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Writing the first major cookbook on the cuisine of your home country is no small undertaking. Karla Tatiana Vasquez knew this from the very start of her journey towards what would become The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them. Yet Vasquez, a first-generation Salvadoran American, saw her job as sharing the food knowledge of Salvi women with the world. When she began her project to collect and share Salvi cuisine in 2015, Vasquez offered a series of workshops, cooking classes, and community engagement initiatives from her home base in Los Angeles, rooting her work in the vibrant local Salvadoran community around her. The project took on new life when she put out a call to the broader Salvadoran diasporic community, receiving messages from Salvi women in Paris, in Abu Dhabi, in Michigan, in Georgia asking, “How far are you traveling?” Her response was that if she could drive there, she would find a way to get there.

“The whole premise of this book,” Vasquez told me, “is that Salvi women, the moms and abuelas, are the experts, but that they are not included in the conversation.” Vasquez’s book is the antidote, featuring 33 women and the recipes they shared, telling their stories in portrait-like essays that look far beyond the kitchen. A blend of ethnography, food writing, and community-based journalism, The SalviSoul Cookbook is not just the first major cookbook on Salvadoran cuisine; it is an invitation to the next hundred cookbooks on El Salvador, and to a much broader appreciation of the passion, craft, and heart of Salvi women everywhere.

Jessica Carbone: In your introduction, you mention this word “anhelo,” the yearning or longing to know something. The project of SalviSoul started with your own quest for knowledge. What has anhelo meant to you in your culinary journey?

Karla Tatiana Vasquez: I really believe that where you sit is where you stand. For a long time, I was sitting at the table, listening to my family’s stories of what life was like in El Salvador. I’d get excited to learn more, and I’d go to the library to visit the encyclopedia and turn to the “S” section to see if there was anything about El Salvador, and then it would send me to the “E” section, and then there would just be a redirect to “Latin America.” The books themselves gave me very little, and I didn’t have a lot of access other than the stories my parents gave me. But the food that they made for me, and the stories that they gave me, depicted a place so vibrant, so real, so colorful, so loud, that I felt like I could hear the traffic. And so longing for more knowledge really became a compass.

But what was I longing for? When my parents would talk about El Salvador, the first thing they would mention would be the food. They’d say, “Quiero annona,” this seasonal tropical fruit with a tangy, almost vanilla-like flavor that was bright pink on the inside. So I go to the grocery store, and see what we had: bananas, apples, grapes, nothing like this annona, the fruit my mom says tastes better than ice cream. Then as I grew older, it wasn’t just like the foods that I wanted to understand, but also their purpose. I wanted to know what foods we should eat for Easter or Christmas. Then I’d hear about some obscure dish and someone would tell me, “Oh, we’re making this sopa for somebody who just had a baby.” So through the kitchen I learned about culture, and how a culture functions is how a community is taken care of.

As you were building out this project, from blog to book, how did you draw a line between what was important for you to know, versus what you needed to document for other people?

I needed to trust that my questions would lead me to the next thing I would learn. What really decided a lot of things, though, were when I sent a call-out to the broader Salvi community. I had the experiences of my family, but Latinos are not a monolith, and Salvis are definitely not a monolith, and I don’t know what I don’t know. So I posted online, saying, “Hey, if you love Salvadoran cooking, and you know a Salvi woman who loves cooking, please have them get in touch with me.” The interviews and cooking sessions that came from that call were the missing piece that I needed, and revealed the next part of the journey.

For instance, one woman, Irene, saw the call-out and wrote to me, saying, “You have to contact my friend Carolina. She’ll never tell you she’s a great cook, but she has great parties, and I love her food.” So I called Carolina, who’s a librarian, and she invited me to her home, to share her recipes for ceviche de pescado and for conchas rellenas, which I’d never heard of, and I’m so grateful we connected because her recipes tell us something about seafood. Oftentimes we think of Mesoamerican cultures as focused on corn or tamales or pupusas, and this was very different. From her I learned about the workers who harvest the mangroves, and their diets are mostly seafood diets, with yuca rather than corn. So there was a lot of kismet in this project, and I wanted it to be a group process to curate the recipes.

There were a few times where it wasn’t so easy—everyone wanted to do the Christmas turkey, because they all said that theirs was the best. That was honestly one of the scariest things in my life, saying no to many Salvadoran moms; I don’t wish that anxiety for anyone. And then after that, because we had the OG headliners of the cuisine taken care of, other dishes that they knew how to make that were important to them came to the surface. We all said, “Pupusas get a lot of airtime, so what other things can we bring up?” It was a very collaborative process.  

How did you give voice to these women’s knowledge in your book?

One of the stories in the book is about a woman named Maricela, which I very intentionally titled, “La Antropóloga,” because she is an anthropologist. Some don’t see her that way because she works as a street vendor in a part of Los Angeles known for Salvadoran culture. But she is an anthropologist, because her menu is a case study on what flavors sell the most, and that tells her how many different kinds of Salvadorans are in the city. For example, it’s easy for her to tell me that there are more Salvadorans from Oriente, the eastern side of El Salvador, here than there are from Occidente, the western part, because she’d had weeks of selling more of a certain kind of tamale or atole, and seeing what people preferred.

We have this language for folks that are on the margins as being voiceless, but what I’ve learned as a food activist and through meeting these Salvi women, is that they have the loudest voices ever. Going to the store with my mom and my tía, you cannot deny that they have a presence. But they’ve been so easily ignored, and their knowledge isn’t taken seriously. The authority I have in my work, I didn’t get it from an institution; I got it from the women who have brought me along with them in their knowledge. It may not be grounded in a degree or anything like that, but it is true knowledge, it is true science. And that’s what I am trying to do, to give a voice to women’s labor that shows that they are the experts in the kitchen. They are historians and oral storytellers, and they’re here doing work that causes them to rise to the occasion.

You talk about asking your mother for recipes, and how she found your questions somewhat frustrating, like you were looking for an easy answer. When you were offered a chance to turn your blog into a book, what did you see as the limitations of the cookbook?

I was talking to a friend about how overwhelmed I felt by the work of this book, and they said, “Well, Karla, usually in our lifetime we only try to understand our own trauma, not our mother’s, not our grandmother’s, and you went and asked them, plus more than 20 other women. So have a little grace.” This is the only cookbook that’s been traditionally published on Salvi cooking, and while that’s amazing, that also means that there is such a big need for different kinds of things. People want the recipes, and they want the food history, and they have their own preferred styles of learning. So in some ways I didn’t feel like sharing a written recipe was an easy way out. Because there’s still a lot of work to do.

I also know how important it is to be the first, or one of the first, to get something written down. When I was in cooking school, one of the students asked the teacher, “Why do we call it an omelet?” The student was Middle Eastern, the teacher was Korean American, and here I was as a Salvadoreña, and we’re all realizing that it’s so seared into what we know as food culture that we hadn’t thought twice about it. So the instructor thought for a second, then said, “It must be because the French were the first to document it.” And so that set me off.

How did you work with your publisher to organize this book?

Before I got my book deal, there was a lot of pushback on how I was presenting this work, because I was including a lot of points of view. But what’s exciting for me is that there is always more to learn, and I’ve always felt more comfortable as a student; I didn’t want it to be just my voice. I was also told by several people, “Oh, there’s nothing much on El Salvador, nothing much from Salvis or Latinos or even non-Latinos.” Then I started to worry, “What if they’re right? What if I run out of things to say?” But when I turned in the manuscript 14,000 words over my limit, I realized that we’re only beginning to scratch the surface on what Salvadoran cuisine is.

I’ve gained all this strength from all the women I met, who are always clear on what they’re here to do, so I’m taking a page out of their rulebook and showing up for myself. I wrote the recipe titles as they were told to me, and didn’t bother translating because it created too much inconsistency, and it never became an issue. It would be silly to translate pupusas, but then do we translate nuegados de yuca, which are a kind of yuca fritter, but also not really a fritter? Look, we already know so many foods by their non-English names, like beef bourguignon or gnocchi. Can you imagine calling gnocchi a potato dumpling? This is my default—I call them rellenos de papa, so that’s what they are. And by calling them by name, the reader is invited to come into this universe with me, and we’ll teach you what it is. I promise, it’ll all taste great.

There are some ingredients that are essential to Salvadoran cooking, like chicken bouillon, that are shamed in some gourmet kitchens. When you were collecting the recipes from the Salvi women you met, how did you decide what to adjust and what to keep?

I left a lot of things as the women explained them to me. We tend to think of the kitchen, as we see it in entertainment at least, as a kind of romantic place, a fantasy space for the cook to become a wonderful, cultured person. But when you are an immigrant woman and you have three hungry kids, it’s a space of efficiency and industry. I learned a lot about the cost that you pay as someone responsible for feeding people, the cost of ingredients and time and the things you do after you’ve done the cooking. So when I was told that a recipe had those costs accounted for, it didn’t feel right to add more time or to fancy it up. So if the cook used chicken bouillon, that’s what I used. That’s the flavor she designed for her family, and she’s proud to mention that. There’s a recipe in the book for pollo con papas, chicken and potatoes, that one of the women, Wendy, gave me, and I love that she used canned tomatoes. Wendy is a single mom with three businesses and is an ultra-marathoner, and these are the shortcuts she has. But Wendy is also the same cook who uses two kinds of oil to make her plátanos fritos con frijoles licuados, and will only fry her plantains in coconut oil. So I love learning the decision-making process of others, the details of what we fuss about and what we don’t.

Were there any recipes or ingredients that you especially loved collecting or testing?

There are two that come to mind in this moment. One of them is flor de izote con huevos, which is made with the national flower of El Salvador. I’ve always been obsessed with how many flowers are in Salvadoran cuisine; there are three flowers on the book cover, though you can’t tell that they’re flowers, but I can tell. A lot of Salvis might say, “Oh, this is just farmer’s food,” but it just makes me so happy, and anytime you can eat flowers, I think it’s great. The other one I’ll mention is the rooster dish, the gallo en chicha, which reminds me a little bit of coq au vin.

