Strolling the aisles of your local Goodwill, you might pause at a shelf piled with old porcelain plates decorated with flowers, vines, and bucolic scenery. These affordable dishes—known as transferware—were invented for the emerging middle class in 18th-century England. Inspired by hand-painted Chinese porcelain but stamped by machine, then exported by the shipload, English transferware became the go-to dish for early American households. 

Transferware’s earthenware base material (sometimes substituted for ironstone, porcelain, or bone china) kept the dishes highly affordable, but their printed-on monochrome designs—featuring castles, courting couples, and other intricate scenes—looked anything but. The technique lives on today, both in pricey, collectible Limoges porcelain from France, as well as in lower-grade plastic servingware that’s suddenly in vogue.

Across the United States, well-known chefs are now reviving transferware, swapping minimalist white dishes for Southern Willow Blue, English Chippendale, Historic American Brown, and other vintage designs. There’s a comfort to these old dishes, which conjure up meals in grandparents’ homes. These days, far from feeling formal or stuffy, the quaint motifs encourage a more relaxed dining experience. Here are the restaurants at the forefront of the transferware renaissance. What’s old is new again.

Gift Horse

272 Westminster St., Providence, RI

Before opening this groovy raw bar, chef-owner Benjamin Sukle (of Oberlin restaurant fame) dove into 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s dinnerware designs to match the new restaurant’s “timeless, brash style.” Rosebud Chintz from Spode was a winner, and eBay and Etsy got the job done. “Every time I have an empty plate in front of me, I can’t help but turn it over to see who made it, what collection it’s from, and how old it is,” says Sulke, a self-proclaimed “lifelong plate flipper.”

Get the look:
Royal Albert Rose Confetti 5-Piece Bone China Place Setting
Villeroy & Boch Audun Ferme Dinner Plate
Gracie China Rose Chintz Porcelain 8-Inch Dessert Plate

Hermosa

4356 W. Armitage Ave., Chicago, IL

Ethan Lim’s modern Cambodian restaurant (named after its neighborhood) pays homage to his late mother, Momma Lim, who ran a noodle stand in pre-war Battambang. With the COVID-19 pandemic in the rearview, Lim “wanted to focus on creating a space where time stood still and the service style was reflective of being at home,” a philosophy that shines through in such touches as his partner’s grandmother’s English Chippendale plates—on which he serves Dungeness crab and caviar.

Get the look:
Royal Albert Old Country Roses 10.25-Inch Dinner Plate
Portmeirion Botanic Garden Dinner Plates
Loki Dessert Plates by Matthew Williamson

Mister Mao

4501 Tchoupitoulas St., New Orleans, LA

At her maximalist “tropical roadhouse,” chef-owner Sophina Uong swaps starched tablecloths and matching plates for a hodgepodge of colorful transferware. “I know it drives our cooks and servers crazy, because nothing matches and things are impossible to stack together neatly, but to me, that’s the beauty of recycling pieces of history,” she says. Menu standouts include avocado chaat and turmeric-potato pani puri.

Get the look:
Bitossi Vintage-Inspired Floral Dinnerware
Gien Les Depareillees Rebus Dinner Plate
Spode Woodland Turkey Dinnerware

Chubby Fish

252 Coming St., Charleston, SC

Housed in a defunct corner store, James London’s dock-to-table restaurant sprinkles in deep blue transferware to complement the casual, nautical feel. “We try not to take ourselves too seriously,” says London, referring to dishes featuring tuna belly toast and caviar sandwiches served on mismatched china. “Guests get excited when they see plates or glasses they grew up with, and often bring us boxes of plates from their garage that they think will work with our lineup,” he says.

Get the look:
Spode Blue Italian 16-Piece Set
222 Fifth Adelaide Woodland 16-Piece Dinnerware Set
Williams-Sonoma English Floral Dinnerware Collection

Troubadour Bread & Bistro

381 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, CA

Boulangerie by day, bistro by night, Troubadour Bread & Bistro’s whimsical aesthetic shines through in the escargot and tartiflette served on gold-rimmed Limoges, a transferware subset popular in 19th-century France. “I love that each piece has a story, and that we get to give these plates a proper stage,” says co-owner Sean McGaughey.

Get the look:
Famille Rose Dinner Plates
RHODE Dinner Plate Sets
Noritake Hertford 12-Piece Set

Ma Der Lao Kitchen

1634 N. Blackwelder Ave., Suite 102, Oklahoma City, OK

The shatterproof melamine dishes at this brother-and-sister-owned Lao restaurant are a nod to the duo’s childhood. “I want patrons to feel like they’re at my mom’s house,” says co-owner Jeff Chanchaleune, who serves mugifuji pork katsu and nam khao on the same plastic, floral-rimmed plates he ate from growing up.

