuisine that is quickly changing. "There's creativity and there's new classics being created every day," she says. And in the U.S., "all Latin cultures are coming together," she notes. "It's really unavoidable that sooner or later you're going to start learning from your neighbor."

But the differences between cuisines aren't as large as some might assume, Presilla says. "If you look at the sofrito, the cooking sauce that is the foundation of our cooking, well, the woman from Cartagena gets a grater, and she grates the onions. While in Cuba, we chop everything finely. And in Puerto Rico, well, she would put everything in a blender," she says. "But in the end, we all have the same elements of culture."

"If you look at the origin of the majority of these things…you realize that they all go back to medieval Spain," she says. "It's a common DNA."

Ecuadorian Spicy Onion And Tamarillo Salsa
Recipes adapted from Gran Cocina Latina
 
Ecuadorian highlanders make table sauces and cebiches with the yellow tamarillo, an Andean fruit they call tomate de arbol, or tree tomato. They usually reserve the red variety, which reaches them from Colombia, for dessert. 

Makes 4 cups

4 fresh or frozen tamarillos (about 1 pound), preferably yellow
1 large red onion (12 ounces), halved and cut lengthwise into 1/4 to 1/2 inch slices
1 tablespoon salt
Juice of 2-3 large limes (about 1/2 cup)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, preferably extra-virgin olive oil
2 Ecuadorian hot peppers, or serrano or cayenne peppers, seeded, deveined and finely chopped
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro 

Salt to taste

Cut a small cross on the tip of each tamarillo. In a medium saucepan, bring 1 quart water to a boil. Add the tamarillos and cook for one minute for fresh tamarillos, 10 minutes for frozen. Drain. Peel the tamarillos and coarsely mash with a fork. You should have about 1 1/4 cups. Set aside.

Place the onion and salt in a medium bowl. Add tap water to cover, stir and allow the onion to stand for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally with your hands.

Place the onion in a colander, rinse under cold running water and drain thoroughly. Place in a medium bowl, toss with the lime juice, and let stand for 5 minutes. Stir in the tamarillo pulp, along with the rest of the ingredients. Serve at room temperature.

 Credit: National Public Radio, Morning Edition, http://www.npr.org/blogs; Photo caption: Maricel Presilla's new book, and her Ecuadorian Spicy Onion and Tamarillo Salsa (recipe revised in Cuenca)

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