There are some recipes, like the fresco de ensalada salvadoreña, where so many of the ingredients are seasonal. How do you feel about recipe improvisation?

I’m fine with it, because home cooks may be in the same position as many in the diaspora. We come to this country hungry to find good substitutions, and when we’re fortunate to find the real thing, it’s a gift. The Salvadoran quesadilla, a kind of pan dulce, is a good example of the diaspora. I’ve worked on my version of a quesadilla for many years, while asking folks why the quesadilla from the store or bakery tasted different from what I got from neighbors or abroad. The reason is because in El Salvador the quesadilla is made with local cheese. Here across Los Angeles, a lot of what bakeries use is Italian cheese like parmesan, because it’s more affordable when bought wholesale. Quesadilla is a working-class food, and if a bakery needs pounds and pounds of an imported ingredient, they may not be able to keep it a working-class food. So when people ask me, “Where can I get the most authentic Salvadoran quesadilla?” my answer is that the most authentic one is the one you make at home. When I was doing online cooking classes, there was a student calling in from France, and she asked if she could use an aged cheese from the farmers market in Paris. And I said “Yes, that’s ok, because that is you as a Salvadoran, doing what you need to do to make it happen.”

You talk about the many different sopas, or soups, as being events in Salvi households. Why are they events?

I think honestly they have to be events because they have proteins. A lot of the chapters in Salvadoran history include those where people have suffered hunger, where having tortillas at home was a comfort because corn was cheap. So there have been a lot of episodes of hunger, poverty, war, political strife. Now we may see it as just the soup, but it’s a whole pot of expenses, resources, vegetables that could go bad if you don’t use them up. These are all things that tell us something about position and privilege, and how a family navigates their social conditions. So I think that we see soups as an event because of our history with food, which tells us, “Hey, you got fresh corn, some yuca, carrots, all in one bowl of soup? Life must be good for you.” So what do you do with those blessings? You call up your friends and family, and you share it, because there’s an abundance. We don’t make that jump so quickly here in 2024, especially in the United States; these are things that we always have, so we don’t see why they would be an event. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to have an absence of food, but I can’t forget, because I know the cost that my great-grandma paid to get my family to the next day.

You talk a lot about the privilege you have as a food writer, and your ability to move freely between countries and spaces. How has your journey to understand your Salvi identity while becoming an American citizen shaped your relationship to food writing?

A lot of the places where I find myself, I’m maybe the only Latina or Salvadoreña, and I always feel othered, like I’m not supposed to be here. But I’ve realized that so many of the institutions operate this way because they’re focused on making a profit. This publishing experience was one of the most radical forms of care that I ever received, of the vision I had of something so personal and so visceral for me. But in some ways this book journey has been very bittersweet, because I had such a hard time pitching Salvadoran stories to newspapers. I’d gotten my degree in journalism, I’d been to cooking school, and I thought “I should be able to pitch a story and have people say yes.” But when I’ve pitched stories, it’s been so hard to see people not grasp the value of this, to hear people say, “Oh, we don’t think there’s a story here.” When you hear editors say no to you, you end up believing that if there isn’t any interest in the story, that the story isn’t something. And it pains me to see the stories that are published, exploitative stories that showcase the suffering of Black and brown communities, sticking to that line, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Because we’re here to sell.

I’ve had to be an adult about it, and fight for how I want these stories to be told, even while operating in that system. And even though I have privilege as a resident citizen, I am also a Salvadoran immigrant. It means understanding the nuances of working within that, but it also means that there are people who will be allies, and who will want to do the work, so that it honors and carves out space for stories to be told. This book is at a ton of intersections, because I am at a ton of intersections. And I think that if you experience some kind of tension surviving in any industry, it’s because you’re doing something great.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Recipes

Sopa de Gallina

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Fresco de Ensalada

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Pastelitos de Hongos

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The post This Salvadoran Cookbook Is Making History appeared first on Saveur.

Jamaica is known for reggae, all-inclusive resorts, and white-sand beaches, but travelers who don’t venture beyond the vacation compound are missing out on the epic food movement that’s happening on roadsides, in homes, and at food festivals (a new one seems to pop up every year) in the Caribbean country. 

Happily, those who do branch out are rewarded with one-of-a-kind restaurants, lively bars (they almost outnumber our churches), roadside stalls supporting the weight of seasonal produce, and villagers selling veritable feasts from bubbling pots and smoking grills.

Jamaica is a food country. We produce some of the best rum in the world, our Blue Mountain Coffee is beloved by baristas; and our bean-to-bar chocolates have won numerous gold medals. There are local artisanal cheeses to taste, and in Kingston, the capital city, a wealth of exceptional restaurants to try.

Jamaican cuisine is so varied and complex that I wish I could tell you about hundreds of our essential dishes. But seek out these 15, and you’ll leave my homeland with an appreciation of Jamaican culture, an understanding of local flavors, and—of course—a full belly.

Ackee and Saltfish at Summerhouse 

Harmony Hall, St. Mary

Jamaica’s national dish consists of flaked salt cod sautéed with butter-yellow ackee (a creamy, squash-like fruit that tastes a bit like yellow split peas). It’s served at nearly every restaurant, hotel, and cook shop (informal takeaway), but for a version that even the pickiest of Jamaican grandmothers would endorse, head to Summerhouse in Harmony Hall. Owned by sisters Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau, both veteran restaurateurs and cookbook authors, Summerhouse doesn’t cut corners with the cod: They soak it, regularly changing the water, until the fish is plump and just salty enough, then and sauté it with ackee, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, and enough minced Scotch bonnet to keep you on your toes. Served with Johnny cakes (fried dumplings) and pressed fried green plantains (tostones), it’s the most satisfying breakfast you’ll have on the island.

Beef Patties at Devon House Bakery

Devon House, 26 Hope Road, St. Andrew 

Take it from a beef patty authority: The patties at Devon House Bakery are some of the best you’ll ever eat. If you’re reading this between noon and 2 p.m., trust that there’s a long line as we speak. These are maverick patties: Instead of the usual crescent shape, Devon House bakes raised triangles, pinched at the corners and atop. Within the turmeric-tinged, flaky crusts is a heap of steaming ground beef with just enough thyme, pimento (allspice), Scotch bonnet, and scallions to make you want to grab a second patty for the road. Hot tip: When in season, the curried lobster patties are a must.

Pepper Shrimp at Middle Quarters

Middle Quarters Square, St. Elizabeth

No trip to St. Elizabeth parish is complete without stopping in the fishing village of Middle Quarters for the roadside pepper shrimp. Fisherfolk catch the crustaceans in the nearby Black River, then cook them in spicy thyme- and scallion-laced bouillon over coal stoves. Sold by villagers alongside the road in clear plastic bags, the shrimp, with their alluring vermillion shells, are punctuated with large slices of yellow Scotch bonnet peppers and black pimento berries. When you open the bag, your eyes will water from the chiles. But braving the spice is worth it when you pop the plump tail (or if you’re like me, the whole critter, head and all) dripping with peppery juices into your mouth. 

Rum-Braised Oxtail at Zest 

The Cliff Hotel, West End Road, Negril

I’m one of a vanishingly few Jamaicans who don’t much care for oxtail (too much bone-sucking, not enough meat)—but that all changed when I tried chef Johnoi Reid’s version at Zest. Lacquered with a gastrique fortified with Appleton Estate 8 Year Old Reserve rum and redolent of garlic, pimento, thyme, and Scotch bonnet peppers, this is an oxtail worth canonizing. Unlike most oxtail recipes, Reid’s starts with two-inch-thick cuts of meat, the way the late Norma Shirley—Jamaica’s culinary grande dame and his mentor—prescribed. Served as a weekend special, it comes with chewy broad (fava) beans and rice and peas made with gungo (pigeon) peas—a holiday version of the side dish that you can try here year-round.

Cookup Salt Mackerel at Sonia’s Homestyle Cooking and Natural Juices

17 Central Avenue, St. Andrew

For 40 years, Sonia Gibbons’ food has graced the tables of prime ministers, corporate elite, and regular folk alike. Her cookup (sautéed) mackerel is one of the best on the island. It starts with salt (pickled) mackerel that’s scalded, its larger bones removed. The mackerel is then hand-torn into pieces and sautéed with tomatoes, bell peppers, white onions, cracked black pepper, garlic, pimento berries, and lots of Scotch bonnet pepper. The symphony of flavors is a hallmark of talented hands; no wonder folks (like myself) regard Gibbons as a matriarch of Jamaican cuisine. 

Jerk Pork and Festival at Boston Jerk Centre

Boston, Port Antonio, Portland

Credited as the birthplace of Jamaican Jerk, Boston hamlet (named for the adjacent Boston Bay) is world-renowned for its cluster of jerk pits, whose sweet, smoky pimento wood you can smell from the main road. Cooked over pimento wood and covered with pimento leaves, jerk pork has a delectable crust encasing succulent meat. With each bite, you unlock jerk’s pantheon of flavors—allspice, ginger, Scotch bonnet, cinnamon, nutmeg, thyme, garlic, scallion, and citrus. Jerk pork tastes best alongside fried festivals—doughy deep-fried cigars made with cornmeal, wheat flour, and a smidge of sugar and cinnamon. As you lick your lips and wipe your brow (because of the “meat sweats,” hot Jamaican sun, or high-octane chiles), you’ll be begging for a Ting or Red Stripe—and another serving of jerk pork.

Escovitch Fish at Gloria’s 

Gloria’s (East Kingston) Port Royal, Kingston

Each fried fish order at Gloria’s comes with two whole, freshly caught, deep-fried snappers. After the chef plucks them from the hot oil, another dresses the crispy skin with a traditional Jamaican escovitch (similar to an escabeche) sauce. The fish is always juicy and never overcooked, but it’s the escovitch—the tang of the white cane vinegar, the heat of the Scotch bonnet peppers, the crunchiness of the vegetables—that always sticks with me.  