Get the look:
Siren Song Floral Print Melamine Plates
Tarhong Cottage Blue Floral Melamine Dinnerware
Sandia Melamine Dinnerware Set

Oma’s Hideaway

3131 SE Division St., Portland, OR

To create a restaurant that existed “outside the space-time continuum,” the co-owners of this Singapore and Malaysian hawker-inspired eatery leaned into bold, clashing patterns and ornate details such as lustrous fabrics, thrifted floral transferware, and a ’70s-esque iridescent snakeskin bar top.

Get the look:
Bitossi Bel Paese Fruit Accent Plate
Sur La Table Italian Blue Floral Salad Plate
Abi Dessert Plates

The post The Restaurant Design Trend We Can’t Get Enough Of appeared first on Saveur.

At the back of a butchery in the town of Martina Franca, Riccardo Ponte claps his massive, baseball-mitt hands, calloused from years of charcoal burns and judo holds, and presents the next plate. Tender chunks of veal lung wrapped in sinister layers of pork fat form a glistening pyramid on the table. “Pugliese chewing gum,” he says with a grin, before retreat- ing back to his grill, a central fixture of his shop, called Mang e Citt, or “Sit Down and Eat” in Pugliese slang. Most of the macellerias—butchers that double as informal restaurants—have, out of convenience, moved to standard-issue flat-top grills in recent years. Ponte’s setup, however, is somewhere between a pizza oven and a hearth, a kind of infernal cubby hole carved directly into the wall of his small fluorescent-lit shop. Stacks of meat balance precariously on skewers; coals, dispersed in various piles, create heat zones measured purely by feel. Ponte insists that this technique, established centuries ago by the butchers of Martina Franca, makes all the difference: “You can taste the process,” he says. 

I had come to Puglia—the gleaming, postcard-ready wedge of Southern Italy that sticks into the Ionian Sea like a boot heel—to eat. This, I recognize, is not a very original quest: Elizabeth Gilbert has been there, Stanley Tucci has done that. Spend enough time digging through guide books and suggested itineraries, and you’d be excused for thinking the only thing in Italy to do is eat.

When we travel to eat, though, we’re often looking for a story—a tale to bring back home, or a clear, easy-to-digest version of a place that fits squarely in our own mental atlases: The ruby red aperitivo glistening in the Tuscan sun, the trapizzino held aloft on the Spanish Steps, the pale green scoop of pistachio gelato, doled out in a Sicilian alleyway. Or, in Ponte’s case, the small-town, larger-than-life chef, seemingly grief-stricken by your physical inability to accept “just one more” piece of grilled meat.

It’s easy to arrive in a place like Puglia with pre-conceptions about Southern Italy: a hot, quiet place, where things move slowly and naps are plentiful. But I quickly learned that for every person doing something one way, there is someone else doing the very same thing—for the very same reasons—a completely different way. As one meal bled into the next, I found that every time I built a story out of the meals I ate and the people I met, every time I thought I had found some definitive sense of what Puglia actually tastes like, it quickly fell away.

While I wish I could take credit for stumbling upon Ponte’s establishment, I was part of a tour group traveling through the region. Roads and Kingdoms, an online travel magazine, has, in recent years, pivoted toward offering small-group, food-centric trips around the world. Trips like the one I took to Puglia are focused not on big-name restaurants, but on offering a backstage pass to show travelers how the actual sausage gets made, drawing on what co-founder Nathan Thornburgh describes as “an archipelago of interesting people.” 

If it all sounds vaguely Bourdainian, that’s not a coincidence. Founded in 2012 by Thornburgh and food writer Matt Goulding, the company and its journalism was for many years supported and funded by Anthony Bourdain. Today, Roads and Kingdoms’ trips actively try to avoid what Thornburgh refers to as “following the umbrella across the piazza.” Potential guests must undergo an interview process to make sure they’re a good fit for the group: Fighting couples and Michelin star-hunters have been turned away in the past. 

Roads and Kingdoms’ shift toward this kind of “don’t-call-it-a-group-trip group trip” is indicative of a wider trend in travel, one in which access is everything. Whether helmed by chefs, academics, or journalists, experiences are being gently curated in a way that feels uniquely yours as they lodge themselves into your memory. Serendipity, by definition, can’t be manufactured. Oftentimes, the best partner to the unexpected is time—slow down and stretch out a trip and you’re bound to meet the characters and have the conversations that end up solidifying the travel experience in your mind. That’s harder on an organized tour, but, as these experiences seem to posit, not impossible.

