When Von Diaz talks about her new book, Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories From Puerto Rico to the Deep South, she usually describes its genesis as a Julie & Julia-style project in her tiny Brooklyn kitchen.
Diaz decided to cook her way through a copy of her grandmother's favorite cookbook, Cocina Criolla. That volume, by Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, is the kind of kitchen staple a new Puerto Rican bride might have received as a wedding gift in the latter half of the 20th century. Diaz documented the whole endeavor in You Tube videos and a video blog four years ago. It was also an homage to her grandmother, whose ability to prepare the kind of foods that so comforted two generations of their family was erased by Alzheimer's.
But, it is well into Coconuts and Collards that we see this book actually began when Diaz was a little girl in a cramped townhouse kitchen in Morrow, Ga. For, as much as Diaz's book is an exploration of the historical and cultural ties that bind Southern and Puerto Rican food, it is also a memoir, a testimony to the power of foodways to hold families together across miles, and strengthen them during their lowest points.
Diaz was born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. When she was still little, the family moved to Fort Gillem, near Atlanta, because her father was in the Army. In time, Diaz would return to Puerto Rico during the summers, to stay with her grandmother, who had lived in Biloxi, Miss., as a child and teenager. Diaz learned in Georgia about Southern staples like grits, but, on the island, she learned how essential sofrito is to the Puerto Rican table.
"I understood my people, my culture, my island, by looking at the food itself," Diaz said.
After graduating from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., she gained a deeper understanding of Southern food when she worked as a host at Watershed Restaurant during its heyday in downtown Decatur. Scott Peacock was chef. Steven Satterfield was sous chef. And, though dementia was overtaking her, Edna Lewis was still alive and under Peacock's care.
It was at Watershed that she began to see "natural parallels" between the food of her grandmother and the food of her childhood home. Much of that had to do with the African influence brought to both regions through the transatlantic slave trade. Sugar cane was the cash crop in Puerto Rico, and enslaved Africans tended it from shoot to syrup. Cotton and rice were economic staples in the lower South. It was body-rending work that required, if not a balanced diet, one that was filling and heavy.
"Despite being a tropical island, where you would assume people are eating fresh seafood and fresh fruits and vegetables all the time," Diaz said, "from the research I've done, the foods that became sustenance, that were cultivated on the island en masse, were cultivated to keep people fed, not to nourish them; scraps of meat, heavy starches. This kind of subsistence eating is common in places where labor was the primary employment."
It wasn't until her grandmother became ill several years later that Diaz began to study those commonalities in earnest. Sandra Gutierrez, author of The New Southern-Latino Table and a pioneer in the intersection of Latino and Southern foodways, said that, from the American South down through South America, where indigenous, African and European cultures collided for centuries, the same culinary roots are shared, based on similar ingredients and techniques: rice, field peas, beans, pork, citrus, squash, nuts, peppers.
The commonalities that Diaz saw were manifestations of the ways each region or country interpreted those things, Gutierrez said.
"Many dishes are similar, if not identical," she said. "For example, rice and beans. You find that in Colombia, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Cuba and here. So, when you get a Latin American with a Southerner at the table, you'll find commonalities."
Diaz amplifies those ties in her book, so there's a recipe for grits made with coconut milk, and for barbecue sauce made with a base of guava juice.
There is also a recipe for one of the last meals Diaz cooked with her grandmother, chicharron de pollo, or fried chicken nuggets. Along with her grandmother's well-worn copy of Cocina Criolla, Diaz has her grandmother's jibarito press for flattening plantains, and a lime press. In the head notes for the recipe, she describes how she helped her grandmother squeeze the juice from the fruit.
Together, they made a meal that was an expression of love and identity.
Food on 08/22/2018