Beef and Pumpkin Soup at Susie’s Bakery

Southdale Plaza, 10 Constant Spring Road, St. Andrew

Susan “Susie” Hanna makes the best bread in Kingston and St. Andrew, but in-the-know locals are just as fond of her hot meals, salads, wraps, and—on Saturday afternoons—beef and pumpkin soup. Chunks of tender beef float in a rich broth alongside local pumpkin (calabaza), cho-cho (chayote), sweet potatoes, African yellow yam, carrots, and dumplings. The contrasting textures play off one another like a well-choreographed dance. Even the steam emanating from each bowl of the golden aromatic soup seems to pirouette seductively, pulling you closer spoonful by spoonful.

Sweet Potato Pudding at The Puddin’ Man

Jus’ Cool Grocery, Green Grocery and Variety Store, Priory, St. Ann

Edgar Wallace, aka the Puddin’ Man, has been delighting locals and tourists for over two decades with his various puddings (pones) made from cassava, cornmeal, pumpkin, or sweet potato. Good sweet potato pudding is easy to get on the island, but folks flock to the Puddin’ Man because he bakes the pudding in the traditional way: in a Dutch pot (Dutch oven) on a coal stove with insulating ash atop the lid. Just before the pone finishes baking, a rich coconut custard is poured over the top, which hardens into a pleasing topping. 

Curry Chicken Thighs with Tamarind at ROKstone Pool Bar & Grill

ROK Hotel (Tapestry Collection by Hilton), Kingston

Three of my favorite flavor profiles—tropical tamarind, earthy Caribbean curry, and smoky meat—collide in this standout appetizer. The grilled brochettes of juicy chicken thighs immediately awaken your palate with their piquancy, but the tamarind sauce (with its complex alchemy of tart, floral, and sweet notes) tones down the meat’s spiciness and leaves behind a pleasingly sweet finish. Hot tip: Ask for extra tamarind sauce for dipping. If you’re like me, you’ll wind up using your index finger to scoop out every last drop.

Stout and Coffee Fudge Pops at Chill-Pops Gourmet Paletas

Island Village, Ocho Rios, St. Ann

Poll Jamaicans about their favorite ice cream flavors, and stout and coffee would no doubt be in the top five. Chill-Pops has taken those beloved Jamaican flavors and turned them into Mexican (or Jamexican, if you will) paletas using no preservatives, stabilizers, or additives. The adult-only creamy Dragon Stout (Jamaica’s boozier, heftier version of Guinness) fudge pop—with cinnamon, nutmeg, caramel, and molasses—will make you as giddy as the sound of an ice cream truck. The Blue Mountain Coffee pop, my other go-to, is like a frappé, but it’s the decadent flavor that amps you up rather than the caffeine. 

Curried Goat at Murray’s Fish and Jerk Hut

Clarendon Park, Toll Gate, Clarendon

Don’t be fooled by the name of this grillhouse—for me, the star dish (the GOAT, if you will) is the curry goat, Jamaica’s favorite stew seasoned with curry powder, turmeric, cumin, and allspice. The bone-in stew is a deep golden brown, a hue that more resembles Japanese curry than Indian. Fresh ginger, Scotch bonnets, thyme, and pimento also go into the cauldron to create a balanced, intensely flavourful (yet not too spicy) dish. If you looked “bone-lickin’ good” up in the dictionary, its definition would be this. Take it from me and order a second roti to sop up all the gravy on the plate. 

Saltfish Fritters at EITS Cafe

17 Mile Post, Newcastle, St. Andrew

At this cafe-restaurant nestled in the Blue Mountains, saltfish fritters are available year-round. And what a relief, because you can’t have just one. Crispy on the outside and pillowy on the inside, these appetizers are fried in fragrant local coconut oil. Take a bite, and you’ll find a filling brimming with flaky Norwegian saltfish (Jamaica gets most of its salted fish from Norway), onions, scallions, Scotch bonnet pepper, and tomatoes. The fritters are served with cool green goddess dipping sauce, which—while wonderful in its own right—is just as good as the tamarind dipping sauce that comes with the ackee wontons. 

Barbecued Pig’s Tails at M10 Bar and Grill

6 Vineyard Road, Kingston

Claudette Tenn and her team at M10 make a barbecued pig’s tail so good that folks reportedly finish eating one serving just to order another. (Tag me, I’m “folks.”) The dish is a labor of love. Brine-cured pig’s tails are first boiled (to remove excess salt and tenderize the meat), then tossed in a barbecue sauce (ginger, tropical fruit, scallions, brown sugar, and a smidge of Scotch bonnet pepper), and finished in the oven. The M10 treatment makes it easy to chew the bones (if you so desire) to get every bit of flavor. Rice and peas and cabbage salad make ideal sidekicks for these sticky, tender morsels.

The Vesper Martini at Jamaica Inn

Ocho Rios, St. Ann

Here’s a wildcard you may not have expected: a retro James Bond cocktail still served at the main bar where Ian Fleming rubbed shoulders with Winston Churchill. I’m talking about the floral, zesty, and slightly herbal Vesper. Jamaica Inn has been a destination for the globally well-heeled since saying “welcome home” to its first guests in 1958. James Bond creator and author Ian Fleming, who owned a villa a few miles from the inn, was a regular. His conversations with the staff, bartenders, and guests influenced several of his characters and plot lines, creating decades-spanning pop culture moments. The Vesper Martini is one of them. To the cocktail world, Jamaica Inn says, “You’re welcome.”

The post Jamaica’s 15 Essential Dishes—And Where to Eat Them appeared first on Saveur.

My Tio Lenchito—my mother’s brother—is a chatty kind of guy. On one particular family trip back to Honduras in 2010, he wouldn’t stop talking about this seemingly magical fish shack at the edge of El Lago de Yojoa. He claimed this was the place to get the most delicious fried fish and encurtido. So one morning, we loaded into his car and set out for lunch. 

The drive along the lake was breathtaking, the water calm and motionless, almost frozen in time. I noticed the local cooks bringing freshly caught fish into their kitchens just a few steps from the water’s edge, and as we got closer, I could see exactly why my tio loved to get away from his home—the bustling Honduran city of San Pedro Sula—to enjoy the relative peace and quiet of the Lago. 

Visiting my family in Honduras has always allowed me to forge a deeper connection with the food of my roots, and I always try to seek out new foods when I’m traveling. Luckily, my uncle shares the same agenda. 

After driving for what seemed like hours, we pulled up to our destination: An unnamed lakeside vendor selling a single perfect platter. Whole fried red snapper—salted, spiced, and deep-fried—is the main event here, served with crisp fried plantains, black beans and coconut rice, red-chile salsas, and fresh limes. Tio Lenchito had been raving about the food since before my mother, sister, and I had even arrived in San Pedro Sula, so I was eager for a taste. 

In all his praise though, he had neglected to mention the jars of pickled beets, onions, carrots, and peppers on every table—a common Latin American accompaniment called encurtido. My little sister nearly started eating her fish without adding a proper spoonful to her plate, but not before my mom stopped her: “Mira, hay que poner el encurtido, mama!” 

Mom was right, of course. The encurtido’s tangy, pungent taste and crisp bite was as perfect as the fish.

There are many variations of encurtido (also called curtido), found throughout Latin America, and in some ways it is a reflection of many nations’ common bonds. Lots of recipes for the condiment-slash-side-dish of pickled vegetables include cabbage and carrot, while others are beet- or onion-based. There is frequently (but not always) some level of spicy heat, usually provided by jalapeños. So many traditional Latin American foods—think Salvadoran pupusas, Honduran baleadas, or Mexican tacos—feature soft textures and salty, fatty flavors. A scoop of crisp encurtido adds crucial fresh, bright acidity to lift up every bite. Each cook’s recipe adds its own special touch, like a sprinkle of dried thyme or a balancing scoop of sugar.

I was born in the Bronx and raised in New Orleans, but I’ve made a point of staying connected with my Honduran roots. I often find myself on long subway voyages in New York City, back to the neighborhood of my birth, to reconnect with the flavors of my culture. One of my favorite restaurants in the Bronx is Seis Vecinos. The name is an homage to six Central American countries—Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras. These countries share not only geographic proximity, but also a common diaspora partially due to the American banana industry of the 19th century, in which the United Fruit Company was granted huge swaths of Central American land and enslaved workers from the local region as well as Africa and the West Indies.

Look around Seis Vecinos and you’ll notice diners dolloping encurtido on everything on the pan-Latin menu, from platano to chula frita (a pan-fried pork chop) to cut the fatty meat. But I think the ideal encurtido vessel is baleada sencilla: a fresh flour tortilla filled with buttery refried beans, slightly bitter Honduran cheese, and salty crema Hondurena. The color, crunch, and spice of the condiment bring everything to life.

With its one-two punch of vinegar twang and satisfying crunch, it’s no wonder this best-kept secret of the Honduran kitchen has a ubiquitous spot on home and restaurant tables. Once you understand the general technique—simmer tough vegetables like beets and carrots until tender, then add quick-cooking ones like onions to a boiling vinegar brine—it’s easy to make and adjust to your taste. It will keep for weeks in the fridge, but once you start using it, you’ll want to keep it out on the table. Like my mom said to my sister, you won’t want a bite without it.

Bryan Ford is a baker, chef, and writer living in New Orleans. He is the author of the best-selling cookbook, New World Sourdough, and owner of the blog Artisan Bryan.