The interesting person leading us on this particular trip was Eugenio Signoroni, one of Italy’s most celebrated food writers, as well as the editor of the hotly contested “Osterie d’Italia” guidebooks from Slow Food International’s publishing house, which list and review the best traditional restaurants across Italy. On day one, as golden hour sets in at the masseria, or farmhouse, that would serve as our base, Signoroni explains that this is a trip to shatter preconceptions, not confirm them. “You know the stories of the nonna, the Italian grandma and her amazing cooking?” he asks. “I want you to know it’s a total myth: My daughter’s grandmother doesn’t know how to cook a damn thing.” It was a good line for a tour built on this kind of punk-rock premise, but in talking to him afterwards, it became clear that the sentiment behind it is true.

“We like to build up this romantic idea of tradition,” Signoroni says when I ask what he notices when talking to first-time visitors to Italy. “It makes us feel safer and more comfortable.” Four years prior, when I visited Puglia for the first time, I had felt a kind of self-satisfied contentment: Sipping wine and watching a blacksmith working on new horseshoes for the stallions he kept behind his shop, the memory fits squarely into the romantic. “If we want to really understand a place,” Signoroni says, “we have to see it as it is, not as we think it should be.” 

That doesn’t mean you won’t find intergenerational recipes and deep-seated heritage in Puglia. This is a place fiercely proud of its traditions, themselves a mishmash of the steady wave of conquerors who came to this land over millennia. It’s a pride that has been reinforced by recent history too, borne from decades of being looked down upon by the rest of the country. Long one of the poorest regions in Italy, Puglia was left behind by the industrialization that took hold in the north. As a result of a largely subsistence economy, cucina povera—literally “poor kitchen”—is the backbone of Pugliese cuisine. It’s only in recent years, as Puglia has marketed itself as a global destination, that the culinary label has been wielded not with shame, but with a kind of reclaimed dignity. 

At Cibus, a family-run restaurant tucked away in a labyrinth of climbing alleyways in the town of Ceglie Messapica, every dish reveals new layers of com- plexity that belies the kind of catch-all utilitarian implication of cucina povera. The Silibello family offers a crash course in the ingredients of the Salento region: Lampascioni, often translated as “bitter onion” but actually the bulb of a type of hyacinth, takes on the consistency of burnt newsprint when fried, yielding a bitterness that prepares the palate for what comes next. Stringy stracciatella cheese is teleported out of the heart of the burrata balls where it’s most often found, and spread out onto overflowing plates, to be eaten by the dripping forkful. Slices of capocollo and other cuts from the Apulo-Calabrese black pig are arranged into a gradient of richness with clear instructions on how to avoid blowing out your taste buds with hits of lard too early. To bring us back to earth, a Pugliese classic that emerged from tough times: fave e cicoria, a bed of mashed fava beans, topped with chicory leaves and lashed with olive oil. A ragù follows, made with tender horse meat and ricotta forte (an aged, barnyard-forward cheese with a long shelf life ideal for peasant pantries), and juicy, butter-soft slices of beef from the region’s Podolica cow, equally prized for its meat as for its milk.

With its familial ambience, its focus on hearty, of-the-soil ingredients, and its secret, in-house cheese cave, Cibus is the kind of place most travelers dream about when they dream about Italy. And it is exactly as satisfying as you might imagine. Here, all of Signoroni’s “romantic ideas of tradition,” are confirmed to carry at least a foundation of reality. But just 30 miles away, in the town of Putignano, those vague notions of some idealized past are being intentionally—and ruthlessly—torn apart.

At Osteria Botteghe Antiche, chef Stefano D’Onghia takes many of the same ingredients—the same dishes, even—and brings them into a kind of parallel universe where what is known and established gives way to what there is left to learn. There is lampascioni here too, but it is accompanied by a kind of capocollo pocket, filled with chickpea purée. Fave e cicoria becomes a vague signpost rather than a cornerstone of tradition: The fava purée is stuffed into a single grilled green pepper and served alongside a spoonful of caramelized red onions. Ricotta makes an appearance, too, but it is imbued with mint and hidden within the delicate folds of a zucchini flower. Orecchiette, the ear-shaped pasta often served in Puglia with broccoli rabe, is made—intentionally, cheekily—with grano arso, burnt grain that for centuries was the only stuff available to the poorest of the poor. It shares the plate with indulgent chunks of grilled octopus, as if to say look how far we’ve come.

