Comida Criolla

This is not a Puerto Rican barbecue pit, its a car dumped and incinerated and cluttering the amazing verdant beauty because the government, along with its lack of interest in sorting out the stray dog problem, has no interest in dealing with the heaps of cars four million islanders drive literally into the ground every year.

Cuisine, including barbecue, was on my mind after our recent hop south for the weekend where we encountered a US variant on Caribbean food, so I was moved to contrast and compare Cuban food as cooked in Key West with creole food. Creoles in the colonial era were upper class people, possibly of mixed race who were descended from white settlers. The term is in use today in New Orleans, and in Puerto Rico where restaurants advertise comida criolla as an attraction for tourists.Like so many popular foods in daily use comida criolla started out as poor people's food. Nowadays mofongo is offered as haute cuisine in haute restaurants, though we found the national dish roadside, under a tarp on the outskirts of San Juan, the island's teeming capital.Mofongo is mashed fried plantains rendered into a starchy pudding, served with meat or fish. I think it works best with some sort of ajo sauce, citrus and garlic, to render the mound less dry. We ate some with chunks of fried beef which was also dry, and an ajo chicken dish which was excellent. Mofongo streetside is not a delicate dish and if you manage to down a plate piled high with those mashed plantains you will be good to work in the fields all day.

Puerto Rico is littered with modest cafes, all of which merit a stop. We found people everywhere who could mumble some small amount of English, indeed they were happy to ignore our reasonably fluent Spanish and help us find our ingredients in stumbling English. In an industrial village south of Fajardo we found a cafe offering creole food simmering in hot plates. We pulled down the Caribbean staples of rice and Puerto Rican red beans with barbequed chops American style and Caribbean pork.

Expecting macaroni and cheese such as might be offered in English speaking Caribbean islands, my wife opted for "macaroni" and got American style pasta salad. It was good, perhaps because we are flexible travelers! Our plates also included hard fried plantains known universally as tostones. All this for $5.25, about two thirds the price in the Lower Keys.

Gas stations across the island offer snack food, much of it a replica of processed foods found in the US but shelves were also loaded with items that rated exotic, Italian chocolates imported to the Caribbean, sweet crackers and sodas based on tropical fruits like tamarind, a sweet/sour drink that is pretty harsh to a palate raised on the delights of colas. My young colleague did her shopping at four am:

Crackers and OJ to fight off breakfastless nausea from speeding, twisting roads. The further we were from fast food offerings the better off we were as usual, but some forms of processed foods one cannot avoid. I, for instance, can rarely resist Latin pastries, a delight to the eye but rather less to American taste buds. Coffee generally was fairly insipid too, lacking the Starbucks verve we mainlanders have come to expect from a cup of java.

Our journey across the back of Puerto Rico on the narrow, steep Ruta Panoramica, through the mountains brought us to the high altar of island cuisine. Where we came face to face with the national culinary obsession: lechon.Lechon is roast suckling pig, pork on a spit. The center of this cult is located in a village called Cayey. But that, as they say is another story, a story unto itself and a memory I want to savor in more leisurely style.

Going hungry in Puerto Rico's hinterlands isn't easy because the golden arches litter the landscape as much as creole cuisine does, so for those that can't stand being far from home, home on America's true caribbean island (not Key West!) is always close to hand, and they even enjoy servicarro service for tourists who miss drive thru windows. Personally I miss the lechon.