Recipes

Honduran Encurtido

Get the recipe for Honduran Encurtido »

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In 1875, at the age of 25, Alfredo Francisco Pellas Canessa left Genoa, Italy, to travel to Nicaragua, leaving behind the comforts of the Old World for the opportunities in the New World—and in an untested new economy. Much like the entrepreneurs of today, he took risks on fresh ideas. During the height of the California Gold Rush, he invested in a shorter and safer steamboat route through Nicaragua that would facilitate transporting goods and passengers from the East Coast to the West Coast of the U.S., cutting the trip down to a mere 36 days instead of 6 months.   The route was a massive success, but when headlines broke that construction would begin on the Panama Canal, he was quick to adapt and realize the need for a new vision, especially with the coast-to-coast railroad in the U.S. also nearing completion. It was then that he took an unlikely change in direction and turned his focus to rum production. In 1890, he was captivated by the landscape at the base of San Cristóbal, a cloud-grazing active volcano in the northwest region of Nicaragua. Since the 16th century, the volcano has erupted some 30 times and regularly releases a heady mixture of gas, ashes, and smoke into the surrounding area.

It was an unexpected place to build a distillery—five miles from the tallest volcano in Nicaragua with a crater more than 55 times the size of a football field—but he saw something there that others didn’t: the fertile soil, water, and climate. Now five generations later, Flor de Caña rum is one of the most highly awarded in the world—some have even hailed it as the best rum on the planet. Achieving this level of mastery, however, has come with plenty of challenges over the decades and the family-run brand has survived revolutions, financial turbulence, and even a plane crash.

Sound decision making has allowed the company to thrive in times when others would have failed. Over the years, they’ve trailblazed social responsibility and environmental sustainability in an industry that for the most part is just starting to catch up. They were early adopters of Fair Trade practices and have been running on renewable energy for more than a decade. To improve the lives of their employees, there has been a company school since 1913 providing free education to around 600 students and a company hospital since 1958 providing free health services to employees and their families. They also support various nonprofits in their community.

While the adventurous life that Alfredo Francisco led makes for one heck of a drinking story, the product in the glass speaks for itself. Similar to wines that are often judged by their terroir, Flor de Caña rums have benefitted from the volcanic landscape. The soil is constantly fertilized by volcanic ashes, the water is enriched by volcanic minerals, and the aging process is improved by the volcanic climate. Inside the distillery, high temperatures accelerate the evaporation rate resulting in a more intense interaction between the barrel and the rum, leading to an exceptionally smooth liquid.

The signature rums, naturally aged (without sugar or additives) in bourbon barrels at the base of this mighty volcano, range from 4 up to 25 years. The Flor de Caña 25 Year is the crown jewel of the portfolio: a 25-year old, ultra premium rum that is full-bodied with a dark amber color. It has an exquisite aroma with notes of vanilla, wood and dark cocoa. Flavor of fruity notes of almond and nuts, with a full and long finish that lingers in the palate. Brace yourself for a truly memorable experience when enjoying this top-of-the-line sipping rum.

Crafted from the spirit of adventure and responsibly made, Flor de Caña is the pinnacle of mature, premium rum.

To read more about what drives Flor de Caña, click here.

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Before we can see the cardamom plants, Amilcar Pereira and his men have to castrate the bulls. That morning, in a pickup truck on the bumpy mountain climb to the cloud forests of Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz, I was privy to Pereira the theologian. Our discussion about his new export company, 786 Gexsa, prompted a half-hour sermon on the roles of god and personal responsibility in family and commerce. He named his first business FedeAgro, a portmanteau of the Spanish words for faith and agriculture. “They’re both tiny things that get bigger.”But now it’s time for Pereira the cowboy—lasso, hat, pistol. He directs his crew to corner a bull and tosses a rope over its horns. A few more lassos and the bull is down, legs outstretched, suddenly silent and docile. As one man douses its genitals with grain alcohol, another unfolds a Swiss Army knife, yanks the scrotum taut, and excises the testes in two quick cuts. More grain alcohol to wash the wound. A splash of iodine and a squeeze of sour orange to cleanse it. Pereira loosens the ropes and the bull is off. The scents of citrus and cow dung mingle in the vaporous haze.

We break from the heat for an early lunch, but Pereira is constitutionally incapable of sitting still. He gobbles his beans and tortillas, then asks if we’re ready to hike up to the part of the farm where the cardamom grows. An hour later, after climbing narrow trails cleared by machetes, we’re nearly there. I’m panting as loud as the bull had that morning and can barely keep up. Pereira, 54 going on 25, circles back to tell us there’s just one more ridge. He slaps his arm on my doubled-over back and says with a laugh, “Race you to the top.”

Green cardamom is the third-most-expensive spice in the world, behind saffron and vanilla. Across the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Nordic Europe, cooks and bakers relish its floral fragrance and menthol bite, and use it in everything from rice pilaf and curry gravies to baklava and butter cookies. But the world’s leading producer of cardamom since 1980 is a country with zero cultural connection to the spice: Guatemala.

In 1914, a German plantation owner named Oscar Kloeffer brought green cardamom to his Guatemalan coffee estate to see if he could undercut growers along the plant’s native Malabar coast in the kingdom of Travancore, in what is now the southern Indian state of Kerala. Cardamom thrives in relatively cool, humid air at high altitude, and it turns out Guatemala’s cloud forests are the perfect environment for it. These days, the country produces around 30,000 metric tons of cardamom per year—well over half the global supply—and 70 percent of it comes from the northern department of Alta Verapaz.

Virtually all of that cardamom is for export; like many spices, it is far more valuable as a cash crop than an ingredient for local use, and despite its presence in the nation’s agriculture for more than 100 years, most Guatemalans never developed a taste for it.

Instead, all that cardamom gets shipped to the Middle East, the world’s leading consumer region of the spice, or to India, parts of Europe, or the U.S. The international spice trade is far from transparent, and though Guatemala is a powerful name in the wholesale market, commodities like cardamom rarely receive origin designations the way balsamic vinegar or prosciutto do. Once in India, Guatemalan pods might get mixed with Indian stock, then perhaps packaged and resold as Indian cardamom. Most of the time there’s simply no country of origin listed at all.

Which is why I’ve followed my friend Ethan Frisch to Guatemala to meet Pereira. Frisch is a chef and aid worker I met back when he was pushing a cart around New York, selling scoops of homemade ice cream and donating his profits to a street-vendor-advocacy organization. After working on development projects in Afghanistan and Jordan, he started an import business called Burlap & Barrel, selling high-end spices to restaurants and cooks in the model used by specialty chocolate and coffee companies. Instead of ordering through the largely anonymous network of commodity wholesalers that have controlled the global spice trade since its inception, Frisch buys directly from small, independent farms and pays them above-market rates to secure their best products. (Disclosure: I hold an unpaid position on Burlap & Barrel’s advisory board but have zero equity or stake in the company.)

Frisch was drawn to Pereira, he tells me, because in all his travels around Guatemala in search of suppliers, Pereira and his partner, Francisco Lavignino, are the only exporters who also grow and process their own pods from start to finish. Frisch is now their sole American importer. Other industry insiders confirm that they run the country’s only vertically integrated cardamom business. It doesn’t hurt that Pereira grows exceptional cardamom: piney, resinous, refreshing as a blast of Arctic air—and that he’ll talk your ear off about it.

Pereira’s farm spans from pasture to jungle. Cattle and turkeys graze in the valleys, and fruit trees climb the hillsides. His cardamom fields are secreted deep in the forest, though “fields” implies level land and tilled earth and neatly placed rows of plants, none of which apply here. Instead, call it a cardamom sanctuary, nature gently nudged into a haven for this interloper species from half a world away.

The stalks loom over us like Jurassic ferns. Each plant shoots dozens of them from the soil, and their diaphanous leaves form a canopy above our heads. Cardamom is a relative of ginger, and its seed pods, the only edible parts of the plant, grow on vines that hug the ground, hidden from sunlight. Native trees tower over the stalks, their fallen leaves forming a bed of nutrients to feed the cardamom. Pereira doesn’t bother with the expensive process of organic certification, but by cultivating the plants biodynamically and cloning high-yield varieties, which doesn’t require clearing more land, his methods are as close to natural growth as you can get.

Pereira calls Frisch over to inspect a vine nearly ready for harvest. He’s taken off his cowboy hat, literally and figuratively. Out in the forest, it’s time for Pereira the naturalist. You know the cardamom is ready to pick, he says, by the softness of the pod. It should give a little, like a green olive, though selecting the right ones is entirely a matter of feel and experience—part of the laborious manual process that makes it so expensive.

Almost all of the cardamom farms in Alta Verapaz are minuscule operations run by Guatemalans of Mayan heritage, some as small as individual plots worked by families one poor harvest from destitution. Once these smallholder farmers pick the fresh pods, they have fewer than 12 hours to offload the harvest before it begins to rot. Drying machines are far too expensive for most, so instead farmers sell their haul to buyers at local markets who set prices indiscriminately, and rarely in the farmers’ favor. These intermediaries then sell to drying facilities, which in turn sell to packers and exporters, which set their own prices by the global commodities market. A supply chain that begins with tens of thousands of poor indigenous farmers ends with a mere handful of wealthy exporters, in many cases descendants of the original German plantation owners.

Pereira began his career a rung below these poor farmers, as a Q’eqchi’-speaking laborer who’d work on others’ farms during harvest. He had dreams of becoming an engineer but soon learned his talents were better suited to wheeling and dealing than studying. “It was easy,” he boasts. “Work more, save more, buy more. It was always about finding better quality, producing with better methods, doing better business.” He eventually earned a degree in theology and did a tour in a military intelligence unit during the civil war that ravaged Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. When he returned to civilian life, he bought a small farm in Alta Verapaz, only to come into conflict with drug traffickers who frequented his land on their way to Mexico. He soon sold that property to buy his current farm, and put his picaresque life experience to work growing high-quality cardamom. “I’ve been the beneficiary of enormous miracles,” he says.