The next evolution of D’Onghia’s menu will be a push toward sustainability, something he argues is at the core of Puglia’s seemingly simple, local-first cuisine. “Nowadays it’s hard to sell a meat dish for less than 18 euros, which is strange for a region like Puglia,” D’Onghia told me. “I want to think about how to make cuts of meat that are not expensive—liver, tongue, offal—just as delicious.” He points to the octopus orecchiette as a dish that is becoming just too expensive for him to sell. What would it taste like, he wonders, if instead of serving the meat, he sous-vide cooked the octopus’s liver, a piece often discarded by fishermen? Somewhere, in some- one’s imagined reality, a nonna in a sauce-streaked apron can’t believe her ears.

Other days highlight both the diversity of the gastronomic scene and the utter impossibility of fitting it into a neat package. There’s the pork cookout in the sun-slapped courtyard of a pig farm belonging to local producers Salumi Martina Franca. It lasts for hours, and transitions organically into a long walk through the land where the animals roam free. At Intini, an olive oil producer outside of Alberobello, a fourth-generation maker explains how some visitors are disappointed to see gleaming industrial equipment instead of charming wooden presses. “If I made it the traditional way, it wouldn’t be good,” Pietro Intini says. “The real revolution in olive oil production only happened 20 years ago.”

Even where traditions do remain intact, modernity creeps in. In Taranto’s Mare Piccolo, an inland sea, Luciano Carriero, a mussel farmer from a family of mussel farmers, explains how a tight-knit network of families has come together to create a cooperative, keeping the sticky fingers of organized crime away. As we float around the bay, he draws long necklaces of the bivalves out of the water and shucks them on the spot, to be eaten raw, paired with bites of provolone cheese and washed down with sparkling wine. He insists I try more than one. “It’s like a big box of chocolates,” Carriero says, one-upping Forrest Gump forever. “Each mussel tastes a little different.” That night, I follow his bounty to its final resting place at Antica Osteria la Sciabica, tucked away along a seaside promenade in the city of Brindisi. The seafood soup doubles as a taxonomy of marine life: fish, squid, shrimp, and, yes, mussels, all afloat in a rich, tomato-based broth. The restaurant buzzes with the sounds of spoons scraping the very last drops from drained bowls.

There is something about visiting the so-called “Old World” as a resident of the so-called “New” one that sets off a kind of rabid, voyeuristic urge to witness “tradition.” Some parts of Puglia, like the family-run cheese cave hidden under a bookshelf at Cibus, or the focaccerias in every village churning out flatbreads in the same oven for generations, do feel stuck in time, and I feel an almost involuntary delight whenever I encounter people doing things as they had been done since before Italy was Italy. But I soon find myself most looking forward to the moments of disruption. I had been warned, in a way, by Signoroni’s meditations on what we often expect from so-called “authentic experiences.” I had caught little rebellions in the form of culinary innovation, and in the subtle twisting of convention. But nothing, it was becoming clear, is that simple.

On the outskirts of Bari, in Altamura, I meet Vito Dicecca who, along with his siblings, has inherited the family cheesemaking tradition, which he treats with all the sacrosanct rulebook-abidance of a mad scientist. Out of a relatively small kitchen, the Dicecca family whips up around 800 pounds of lactic heresy every day. “Anyone in Puglia can make small cheese,” Dicecca says before pointing to his brother Paolo who is in the process of tying a mozzarella knot the size of a newborn. “I want to make big cheese.” He shows off a milky goat cheese concoction, best used as a dip for crispy bagel-shaped taralli crackers (“the best drunk food,” Dicecca calls it). A bright orange cousin to caciocavallo goes by the name “Life on Mars.” While conventional wisdom says mozzarella needs to be made from buffalo milk, the Dicecca family makes a goat milk version, granting the usually mild cheese a deliciously grassy funk.

To try Dicecca’s wildest creation, I have to wait until we leave the shop in Altamura and travel into the pinewoods of the Mercadante nature reserve. There, the family has opened Baby Dicecca, a cheese bar that serves as a tasting room and satellite for experimentation. After the kind of long, languorous meal I’ve grown accustomed to in Puglia, Dicecca brings out dessert. Looking more like a cake than a wheel of cheese, this has, for good reason, become the Diceccas’ most famous act of sacrilege. To create it, he drops a wheel of blue cheese into a barrel of primitivo wine, where it soaks for 100 days. Afterwards, it’s topped with candied sour cherries, adding a tartness to the indulgent sweet and salty combination. It’s cut into wedges that are inten- tionally about 12 times too big for one person to handle and served with even more primitivo wine. It’s called, Dicecca tells me with a conspiratorial grin, “Amore Primitivo.”

