Puerto Rican Cooking And The American South Mix In 'Coconuts And Collards'

When Von Diaz was growing up, her mother sent her away from her home outside Atlanta to spend summers in Puerto Rico. Diaz was born on the island in Rio Piedras, but she found the trips back disorienting. She didn't speak Spanish well. She lay awake at night, pestered by mosquitoes and wilting heat. In her grandmother's kitchen, she found relief in grilled cheese loaded with ground beef picadillo, aromatic olive oil infused with garlic and oregano, and fried cinnamon donuts.

Back in Georgia, Diaz was tasked with cooking for her younger sister and their cash-strapped single mom. She says her grandmother inspired her to add complexity to their meager home fare of spaghetti, boxed potato flakes and frozen chicken nuggets. And Diaz learned to appreciate Southern food — like the grits and fried okra that had once repelled her — from the kindly mother of a classmate.

Diaz has woven these three culinary threads — her grandmother's legendary kitchen, the food of the American South and her own cooking journey — into her debut cookbook, Coconuts and Collards.

She tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro that the book was born as a self-imposed culinary challenge: cooking every recipe from her grandmother's 1962 copy of Carmen Aboy Valldejuli's Cocina Criolla, a classic basic manual ubiquitous in most Puerto Rican kitchens. (Cocina criolla means Creole cuisine, or the cuisine of Spanish background, and books with the same title have formed the bedrock of Cuban and other Latino cooking traditions.)

"I found fairly quickly that while the dishes that I was making out of the book were really rife with nostalgia and they were certainly delicious, they felt really outdated," Diaz tells NPR. "A lot of deep frying, a lot of laborious processes that sometimes would take an entire day of cooking. It just felt to me like it didn't match the way that I actually cook."

Coconuts and Collards offers lighter, more vegetable-forward takes on Puerto Rican classics, as well as some clever hybrids of Diaz's different worlds.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights:

About her grandmother

My grandmother — who in many ways is my culinary muse — was an incredible cook. I mean, she was the kind of cook that people would coincidentally show up at her house. They were sort of just passing through the neighborhood and would walk in her front door, kind of sniffing the air to see what was going on.

About Brussels sprouts:

My grandmother, for whatever reason, she had a really interesting, really unusual taste for vegetables. ... All she had access to, at least when my mom was a kid, were frozen Brussels sprouts, which she was forever trying to get my mom and my uncle and my aunt to eat. She would put sofrito on them, she would put olive oil and garlic and they didn't like them. ...

What I did was kind of combine what is a really traditional way of preparing Brussels sprouts in the South, which is to either sauté them or roast them with some kind of a pork fat — either bacon or fatback — and instead use chorizo, which is more traditionally used in Puerto Rico and also references that Spanish root to Puerto Rican food. And so I sort of combined all those ingredients almost as an homage to her.

About Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

My cousin who is on the island has told me that, interestingly, because of the lack of power and also lack of access to things like meat, a lot of people have kind of gone vegan. So they're eating more of the fresh produce that grows naturally on the island, and innovating.

And I know that for me, when I cook Puerto Rican food lately, I do it a little bit differently. I was making a stock the other day, and realized that I had an entire container of rock salt from Cabo Rojo, which is on the southwest tip on the island. It's a natural salt flat that's been there. And when I put that salt into that stock, it felt like I was honoring my island.

Brussels Sprouts with Chorizo Sofrito

Yield: 4 servings as a side dish

1½ tablespoons olive oil

3⁄4 cup Sofrito

½ cup finely minced Spanish chorizo

1 pound Brussels sprouts, trimmed and thinly sliced

½ cup chicken stock

1 teaspoon fresh lime juice

½ teaspoon salt, plus more if needed

Cracked black pepper

Heat the oil in a large skillet or wok over medium-high heat. Add the sofrito and chorizo and cook, stirring frequently, for 7 minutes, or until the mixture is browned and the liquid is mostly evaporated.

Lower the heat to medium and add the Brussels sprouts and stock. Bring to a simmer and cook for 7 to 10 minutes, until the Brussels sprouts are tender.

Turn off the heat, add the lime juice and salt, and season with pepper. Taste and adjust the salt and pepper if needed.

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Sofrito

What I'm calling sofrito is sometimes referred to as recaito, the distinction being whether or not it includes tomato. But the basic ingredients are the same. It is the number one backbone of Puerto Rican cooking and can be adapted in a number of ways depending on the dish.

Abuelitas and tias alike often keep sofrito in the freezer stored in repurposed plastic margarine containers or frozen into cubes and saved in zip-top bags. It's best used within a week if kept in the refrigerator but can be frozen for up to six months. Plop it in the pan straight out of the freezer to save time defrosting it.

Yield: 3 cups

1 medium red bell pepper, seeded and quartered

3 ají dulce chiles, seeded and roughly chopped

6 large garlic cloves, peeled

1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped

6 fresh culantro leaves

6 fresh cilantro leaves and stems, coarsely chopped

Put the bell pepper, ají dulce chiles, and garlic cloves in the bowl of a food processor and blend into a smooth puree, scraping the sides halfway through to incorporate fully.

Add the onion and pulse 5 to 7 times, until the mixture is again blended into a smooth puree.

Add the culantro and cilantro and pulse 5 or 6 more times, until the stems and leaves are minced and you have a loose paste.

From Coconuts and Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South by Von Diaz. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. Reprinted by permission of the University Press of Florida.

Sophia Schmidt produced this interview for broadcast.

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