Traffickers don’t bother him now, but Pereira keeps a pistol in his pickup truck all the same. It’s a smart precaution in a business where some buyers negotiate behind the barrel of a gun. This is one of the reasons he and Lavignino have spent the past 15 years building an alternative supply chain all their own. What Pereira doesn’t grow himself, he buys from a growing cadre of nearby farmers, to whom he pays a premium for superior-quality cardamom. He owns a drying facility that processes the fresh pods up in the mountains, and in the city of Cobán, his warehouse handles the intensive steps of cleaning, sorting, grading, and packaging. Pereira is responsible for the supply side of the business; Lavignino is the head of sales. In 2017, the partners sold 36 shipping containers’ worth of cardamom to wholesale clients in Pakistan, Dubai, Israel, Spain, and Romania. This year, they hope to hit 60.

Three hours’ drive from the misty cloud forest, the city of Cobán is awash in color. Tourists usually bounce between Guatemala City and Antigua, but little Cobán is on the way to hot springs and scenic vistas that draw visitors in search of natural beauty and indigenous Mayan cuisine. The city is also the local capital of the cardamom business, where packers sort and grade raw product for the major export companies.

Pereira’s cardamom dryers on the mountain, repurposed coffee dryers, are hulking wood-fired machines. His warehouse in Cobán, on the other hand, is a portrait of modern industry. New batches are inspected by hand, then sent through high-tech equipment that cleans, sorts, and grades the pods by color and size. Machinery like this costs a small fortune in Guatemala, well out of reach of most producers, but Pereira considers the investment an essential part of the export company’s growth. While he and Lavignino can’t compete on volume, they’re able to sell a particularly high-quality product to smaller buyers in search of a genuine specialty ingredient, not just a commodity. Frisch’s haul on this trip amounts to a couple hundred pounds packed in our luggage. An order that small wouldn’t even get you in the door at a major wholesaler.

“If Pereira is to succeed, he can’t rely on the typical markets for cardamom,” says Juan Manuel Girón, an agronomist at the nonprofit Heifer International. “He will have to build new markets of his own.” Girón lives in Cobán and works with cardamom farmers to improve the efficiency and quality of their harvests. He’s watched Pereira’s blossoming enterprise with interest for years, and considers it a potential model for other growers. Adding value at the source is critical, he says, for small farmers looking to improve their bargaining position and escape the hand-to-mouth poverty cycle that so often accompanies cash-crop agriculture. But to really succeed, farmers also need buyers to believe in what they’re doing, and the infrastructure to support their growth.

Between the fields and the warehouse, 786 Gexsa employs 35 people. That doesn’t include the 200 partner farmers Pereira buys from, smallholders used to living at the whims of the harvest that he’s guiding toward greater self-sufficiency. “Growing up,” he says, “everyone around me was struggling. They didn’t believe in themselves or that anything could change. I feel a responsibility to show them they can succeed. God put us here to pursue our dreams and provide for our families. Anyone who disagrees is dead wrong.”

Baking with Cardamom

This fragrant spice is used all over the world in an array of sweets

Recipes by Kat Craddock and Stacy Adimando

Sugar Cookies Sandwiches with Cardamom Milk Chocolate Ganache

Cardamom-Rose Cake Donuts

Cardamom Rice Pudding

Swedish-Style Cardamom Buns

The post Meet the Farmer Shaking Up the Guatemalan Cardamom Trade appeared first on Saveur.

The Pan-American Highway is less a road than a 30,000-mile-long spiderweb. Its threads run through 14 countries, from the United States to Argentina. But there’s a 100-mile chunk missing through the border of Panama and Colombia; here, the mountainous jungle terrain is too rugged to be paved.

There is ongoing consideration to build one—connecting Yaviza, Panama to Turbo, Colombia—but it faces steadfast concern that a break in the rainforest would affect Panama’s annual rainfall, putting the Panama Canal (and the country’s economy) at risk. Plus, the jungle is a barrier against drug trafficking and from certain illness reaching North America. The region, known as the Darién Gap, is where the Emberá tribe lives.

The Emberá are an indigenous group native to the Darién Gap, which is comprised of the Choco department in Colombia and the Darién Province in Panama. After the Spanish invasion, they spread west to the jungles near what would eventually become Panama City.

It was here, on the bank of Lake Alajuela in Salamanca, that a dugout canoe picked me up for lunch.

We faced headwinds as we left the shore. The lake’s warm water seeped through tiny cracks in the canoe; one man steered a small outboard motor while another scooped water back into the lake. The boat pointed northwest toward Boqueron, where the Pequeni River narrows and channels into the San Miguel River, the banks of which form the Emberá Purú village of 128 people living among 31 houses.

The outboard motor, along with other more modern commodities like dyed fabric clothing and steel pots for cooking, became realities after the Emberá Purú moved to their current location in 1963. That decade saw Omar Torrijos, Panama’s de facto dictator, push indigenous peoples to settle in communities (opposed to smaller extended family units) in order to gain access to government-sponsored benefits like school and health care. The re-grouped Emberá’s proximity to Panama City provided an outlet to trade their goods—and the opportunity to bring in visitors.

So there I was, on an elevated floor raised two stories above the ground as oil simmered in a caldron. I rinsed my hands in a bowl of water full of vibrant leaves and herbs pulled from nearby plants. As they dried I caught whiffs of orange and lilac and cinnamon. Lunch would be twice-fried plantains and fish, also fried, that we picked up on the way in.

Somewhere along the Pequeni River, in a shallow part near a garden of water lilies, our boat pulled up to another just like it. Only this one was occupied by a lone man throwing a short fishing line from his bare hands, over and over. His boat also leaked, but he left the water in place to hold the impressive collection of small fish he had caught since morning.

The plantains, cut into thick chunks, hit the oil first. A gentle stir ensured none stuck to the bottom and burned. As they frizzled, others bowls were from banana leaves torn in half lengthwise, folded, and held together by the stem (previously removed and shaved into a long needle). Smashed plantains and crispy fish came together in the bowls, collected on the wooden tray. We ate in silence save for the still-crackling fire and crunch of plantains.

The post You Need a Canoe to Reach This Lunch in Panama appeared first on Saveur.

It’s getting close to lunchtime at the market in San Juan La Laguna when a vendor named Horacio tells me that I need to try some puchon-ik. San Juan is a quiet village of around 10,000 people in the highlands of central Guatemala, on the shore of Lake Atitlán and within walking distance of several volcanoes, including one that’s spewing puffs of ash on this particular afternoon. At the lakeshore, motorboats zoom up to the wooden dock several times an hour to drop off small groups of European backpackers or local women balancing baskets of food on their heads. A steep road leads uphill to a concrete building with a small indoor market, where Horacio Cotuc works at a chicken stand. I’ve just arrived in town, and when I mention to Cotuc that I’m here to write about the country’s ancestral Maya cuisine, much of which has been prepared the same way for about 2,000 years, he declares that puchon-ik, a chile-spiced dish of small, sun-dried fish, is San Juan’s unrivaled favorite. Later, on my own in an empty restaurant on the village’s main road, I have what seems like a stroke of luck: The waiter offers to serve me puchon-ik even though it’s not on the menu. He comes back with a plate of thumb-size river fish, their heads and tails still intact. Feigning nonchalance, I begin chewing my way through several mouthfuls of whole pescaditos, but I’m distraught to discover that they are just as spiny and hard-to-swallow as they look. I hide a few half-nibbled fish under a tortilla, offer a polite “gracias” to the waiter, and return to my hotel to do what any hapless foreigner would do—Google puchon-ik. Number of results: zero.

When I recount all of this to Cotuc at the market the next day, he laughs. And not only because I’d ingested a bunch of fish heads and fins. (Except for a few hardcore elders, most locals remove them before eating the flesh.) The funniest part to him is that I’d expected to find any information at all online about puchon-ik. “I bet there’s nothing on the internet about it, and there never will be,” Cotuc says. It turns out that this dish can be found almost nowhere but in the home kitchens of San Juan. In another lakefront village just 2 miles away, San Marcos La Laguna, whose residents speak a different Mayan language than San Juan’s, the people I talk to know nothing about puchon-ik. But they have a lot to say about a thick corn-based drink called atol maatz, which is flavored with ashes from the kitchen fire.

At a time when even the most obscure culinary cultures have been picked over by herds of eager food bloggers, Guatemala remains one of the Western Hemisphere’s last true culinary terrae incognitae. Due to centuries of isolation in the volcano-strewn highlands—not to mention a brutal civil war from 1960 to 1996, plus gang-driven crime waves that have discouraged tourism until very recently—many members of the 23 distinct Maya groups in rural Guatemala still speak their own pre-Columbian languages and wear the same outfits that their great-great-great-great-grandparents did. Here, local really means local: You can often tell which village a woman is from by the colors of the birds and flowers that adorn her hand-loomed huipil, or tunic. The same goes for the way she cooks her turkey stew or macuy (a local green) broth.

“There are probably thousands of unique ancestral dishes here,” says producer and documentarian Ana Carlos, whose long-running Guatemalan television series El Sabor de Mi Tierra explored more than 50 indigenous specialties around the country. Carlos says there’s been little effort by the media to document or preserve the native cuisine, in part because the ethnic Mayas, who make up more than half the population, are still seen as the underclass. “So it’s really in the kitchens and at the table that people are keeping the country’s culture alive,” she says.

There are plenty of ancient concoctions far tastier than puchon-ik, as I learn in San Juan where Cotuc offers to connect me with a Maya villager employed in one of the textile workshops near the dock. Elena Hernandez Vasquez’s house is on a dirt road in the scruffy upper part of San Juan, where the town’s Maya majority lives. A few hotels and textile shops and other gringo-geared businesses are down the hill near the shore. Her kitchen walls consist of rough slats of wood, the wide spaces between them allowing sunlight to come in and smoke to go out. As she starts to boil water on the comal—a clay griddle over an open fire that’s the focal point of most Maya kitchens—three chickens dart around her feet. She sets out the ingredients for tukun-ik. (The suffix-ik means “chile” in several Mayan languages, signifying that the dish contains them.) Tukun-ik, unique to San Juan, is a soup of corn masa, ground achiote, a couple of eggs, and some fresh green stems of epazote, a pungent local herb.