This, I think, seems like the kind of person who takes great pride in his inventions, who revels in the fact that he’s challenging tradition with each new wacky idea. Does he spend as much time thinking about authenticity as I do? “Are you worried some- one is going to take your idea, or try to do some other, worse version of it?” I ask. I imagine grocery stores lined with tasteless, harmless cheeses, smothered in neon jelly.

“It doesn’t matter who invents the thing or who has the original story,” Dicecca says while doling out the next in an endless series of wine refills. “It only matters who does it best.”

Recipes

Brindisi Seafood Stew

Get the recipe >

Orecchiette with Octopus Ragù and Chickpea Purée

Get the recipe >

Ricotta-Stuffed Squash Blossoms with Fried Zucchini Coins

Get the recipe >

The post The Cuisine of Puglia Defies Definition appeared first on Saveur.

Chef Stefano D’Onghia opened Botteghe Antiche on a storybook square in the town of Putignano after apprenticing at several high-end restaurants around Southern Italy. “You have to walk a careful line between respecting tradition and innovating,” he says of his constantly changing menu, which leans toward cheeky takes on Pugliese classics. This dish seems designed to foreground versatility: a single plant, torn asunder to build two very different experiences. The lightness of airy, minty ricotta nestled in delicate zucchini flowers provides a bite-by-bite counterpoint to the heartier fried zucchini coins.

Featured in “The Cuisine of Puglia Defies Definition,” by Sebastian Modak.

The post Ricotta-Stuffed Squash Blossoms with Fried Zucchini Coins appeared first on Saveur.

At Botteghe Antiche, Chef Stefano D’Onghia makes orecchiette with grano arso flour. Literally translating to “burnt grain,” grano arso is thought to refer to what was left behind after the stubble of harvested wheat fields had been burnt off, often gathered by poor farmers before the next crop was planted. Store-bought pasta will suffice, and you can find dried grano arso orecchiette in specialty Italian food shops. D’Onghia pairs the pasta with indulgent chunks of octopus instead of the traditional broccoli rabe.

Featured in “The Cuisine of Puglia Defies Definition,” by Sebastian Modak.

The post Orecchiette with Octopus Ragù and Chickpea Purée appeared first on Saveur.

At La Sciabica, a seaside outpost in the Adriatic port city of Brindisi, this seafood stew is a culmination of generations of fishermen throwing whatever they’ve got into a pot and feeding a family. In chef Ernesto Palma’s original recipe, he instructs cooks to “look at the sea for a minute” while adjusting the salt to taste before serving.

Featured in “The Cuisine of Puglia Defies Definition,” by Sebastian Modak.

The post Brindisi Seafood Stew appeared first on Saveur.

This creamy and aromatic chicken is cooked down in coconut milk, brightened with fresh tomato and lime. The resulting gravy pairs beautifully with cassava, a dense and starchy tuber integral to foodways of the African diaspora, particularly in Latin America. You may use one whole chicken or an equal weight of Cornish hens, which are traditional in Palenque, Colombia, cuisine. 

Featured in “Colombia and West Africa Unite on the Plate in this Fascinating Food Town,” by Kayla Stewart.

The post Creole Coconut Chicken appeared first on Saveur.

Down a gravel pathway in a rural Colombian town, just over 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, a group of African women donning billowy dresses offer up baskets filled with sweets: coconut-laden cocadas, chewy caballitos, and the ever-so-sweet popped millet balls known as alegría, from the Spanish word for “joy.” Cloaked in the saturated red, yellow, and blue of the Colombian flag, the women, known as palenqueras, make a living here peddling fresh fruits and homemade treats to locals and visitors alike. But it’s not just the palenqueras’ snacks that are sweet; the quiet roads of San Basilio de Palenque are paved with the sweetness of freedom.

Palenque, as its name is typically shortened, is the first free African village in the Americas, and descendants of African slaves exist here in a way that’s foreign to most other descendants of slaves, myself included: There is no police system here, and never has been. Instead, locals self-govern, and approach disputes using locally-trusted practices of forgiveness and conflict resolution. This atmosphere has enabled the community’s African heritage to flourish well beyond the legacy of Colombian enslavement. Elders retain ancient medicinal practices, young musicians revitalize erstwhile music traditions, and home cooks and chefs preserve their generations-old recipes and culinary techniques—all rooted in customs and practices brought over by their enslaved ancestors in the early 16th century. 

That heritage was immediately evident even before I arrived in Palenque, along with about 10 other Black American travelers. Roughly 4.7 million Colombians are of African descent, making up just under 10 percent of the country’s population. In Cartagena, 30 miles or so to the north, their influence is most recognizable in the street food: Arepas, the popular flatbreads frequently stuffed with meat and cheese, are made from a dough of ground and mashed maize, a common ingredient for Indigenous and Black Colombians. Among vendors doling out papas con huevo y carne (potato balls with eggs and meat) and potato- or meat-stuffed empanadas, the palenqueras, who sometimes commute north to make more money in Cartegena’s main squares, are easily visible in their vibrant colors, selling the same sweets I encountered in their storied hometown. 