Speaking in her native Tz’utujil as Cotuc translates into Spanish, Vasquez explains how she copes without running water and cooking oil. “My ancestors never used them, or needed them,” she says. (Sometimes she also does without pots and pans: Tomatoes and chiles and even the fish for puchon-ik are browned directly on the comal.) Though some of her neighbors have resorted to shortcuts like instant soup and canned beans, Vasquez says these dishes still thrive for economic reasons (they’re simply cheaper to make from scratch), but also because they’re a point of cultural pride. Vasquez wants her children to eat like she always did. “Instant soups are threatening Guatemala’s unique way of cooking,” she says.

The Mayas created one of the great ancient civilizations—stretching across southeastern Mexico and northern Central America—with advanced mathematical, architectural, astronomical, and hieroglyphic systems, so it’s no surprise they knew how to eat. Chocolate, guacamole, and tortillas all originated in this part of the world, long before the Spanish colonizers arrived in the 15th century. But today, for visitors and even many urban Guatemalans, the country’s culinary heritage can be easy to miss. Most high-end restaurants strive for a Continental or North American vibe; local places tend to serve a handful of well-known platos tipicos such as pepián (a spiced meat stew) and beef enchiladas—dishes whose indigenous components are mixed with things the conquistadores brought over, including rice and cheese. Maya cuisine in its least adulterated form is best sampled in home kitchens and a few of Guatemala’s cheap set-menu diners, called comedores.

Holding a squawking black hen, Maria Boror, 77, stands on her concrete patio preparing to snap the bird’s neck. On the comal rests a bubbling pot of tomatoes, tomatillos, garlic, and four types of chiles, which will eventually be steamed together with the hen’s meat and chunks of pork, inside a casing of jumbo emerald green mashan leaves (a local variant of plantain leaves), to make a dish called suban-ik. After dispatching the hen with the assurance of someone versed in six decades’ worth of avian butchery, Boror drains its blood, walks to the sink to clean out its innards, and finds a surprise: a white egg, its shell fully formed. “We’ll eat it,” she says. “It was almost ready to come out.”

Ana Carlos, who’s showing me around for a couple of days, has brought me to meet Boror and her daughter Marta Hernandez Boror because they’re known for the suban-ik they prepare at their comedor in San Martín Jilotepeque. Carlos and I begin the day in Antigua, the supremely scenic, UNESCO-recognized colonial city where most of the country’s expats and tourists are concentrated, and we drive 90 minutes to the dusty but lively San Martín. Wealthy Guatemalans in Antigua and the capital of Guatemala City, two hours to the east, often celebrate weddings and birthdays with suban-ik; invariably the elaborate meal is prepared by their cook, who is likely to be a Maya woman. (Maya men have managed to stay out of the kitchen since about 500 BC.) Even in Boror’s house, suban-ik is a special occasion dish, since a live hen costs about 70 Guatemalan quetzals, or $10—no small sum in a country where 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and the typical wage is $1.50 an hour.

After Maria and Marta tie up the mashan leaves with pieces of strawlike cord called cibaque and stew the packet of meat and sauce on the stove, papillote style, the whole family, including two of Boror’s great-granddaughters, gathers around the table for lunch. The unanimous verdict: muy rico. The flavor of the thick vermilion sauce is simultaneously deep and subtle. Marta says some locals can distinguish the taste of each of the four different chiles, yet the distinctive grassy zing from the steamed leaves is just as potent. It can’t hurt that the Borors sourced every ingredient a few hours earlier at the daily outdoor market, two blocks away.

Braised Pork With Sesame and Pumpkin Seed Sauce (Choc’a)

Guatemala’s raucous local markets provide a crash course on rural life here. Whether in dedicated indoor spaces or in a jumble of outdoor stalls near a bus station, markets tend to function simultaneously as swap meets, social clubs, luncheonettes, and spiritual centers. (You might see a huipil-clad great-grandmother laying an offering of maize at a Catholic shrine in one corner, next to a teenager hawking stonewashed jeans, while in the parking lot an evangelical preacher shouts the secrets to salvation through his megaphone.) Though the Mayas have a reputation for being wary of outsiders, if you speak some Spanish and are up for tasting whatever anyone offers you, barriers quickly dissolve.

One morning while I stroll around the indoor stalls in San Cristóbal Verapaz, a six-hour drive north of Antigua in the lush coffee-growing region near the city of Cobán, someone mentions a local dish called sak-ik, a turkey stew with ground corn and chiles. Since there’s a power outage today, the vendors have lit some candles and nestled them in their stacks of raw chickens. Business is slow with the lights off, so we take sips of warm atol from Styrofoam cups and chat about sak-ik recipes. When one spice vendor finds out I’m from California, she asks if that’s near Oregon, where her brother lives, and wonders if I want to quit my job and launch a chile import-export business with her.

There’s less to joke about whenever conversations turn to the longtime persecution of Guatemala’s ethnic Mayas, which reached its peak during the civil war, when thousands were massacred by government troops. Like the multicolored huipils and headbands that women still wear every day in rural areas, the traditional dishes offer tangible links to a culture that’s often been neglected or actively suppressed by the country’s ruling classes. “Ritual has always been so important to the Mayas,” says Carlos, “and you still see a strong ceremonial aspect in so many ancient dishes.” Kak-ik, for example, is not just a turkey soup but also a key fixture in christening a new home; the blood of the slaughtered turkey is spread around the floor of the house before the bird makes it to the stove. In the highlands there’s a special variety of atol that’s prepared to mark the day when a boy gets his first haircut. The foam from the drink is rubbed onto his head, to ensure he’ll grow up healthy, with dark and shiny hair.

Throughout Guatemala there’s also a deep reverence for chocolate, which the Mayas consumed in liquid form before the Spanish arrived. Cacao bean sellers established some of the Mayas’ first trading routes, and beyond its ceremonial and medicinal importance, it was considered a luxury, used as currency, and later consumed by the Aztec elite following meals. In Quetzaltenango, the bustling city of 225,000 in the mountains two hours north of San Juan La Laguna, I hear more about cacao from Mirna Rojas, a sixth-generation Maya chocolatera, who since 2005 has run a local confectionery called Doña Pancha. “In the old days, when a Maya family had a visitor in the house, the highest honor was to serve a drink of chocolate,” she says. Rojas’ main concession to modernity is an electric mill, which saves her hours of crushing cacao beans at the grinding stone. (“My mother’s back was as muscular as a boxer’s, and she was tired all the time,” Rojas says.) She insists the best chocolate needs only two ingredients—cacao and sugar. Vanilla and chiles are also fine, says Rojas, as is milk. The real enemies are the added fats and soy lecithin found in most industrial chocolate today.

The most essential food of all for the ancient Mayas, of course, was maize—not just a crop but a vital force and, according to legend, the stuff the first humans were made from. Cooks here love to hold forth on the dozens of varieties of local corn and how to cultivate them (essential tip: the cooler the soil that the corn was grown in, the longer the tortillas made from it will last). And maize turns up at every single meal, including in the country’s ubiquitous tamales. Many Guatemalans claim that there are more types of tamales here than in Mexico. Popular versions like the rich, smoky pache, filled with potatoes, meat, and three kinds of chiles, are wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks and are big enough for a meal.

A few of Guatemala’s tastiest dishes prove to be the hardest to track down. Toward the end of my trip, in Quetzaltenango, I hear a few people rhapsodizing about something called choc’a—stewed pork with a musky, mole-like sauce. Surely I can try it somewhere in the city, a restaurant or at someone’s house? No, and no: Choc’a is another obscure, one-town-only specialty, so I’ll need to head south to the agricultural village of Almolonga and hope for the best.

One morning I board one of Guatemala’s notorious “chicken buses,” the repurposed American school buses painted in technicolor stripes and driven by men with a tendency to take hairpin turns at triple the speed limit. Soon I’m walking past terraced fields of carrots and radishes toward the food stalls in Almolonga’s main square. There’s no sign of choc’a anywhere, but a guy selling papayas and sapotes (a soft tropical fruit) tells me to come back at 1 p.m. and ask for Francisca. I do, and there she is at a busy outdoor stall, ladling a thick pinkish sauce over chunks of pork. The ancient Mayas didn’t eat beef or pork—both were introduced by the Spanish colonizers—but I overlook that detail as I down spoonfuls of this addictively unctuous dish, which combines the tahini-like creaminess of ground sesame and pumpkin seeds, the sweet tang of stewed tomatoes, and just the right overdose of black pepper. Francisca Siquaná de Cotoc invites me to her house the next day to watch her and her two daughters prepare that afternoon’s batch. The secret: toasting the seeds before grinding them by hand, then blending in the tomatoes right on the grinding stone. “Using a blender doesn’t just affect the texture but the flavor, too,” de Cotoc says.

The spicy Maya soup kak-ik, unlike choc’a, can be found without loitering for hours in markets while waiting for Francisca. It’s available in several parts of the country, even in restaurants, and is eminently Google-able. Imagine a triple-strength version of grandma’s turkey soup, with gamier meat, lots more cilantro, and a slow-burn jolt from local chiles. I sample it in its city of origin, Cobán, where Ana Carlos connects me to a woman named Carmen Grisela Popchun whose kak-ik is so renowned she once cooked it for the president of Guatemala. The recipe comes from her mother, she says, “who learned it from her mother, and you can guess who she learned it from.” Today Popchun has been hired to make enough kak-ik for a 200-person baptism celebration, meaning that her 14-year-old grandson will be killing a lot of turkeys in her cluttered courtyard in the middle of town.

Popchun is a no-nonsense type, her fingers deeply callused from years of moving things around on hot comals, and she has strong opinions about most topics. I figure that she’ll have lots to say about some of the other Maya dishes I’ve tried during the past week. I ask for her thoughts on suban-ik, puchon-ik, tukun-ik, and a few more, but Popchun looks at me blankly. She’s never heard of them.

Braised Pork With Sesame and Pumpkin Seed Sauce (Choc’a)

Spicy Guatemalan Pork and Chicken Stew (Suban-Ik)

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It’s not easy getting to Little Corn Island. The challenge is part of the charm. At least that’s what my girlfriend, Danielle, and I tell ourselves as we step onto the ferry, neither of us quite noticing that it isn’t really a ferry, but a working ship transporting thousands of gallons of gasoline. As the boat chugs into stomach-turning swells, diesel fumes fill the cramped passenger hold.

Seeking fresh air outside, I watch three men trolling for fish off the back of the boat, each clutching salt-crusted hand-lines. On a bench between greasy fuel drums, a gray-haired German man in wire-rim glasses has wedged himself into a child-sized life vest and stares grimly at the heaving horizon. One errant spark, his fierce look says to me, and we all go down together.

Ten miles and two-and-a-half hours later we enter the calm of Little Corn’s protected harbor. Just as we do a springtime squall opens overhead. The rain falls in gray curtains and a dozen teenage boys scramble onto the ship with wooden planks they use to roll the gasoline barrels off the deck and plunk them into the glassy water below.

Danielle chose Little Corn Island as a vacation spot where the two of us could escape New York’s pressure, structure, and noise. There are no taxis honking on this one square mile of land, no streetlights flashing. Electricity runs only at night. We’ve come for the sounds of waves, the rattling of wind in the palms, and not much else.

What we weren’t expecting on this dot of sea-sprayed jungle and sand is compelling food. In most resort destinations, isolation brings overpriced and underwhelming tourist fare. But here, where the local languages include Spanish, an English patois, Garifuna, and the indigenous Miskito, we find a cuisine that is both proudly self-sustaining and utterly fresh. The majority of the food is grown on the islands—bananas, tomatoes, breadfruit, cassava, other tubers—or fished from the surrounding clear turquoise waters. Soon we find ourselves on an unexpected culinary expedition, slurping down fresh coconut juice and inhaling simply prepared ceviche at every turn.

Off the boat, we take refuge under the covered porch of the first restaurant in sight, Miss Bridget’s, remove our packs, and grab a table. We order two cold Toñas and some curried yellowtail snapper, which comes with a side of crispy golden tostones (twice-fried plantains). As with most meals over the next five days, lunch blurs the lines between a commercial transaction and simply eating at someone’s home. The bathroom for customers is next to the family’s outdoor washboard and drying lines. The veranda at Miss Bridget’s, we realize as we sip our beers, is also simply Bridget’s veranda.

We dip our tostones in the curried milk and are stunned. The silky-spicy sauce, the flaky fresh snapper, the crunch of the tostones—how is this food so good? As we sop up the last drops of broth, a man in an American-flag T-shirt at an adjacent table introduces himself. This is Bridget’s husband, Elvis, a fisherman, who offers to take us trolling for barra (barracuda), king fish (king mackerel), and snapper. Fish and shellfish are plentiful on Little Corn. Spiny lobsters dominate the market—their season runs from midsummer to early spring and is an economic cornerstone—and during the annual August Emancipation Day festival, locals catch blue forest crabs and cook huge pots of crab soup packed with plantains and yucca, all swimming in a rich coconut broth. Elvis tells us that Bridget will cook whatever we catch. The melody of his baritone has the ring of gospel. How could we say no? We make a date for later that week, sling our packs on our backs, and head into the rain-cooled jungle.

There are no cars on Little Corn—the only “highways” are paved wheelbarrow paths through the Village and Caribe Town. For back roads, miles of dirt trails crisscross mango forests and dead-end at rocky bluffs and coconut grove beaches. Mangoes litter the forest floor in rotting piles—we pick the good ones for tomorrow’s breakfast, a kind of island grocery shopping I could get used to. The revolting noni fruit is also ubiquitous. These “hog apples” rot in mucus-colored stains on the ground and smell uncannily like blue-cheese dressing warming in the sun. But the noni fruit is also a sworn tonic for hangovers. At Yemaya, the island’s lone upscale resort, they are blended with coconut and cinnamon into a palatable but pungent noni-colada.

Aimless walks and random snacks give structure to our days. We wander into Miss Esther’s kitchen, a home-bakery hybrid, where a TV on a high shelf plays cartoons and we buy oven-warm coconut bread that smells like toasted coconut oil. We hide in the shade at Alfonso’s as his wife presses star fruits into juice from trees in their own backyard. We follow the sounds of reggae to the weekly baseball game, where women sell us peppery fried chicken behind the bleachers and an 8-year-old boy plies the crowd with his mom’s spiced beef patties, stuffed in golden-orange cornmeal pockets. Habana Libre, a Cuban standout near the harbor, serves the most delicious ceviche we have ever tasted.

Nicaraguan “Rundown” Seafood Soup

At Derek’s Place, the mini-resort of Ewok-esque bamboo palapas that we call home on the island’s north shore, a cook, Rachel Rebeca Sambola López, introduces us to the local version of “rundown.” The dish is common throughout the Caribbean, but recipes differ; in Jamaica, rundown is a slow-cooked coconut custard. On the Corn Islands and along Nicaragua’s east coast, it is more like a Creole bouillabaisse, a heady broth of spices and fresh-pressed coconut milk simmered with whatever seafood the cook finds when she “runs down” to the harbor market.

“This is our food,” López says with evident pride. The golden broth she makes starts with a coconut milk base cooked down with onion, garlic, sweet pepper, curry leaf, chiles, and fresh oregano. Cassava and breadfruit are added, and finally the different types of fish she bought earlier that day at the market.

“Rundown is a hearty food,” she lilts in her Garifuna song. “When you eat, it sits heavy in your stomach.”

We try a second version at Darinia’s Kitchen, where Darinia Jeanneth Bonilla Estrada has turned her modest patio into a cozy and casually charming destination. Hers, a consommé of fish broth and salty-sweet clarified coconut milk, is an elegant interpretation. She adds herbs, carrots, shrimp, and, on the night we visit, two types of fresh-caught local fish.

On one of our last days, we meet up with Elvis, as planned, to go fishing at dawn. Danielle reels in a fearsome-looking 15-pound barracuda, and with fillets to spare, we head back to Bridget’s. The cook suggests barra Caribbean-style—seared and flash-roasted in spiced coconut milk, the same flavors as rundown, but prepared sans broth. After we order, we see Bridget walk out the back door with a young green coconut and a huge machete. This is slow food. We order two more Toñas and sit back. There is nothing more to do, nothing else to see. We look out at the harbor, look back at one another, and think long and hard about nothing at all.

See the recipe for Nicaraguan “Rundown” Seafood Soup »

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Blackberry Masa Drink (Atole de Mora Negra)

The Menu

• Atole de Mora Negra (Blackberry Masa Drink)
• Fiambre (Guatemalan Composed Salad)
• Fresh bread

More About This Menu

1. Making fiambre is labor-intensive, but it’s all in the prep! Start by cleaning and chopping all of the ingredients into proper sizes as designated by the recipe. You can prep some of the vegetables and store them in the fridge in a cold water bath overnight (green beans, carrots, and celery will hold up to this best), and you can boil the eggs and chop the cured meats in advance. Start early the next day by boiling the ingredients in batches until tender, then leave plenty of time to marinate.
2. The recipe for fiambre is different in regions across Guatemala and from family to family. Red fiambre contains beets, while white fiambre does not (pink fiambre will contain just a few). Some recipes include shrimp, as this one does, and some do not. Feel free to adjust the ingredients to your preferences. The backbone of the dish comes from heavily brining the vegetables and including a good variety of cold meats.
3. Masa harina for the atole can be sourced online or at most Latin American groceries.
4. Read more about the tradition of fiambre and Guatemalan Day of the Dead celebrations in Ken Black’s article Saintly Salad.

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Driving down the Carretera Transistmica in Panama, I caught a whiff of smoke. Around the bend, a young woman swathed in billowing smoke caught my eye as she tended the grill outside a restaurant. Hypnotized, I pulled over and approached the cinder-block building as a dozen people, who I found out were her family members, looked on skeptically. This restaurant was their life, and after I complimented the char and aroma of the grilling chicken and asked for a taste, they warmed up to me. Grandma proudly sat mixing garlic, allspice, sherry vinegar, and orange juice, while her daughter, the grill master, made my plate. Eating juicy chicken straight from the flames, sighing with pleasure at each bite of crisp-skinned flesh dripping with garlicky marinade, we shared a moment of intensity and informality particular to the cookout, where the cook is part of the party and everyone is warmed by fire, smoke, and good company.

See the recipe for Pollo Al Ajillo (Panamanian Garlic Chicken) »

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The fish, rubbed with garlic and cumin, was frying, and the coconut milk was bubbling on the stove when Mama Nicha walked through the room. “Now it smells like a Garifuna kitchen!” she proclaimed in Spanish. At 75 years old, this tireless community leader presides over a busy household and language school in the seaside city of La Ceiba, Honduras. She was getting ready to teach a lesson to youngsters who were hoping to add English to the Spanish and Garifuna they already spoke.

Dionisia “Mama Nicha” Amaya-Bonilla and her students are Garifuna, descendants of Africans and Native Americans who live, a nation within nations, along the Caribbean coast of Honduras as well as in neighboring Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and, nowadays, several U.S. cities. The most common story of their origins tells of slave ships that sank in the early-17th century, and of the Africans who escaped the wrecks and swam to the island of St. Vincent, there to mix with the indigenous Carib Indians and to thrive for more than 100 years, their numbers reinforced by other escapees of the region’s slave plantations.

The Garifuna fished; they grew cassava and other Carib crops, as well as colonial imports like plantains, which they used in a dense mash akin to African fufu. They skirmished with the French and the British, resisting subjugation until 1797, when the British defeated them and exiled thousands of Garifuna to the island of Balliceaux. Starvation and illness decimated their numbers. Later that year, survivors were deported to the island of Roatan, off Honduras. From there they migrated to the mainland, eventually spreading out along Central America’s Caribbean coast. The Garifuna brought their culture and language with them, living off the bounty of the shore. Though modern times have seen the Garifuna squeezed out of many of their valuable beachfronts, they remain fierce in their identity.