In Palenque, though, that African influence extends far beyond the food: It’s an inextricable feature of the place itself. As you arrive in town, you are welcomed immediately by a striking statue of the freedom fighter Benkos Biohó, a Guinea Bissau–born revolutionary who escaped a Spanish slave port in Cartagena in the 16th century and led his people to freedom. Settling in the mountainous Montes de María region of the country, he organized a runaway slave network to help other enslaved Africans reach their liberation. He was ultimately captured and executed in 1621, but his efforts toward freedom weren’t entirely in vain: In 1713, after years of failing to take back the settlement, the Spaniards surrendered their attacks, and Palenque effectively became the first free African village, by decree of the King of Spain. Today, lionized through the brass statue, Biohó extends a single shackled arm, grasping for one more chance to bring another soul into a free world.

More than 300 years after its founding, food, art, and music have become some of Palenque’s most prominent features. Walking through the gravel roads, songs drift from open windows, while local bands perform in the streets throughout the day. Drum beats and the sounds of rhythmic steps merge with the music as it crescendos and reverberates across town. Brightly painted murals adorn storefronts and walls, many depicting Black women experiencing the ebbs and flows of life. 

As I swipe beads of sweat from my forehead, I see a mural showing a Black woman with words inscribed in her braids, an ode to a clever trick among enslaved African women who braided maps and instructions into their hair to provide key information and escape routes during the transatlantic slave trade. They would braid seeds into their hair as well, which enabled ingredients like tamarind, bitter melon, kola nut, and the subtly sweet melegueta pepper to become part of Colombia’s foodways. Elsewhere, a stoic Black woman’s eyes seem to meet the end of the short road, and a colorful “Black Lives Matter” sign points to Black people’s interconnected, global fight for liberation. 

I am soon encircled by a group of children, recruiting me into their game of tag as we approach “The House of Music.” Founded by local musical group Kombilesa Mi (which means “my friend,” in Palenquero, the Creole language here), the small museum is home to a collection of regionally specific instruments, like the Cuban-inspired marímbula and large drums called buleadors. The band members hope to transform the space to welcome even more visitors, and are actively raising money to reach their $12,000 goal. “Music is really the heart and soul of Palenque,” says Blue Apple Beach hotelier Portia Hart, “so having an institution like this readily available for the community and visitors is imperative.” 

Palenque’s music history includes a combination of traditions brought over and adapted by enslaved Africans from places including Nigeria and Central Africa. In 1927, Cuban influences reached the local music scene, which continued to evolve as more local musicians drew inspiration from other parts of the diaspora. As we walk to lunch, we are treated to some music from a local group that march near us down the road, dressed in some of the cleanest multicolored short sets in the area, their ebullient lyrics and colorful instruments rousing the entire neighborhood.

“Everything we do—how we learn how to use our environment, how we prepare the plants that grow nearby, the way we prepare fish, the way we prepare our medicine—it’s a result of our heritage from the African people,” says Víctor Simarra Reyes, a chef, educator, and an advocate for Palenque pride. 

Just a few blocks away from Biohó’s statue, at a friend’s home, Reyes has prepared an exquisite meal for us. Quiet and uninterested in small talk, Reyes focuses on getting the food to our table, which is covered in bright, pear-green banana leaves. Within just a few minutes, there are generous helpings of meat, rice, stews, and sauces. Reyes throws his towel over his shoulder, and gestures with his hands in urgency. 

“Eat,” he says. And so we do. I take handfuls of hen and cassava in a lightly sweet coconut sauce, served with a thick red bean pottage. We all take increasingly bigger bites of his bollo de plátano con cerdo asado, a traditional plantain bun cooked with roasted pork; and his cabeza de gato, a smashed green plantain snack he’d decided that day to combine with a kind of fresh cheese. We enjoy our share of sweets during a magnificent dessert spread: alegría, like the palenqueras served, sweet and fragrant with coconut, and enyucado, a cassava cake enlivened with star anise. 

It’s a marvelous feast that clearly has required hours of cooking. Reyes explains that he chose to share these dishes not in spite of their difficulty, but because of it. “We wanted to show that this cooking is not simple,” Reyes says. “It requires a lot of time, and a lot of effort.” This education is part of a larger movement that Reyes has long championed—working with Palenque cooks and chefs to preserve and create from their local foodways, rather than have their food expressed by non-Black chefs and writers. He has become a voice for sharing what he describes as Palenque’s “rustic” dining with the world, and fully and proudly communicates the integral role African roots play in their food.