“We were deported from St. Vincent because we refused to be enslaved,” Mama Nicha explained to me. “They deported us to nowhere, hoping we’d die. But we didn’t. It’s been 215 years, and we are still here.”

In the kitchen beside Mama Nicha’s classroom, her niece, Mirna Martinez, a big woman in a maroon dress and matching headwrap, was deftly cubing cassava and sweet potatoes in the palm of her hand with a dull kitchen knife. I knew the knife was dull because her cooking partner on this day, Robinson Chimilio, complained about it. A young chef in Coke-bottle glasses, Chimilio, like many Garifuna men, often works on cruise ships or abroad. He had arranged the mise-en-place just so for his dish—green banana dumplings called alabundigas, served with meaty turbot steaks in a coconut milk-based sauce. After a while, Martinez set out her tapou, a fish, green banana, and root vegetable stew emboldened with plenty of garlic and crimson achiote paste. We dug in, eating silently, scooping leftovers off of each other’s plates, picking fish from the bone with our hands.

“Semeiti weigie, idia?” said my guide and friend, Lina Hortensia Martinez, and then she translated from Garifuna: Our food is delicious, right?

Indeed it was. I could understand why Chimilio and Mirna Martinez took such pride in their cooking. Elemental yet opulently flavored, these dishes said a lot about who the Garifuna are, and how, in a changing and challenging world, they manage to hold fast to their identity.

“Our food is survival food,” said Mama Nicha after lunch. “We will not die of hunger if we have banana, fish, coconut, and we know that. You go to the sea and fish, and there are coconuts on the beach. You don’t need money.”

Of course, nothing, really, exists separately from money, not even the Garifuna culture. So I found the day I met Lina, a year before my trip to Honduras, at a food festival in the Bronx, where many of New York City’s estimated 200,000 Garifuna live. Lina was in New York promoting her business of exporting cassava bread made by Garifuna women’s cooperatives in the municipality of Iriona, in Honduras’ remote northeast. For these women the starchy flatbread, a Garifuna staple, offers a potential livelihood and therefore a way to keep their coastal lifestyle—one based on communal fishing, farming, and cooking—intact.

I was so compelled by the down-to-earth beauty of the Garifuna foods I sampled that day that I called Lina afterward; without hesitation she invited me down to Honduras. And that’s how I ended up here, among the Garifuna in and around La Ceiba, Lina’s home, eating delectable Garifuna food. At Chef Guity, a restaurant overlooking La Ceiba’s pier, we savored a creamy soup chock-full of tender hunks of conch, and another made with briny she-crabs bursting with roe. In the nearby Garifuna town of Corozal, we hung out beneath the pavilion roof of Restaurante Corozal, where proprietress Maritza Centeno maintains a museum of Garifuna folk objects, many of them cooking utensils. Of the enormous wooden mortar and pestle called a hana, used for pounding plantains, Centeno said, “This is African culture.” There was a grater called an egi, fashioned from bits of jagged stone embedded in a board, and a ruguma, the woven sleeve used to squeeze the juice from grated cassava.

A group of young musicians from the local church slapped out Garifuna rhythms on their drums, and we devoured platters of fried conch, kingfish, plantains, and rice and beans. Though the lunch included foods eaten, as well, by the country’s mestizo majority, the predominance of seafood reflected the Garifuna’s coastal palate, and the rice and beans were sweet from cooking in that quintessential Garifuna ingredient, coconut milk.

Lina and I walked off lunch, strolling past concrete-block houses wedged between the highway and the Caribbean Sea. “When the road was built,” Lina said, “people felt the land had been cut in half, so they moved to the beach side and sold the other. Now the Garifuna live shoved up next to one another, with health, water, and housing problems.”

Among other challenges facing the Garifuna along this coastline, there are the land-grabbing tourist developments in Trujillo, two hours east of Corozal; the palm oil plantations threatening to swallow up Iriona; and the encroaching pan-American drug trade. Then there’s lethal yellowing disease, which ravaged Honduras’ coconut palms in the 1990s. For the Garifuna, who use coconut profusely—frying fish and plantains in its oil; making soups, stews, and breads with its milk; cooking its grated meat with ginger and unrefined sugar to make a fudge-like sweet called dabuledu—the loss was devastating. Though disease-resistant coconut palms have been introduced, “these are not the ones we’re used to,” Lina explained. “They have less oil.”

Not that I would have known it from the wonderfully rich alabundigas and tapou and seafood soups I sampled. These Garifuna recipes are strong enough to have weathered the storm—despite the availability of fast foods and supermarket conveniences. “In the city, things have changed because of jobs and school. We have left that kind of cooking for the weekends, but we haven’t lost it,” said Lina’s friend Teofila Valerio, a law student and gifted home cook, as she peeled plantains in the kitchen of her house in La Ceiba. “The lifestyle has changed, but the culture of the Garifuna will not change. The food will not change.”

We had come to watch Teofila, who goes by Teo, make the most beloved of Garifuna dishes, hudutu. Prepared traditionally, many Garifuna dishes take a while and some effort to complete. But none match the labor intensiveness of hudutu. Both sweet, ripe plantains and unripe ones, which add a starchy consistency, must be boiled and then pounded—and pounded and pounded—to a smooth, dense paste. The paste is served alongside of, and as a utensil for, the fish and coconut stew that completes the dish. Often, Lina said, while the plantains are boiling, “men take a nap and expect to be awakened to do the mashing.”

Since we had no men with us, the job was delegated to Lina. “When they hear the pestle hitting the mortar in the community,” she told me, “people pass by your house and say, ‘Oh, you’re making hudutu!’ That’s a special sound.” While Lina mashed, Teo prepared the stew. She started with coconut. If this were another dish—if she were making the Garifuna’s sweet coco bread, for instance, which requires the richest milk—she might have stopped at what they call “first water,” squeezing the grated fruit with only a small amount of water so as not to dilute its aromatic compounds. But for the stew she soaked and strained the grated coconut repeatedly to extract the milk. To that she added cumin, allspice, and a sofrito, or flavor base, of diced and sauteed aromatics—garlic, bell peppers, basil, culantro, and oregano, all pulled from her garden. Then, into the pot went thick kingfish steaks marinated in lime. Along with the pounded plantains, the finished stew made a hefty meal. I mopped up the last, luxurious drops with a sleek, sweet-savory hunk of the plantain mash and thought of the man I had met the day before in Corozal. “After I finish hudutu,” he had told me, “I go to sleep.”

The following morning, Lina, Teo, and I made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to the municipality of Iriona, traversing highways, forging rivers, and bumping along on country roads walled with coconut palms. Along the way, Lina serenaded us with Garifuna songs: “Meiguada la tia bere, meiguada la, meiguada la.” May your strength not fall, may it not fall, may it not fall.

When we reached our destination in Iriona, the village of Ciriboya, women were gathered around a thatch-roofed hut that serves as a communal kitchen. “The Garifuna community does everything around feasting and food. If there’s no food, they will highly complain,” said Lina.

The occasion was the 40th birthday of Mirna Ruiz, a taut-muscled, lively woman who is a member of a cassava-producing cooperative that Lina works with. We found Ruiz and her friends at her sister’s house, finishing up breakfast—coco bread and cups of porridge-like adulu, made with coconut milk and cassava flour, flavored with unrefined sugar and cinnamon—and assembling a few stews. As they cooked, the women bantered in both Spanish and Garifuna, a language derived from their Carib ancestors’ but with plenty of African and adopted European words.

Like their language, their cuisine has borrowed from the dominant culture around them, while retaining its distinctly Garifuna character. I was handed a pot of ariran guisou, a spicy-sweet, mestizo-style chicken stew, and instructed to carry it down the road to the thatch-roof hut, where one of the women slid it into wood-fired handmade clay oven. Lina carried the darasa, green banana paste steamed in banana leaves harvested from the women’s yards. “We call these traveling tamales,” Lina said. “They can take away your hunger if you are walking a long distance.”

The women here are used to journeys on foot; every week, they trek with their machetes to the steep hillside where they farm cassava. From the long, muddy path up to their high patch of land, the view of their pristine beach is breathtaking. It’s easy to see why others would want to take it all from them. But as their men and children leave the village to find work elsewhere, the women have fought to hold on to this land, for cassava’s sake. “Ereba nanibei weiyei,” said Ruiz. Cassava bread is my husband. “Whenever I need some money, I know cassava bread will feed me.”

While we celebrated, sitting at tables in the shade of a nance tree and feasting on guisou, rice and beans, darasa, and caramelly, dense banana and pumpkin breads, the women took turns working over a clay stove inside the thatched-roof hut. Using a hand broom fashioned from shrub branches, they spread cassava flour on a hot iron plate, patted it down with a wooden press, and when the starch had bound the disk-like bread together, they flipped it to toast the other side. Then they swiftly trimmed its edges with a machete, creating a big, bronzed, perfect circle.

“God made people in his image, and he made us Garifuna with our qualities,” one proficient breadmaker told me. “When we dance and when we sing and when we eat, we show the world who we are, and we are content. We believe in our ancestors, and they have left us a lot of things: the cassava bread, all our foods.”

She handed me a piece of the freshly cooked bread. It was nutty and chewy and smoky; it tasted wonderful. Then we all stood in a circle beneath the nance tree holding hands. Lina led us in prayer, asking God and the Garifuna ancestors for the wisdom and strength they would need to prosper as a community, and giving thanks for the gift of the meal we had all shared.

See the travel guide to Honduras’ Garifuna Coast »
See a gallery of recipes from the Garifuna Coast »
See more photos in the gallery »
See a gallery of Garifuna cooking essentials »

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