Reyes’ work is documented in the cookbook Kumina ri Palenge pa tó Paraje, or “Palenquero Cooking for the World,” in English: a community collaboration he spearheaded to document recipes spanning more than 300 years of the town’s history. He and his wife, Ruth Reyes, consulted more than 600 local home cooks, collecting recipes and selecting an elite group of recipe writers and testers. “We were the first ones to go through the recipes, collect them, and put them on paper so we don’t let these traditions die,” Reyes says. Together, they produced the first cookbook documenting Palenque’s cuisine, which went on to receive the “Best Cookbook in the World” award at the 2014 Gourmand World Cookbook awards in Beijing. 

Before Reyes was a chef, he was a young African Colombian boy, helping his grandmother with her sancocho trifásico, a three-meat soup that typically took a full day to prepare. Often served with cassava and rice, both of which Reyes says are mainstays of the local diet, the soup is a peppery, aromatic, and deeply soothing dish that has persisted in home kitchens. He recalls the once-ubiquitous (and labor-intensive) bollo de maíz, a fried, roasted corn snack, which he laments had disappeared from many Palenque homes by the time he was a young man.

I get the chance to experience some of this labor with Antonia Cassiani, a Palenque native and local tour guide who goes by the name “Samba.” Gripping a massive pestle along with another partner, we rhythmically beat the corn as our group sings songs to encourage us. The process is reminiscent of an enduring practice in which women pile rice, grains, or corn into a massive wooden mortar and use their physical strength to do what locals call, “pillaring the corn.” That is, grinding the ingredients while singing songs that illustrate their dreams, concerns, and everyday thoughts. “This kitchen instrument was the creative engine of many women who poured their ideas into it, and sang their sorrows to it,” says Reyes. “It’s another example of just how important Black women are to our community, and to our food.”

When Reyes first started cooking, he picked up history and recipes orally; it wasn’t until later in his life that he learned to read and write so he could record and share his knowledge. When he graduated from elementary school at the age of 50, he immediately put his new skills to use: As part of his graduation requirements, which encouraged students to do something impactful for the community, he authored the cookbook. The goal for most, it seems, in Palenque, is not to climb and climb and climb chasing trivial achievements, but rather to salvage, to save, and to secure. 

“I take pride in my role as the representative of our traditions and our cuisine,” says Reyes. “After all these years of working, that’s what I cherish most.” 

Palenque hasn’t always been so comfortable with sharing its culture: The legacy of colonization has made many in the community understandably resistant to outside influence. Even Ruth, Reyes’ wife, was considered suspicious when she first moved to Palenque from the similar small Colombian town of San Antonio. An outsider, then, was always an outsider. But Reyes and his peers are learning to embrace opening their doors to other descendants of the African diaspora. 

“I’m very joyful that the community of Palenque is very open,” Reyes says of the shift. “My heart warms every time I see 80 buses full of tourists. Palenqueros are welcoming them and are showing their traditions, their cuisine, and their culture. They’re taking pride in it and showing it to the world.”

Reyes and his peers recognize a solidarity among curious Black travelers who come to Palenque. It might be for the food, the music, or simply the evidence that we all have a shared home, a shared origin story. The canvases on which we were forced to design a life reveal a com – mon search for freedom—perhaps most evidenced in our ability to survive and thrive in different parts of the world. 

Prior to my departure, I visit Biohó’s statue once again, his face charged and yearning to be free. My own family, like many others, were enslaved on American coasts in the Deep South, and though Emancipation supposedly gave us freedom, it would be another century before my people gained equal rights in the United States. The quest for Black liberation can be devastating. Our culture, heritage, and contributions are still often misrepresented or under – appreciated. We lose our heroes to state-sanctioned violence, are lectured about our behavior, and are chastised for demanding a society where equity and decency are primary values.

“There’s a phrase that resonates here,” Pedro Mosqueda, a chef and student of Reyes, tells me. “I’m happy, and it is not because of the music, but because of the leader who gave me my freedom.” As I gaze upon the town, filled with Afro-Colombians dancing, playing soccer, and lounging out under the dazzling sunset, I remember that freedom is so often something we find within ourselves.

Recipes

Colombian Stewed Chicken with Achiote and Yam

Get the recipe >

Creole Coconut Chicken

Get the recipe >

The post Colombia and West Africa Unite on the Plate in This Fascinating Food Town appeared first on Saveur.

No shade to the two-note schoolyard frozen treat, but lately, ice cream sandwiches have grown up. In New York City, cool-kid scoopshops, pop-ups, restaurants, and even wine bars have peppered their menus with vibrant frozen sandos redolent with spiced, floral, herbal, and savory notes to tempt those of us inclined to eat the world—brain freeze be damned. Here’s how to make a few of our favorites.

Coconut-Taro Ice Cream Sandwiches with Ritz Crackers

The vibrant, violet-colored ice cream in this sweet-and-salty recipe from SAVEUR contributing editor Jessie YuChen is dairy-free and comes together easily—no ice-cream machine required. Get the recipe >

Sweet Fried Milk Buns with Ice Cream, Peanuts, and Cilantro

Peanuts and cilantro may be surprising toppings for many ice cream lovers, but the flavor combination is popular in Taiwan’s coastal Yilan County, where night market vendors roll the ingredients in thin wheat-flour wrappers for a beloved snack called hua shen juan bing qi. At Win Son in Brooklyn, pastry chef Danielle Spencer pays homage to the famous street food with this ice cream sandwich. Get the recipe >

Ginger Matcha Ice Cream Sandwiches

The secret ingredient in these bracing, eye-catchingly green sandwiches from Noona’s owner Hannah Bae is dextrose, a grape sugar that keeps the ice cream soft and scoopable. Get the recipe >

Vanilla-Rose Ice Cream Sandwiches with Cardamom Toast

In this fork-and-knife-optional sandwich from Malai’s Pooja Bavishi, buttery cardamom toast encases a heady rose-scented cream filling that requires no churning whatsoever. Get the recipe >

Brown Butter Sugar Cookie Ice Cream Sandwiches

At Bad Habit Ice Cream, chef Javier Zuniga often sandwiches chewy sugar cookies with fruit-based ice creams such as roasted banana or sweet milk with a swirl of fig jam. Fake it at home by softening a quart of store-bought vanilla and folding in a ripple of your favorite preserves. Get the recipe >

Bastani Sonnati Ice Cream Sandwiches

At Eyval in Brooklyn, chef Ali Saboor’s artful hand and Persian influence shine through in this elegant sandwich that’s perfumed with saffron, rosewater, and citrus and studded with raisins. Get the recipe >

The post 6 Bold Ice Cream Sandwich Recipes to Change Things Up This Summer appeared first on Saveur.

Peanut- and cilantro-topped ice cream may seem surprising, but this is a popular flavor combination in Taiwan’s coastal Yilan County, where night market vendors roll the ingredients in thin wheat-flour wrappers for a beloved snack called hua shen juan bing qi. At Win Son in Brooklyn, pastry chef Danielle Spencer fries fluffy milk-bread dough to make an oversized and shareable ice cream sandwich inspired by the famous street food. For an over-the-top flourish, Win Son co-owner and chef Trigg Brown suggests frying the peanuts in salted butter.

Featured in “6 Bold Ice Cream Sandwich Recipes to Change Things Up This Summer” by Kat Craddock.

The post Sweet Fried Milk Buns with Ice Cream, Peanuts, and Cilantro appeared first on Saveur.

A former business operations manager, Hannah Bae has done extensive recipe testing in the name of engineering the ideal ice cream texture for Noona’s, her eight-year-old line of frozen treats inspired by Asian American foods and flavors. Bae uses dextrose, a sugar derived from grapes, to ensure a soft and scoopable texture, as well as guar gum, a popular plant-based ice cream stabilizer that helps prevent the formation of icy crystals over time. If you plan to serve the ice cream within a few days of freezing, feel free to omit the latter. To best preserve the matcha powder’s delicate flavor, be sure to cool the ice cream base thoroughly before adding the tea.

Featured in “6 Bold Ice Cream Sandwich Recipes to Change Things Up This Summer” by Kat Craddock.

The post Ginger Matcha Ice Cream Sandwiches appeared first on Saveur.

At Bad Habit Ice Cream—a natural wine bar-meets-scoop-shop in New York City—a reach-in freezer is stocked with to-go pints and Big Mac-sized ice cream sandwiches featuring chef and co-owner Javier Zuniga’s playfully elevated flavor combinations. These chewy sugar cookies starring rich, nutty brown butter frequently sandwich fruit-based ice creams such as roasted banana or sweet milk with a swirl of orange marmalade or fig jam. Fake it at home by softening a quart of store-bought vanilla ice cream and folding in a ripple of your favorite preserves.

Featured in “6 Bold Ice Cream Sandwich Recipes to Change Things Up This Summer” by Kat Craddock.

The post Brown Butter Sugar Cookies appeared first on Saveur.