Читать книгу Cortadito - Enrique Fernández - Страница 6

Greta Garbo not only famously laughs in Ninotchka; she participates in an endorsement of the cuisine of exile. This hilarious 1939 A Bolshevik in Paris film gives us Garbo as a stern Russian Communist courted by an aristocratic Melvyn Douglas and accompanied by a trio of bumbling compatriots. At the end of the film, Douglas wins her Bolshevik heart; having earlier dismissed romance, Ninotchka now prefers it to ideology. Soviet Russia is not fit for living and certainly not fit for love, so she stays with her beloved in Turkey, where she has been sent on a mission—engineered by Douglas—to handle the nincompoop trio. Shedding their Communist personae, they have become exiled capitalists by opening a successful Russian restaurant in Istanbul. The Russians conclude that even though they are exiled from the Motherland, they have not left it, for it is present in the restaurant’s borscht, its vodka, and its music. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and written by Billy Wilder, exiles both, the movie finds its happily-ever-after not only in the romance of Garbo and Douglas, but in the equally happy discovery that national identity lives on in an exile restaurant.

●

Walking along Manhattan’s Lower East Side on a quest for a cup of joe, I see a restaurant sign that reads “Cortadito.” I’m Cuban and live in Miami, where cortadito—espresso with steamed milk or milk foam—is everywhere, so I go in. Cuban music is on the sound system. And the menu is pure Miami Cuban. I ask the hipster Latino waiter for the eponymous cortadito and am about to order something else when some instinct makes me pause and ask the lady who seems to be in charge, “Are you all Cuban?”

“No,” she replies, “we’re Ecuadoreans.”

A faux Miami Cuban restaurant in New York. Figures. How far would a business go selling Ecuadorean cuisine, which, for all I know, is terrific? But cubano, oh yeah. Everybody knows Cuban. Everybody knows Cuba. And not just in Miami, where we Cubans are the majority of Latinos, who are the majority of the population, never mind the ones who run the town. I have visited putative Cuban restaurants in Rio de Janeiro and Nashville. The only Cuban element in the Brazilian spot was Gloria Estefan on the sound system; in the country-music capital, it was a cigar-humidor room where they sold Cuban brands—made outside Cuba since true habanos are illegal in the US.

Some years ago, I read about a trendy New York restaurant called Calle Ocho, the Spanish name for Southwest Eighth Street, the main drag of Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Trouble was that at the time there wasn’t a single trendy Cuban restaurant on the real Calle Ocho. On a visit to New York after an absence of a few years, I was taken to Asia de Cuba, which was the name of a family-owned Cuban-Chinese restaurant when I lived in the city, and was now a big, swinging joint run by China Grill. “I hate to say this,” I told my hosts, “but the only Cuban thing about this place right now is me.”

No matter; Cuban was way cool. Avant-garde even, with a phenom called Nuevo Cubano: the principles of New American Cooking applied to the traditional Cuban menu. Nuevo Cubano has an interesting history, but by the time I dined in Manhattan’s Asia de Cuba, at the beginning of the millennium, there was no need to serve up any connection to a real place. A name would do. The rest was, as far as I could tell, the China Grill menu served with a Cuban soundtrack.

That was the time when, walking around the city, I spotted another Nuevo Cubano eatery way over on the Midtown West Side. It proudly displayed a banner with a quote by patriot and poet José Martí, the father of the Cuban Republic. And the quote was in Spanish. Sort of. (Quoting Martí is a Cuban national pastime, both on and off the island, across the political spectrum. Even the remnants of a movement that would have been anathema to a staunch patriot like Martí—the anexionistas, Cubans who would have the island become part of the American Union—quote Martí. I’d never claim we are a sane people.)

Martí famously said, “With all and for the good of all,” which some liberal Cuban Americans have used to promote the notion that in spite of ideology, our attitudes and policies should be inclusive because we Cubans are all brothers and sisters. Except that on the restaurant’s banner the quote was back-translated, meaning that someone, instead of going to the original Spanish, did a literal translation into Spanish of an English translation from Spanish. The result, Con todos y para el bueno de todos, is totally illiterate. “The good” is not el bueno (the name for the good guy in the white hat in an old-fashioned Western), but el bien, a word that means “well” but in this case means “welfare,” i.e. benefit. I don’t have to add that I did not try the food for, obviously, the place was run by idiots, and disrespectful ones at that.

And several years ago, when the Nuevo Cubano wave was just starting to roll, I was in L.A. at a restaurant that served the whole thing with heavy-handed hipster irony. Like a drink named after Che Guevara, something that would’ve gotten the joint firebombed in Miami. Indeed, places there had been firebombed for far less.

Cuban food is the subject of trends and an object of enduring popularity for the same reason that Cuba is a household word and, say, Ecuador is not. We Cubans are bad at some things (like running our country properly, though others have had a hand in messing us up) and good at others. And one thing we’re very good at is self-promotion. Many of us do it without the slightest self-consciousness. Be around Cubans long enough and you will learn that we think we’re the cat’s meow. I’d be tempted to say the Master Race, but that’s Germanic and boring, and if there’s one thing we can’t abide, it is boring. I’ve heard many Cubans dismiss Mexican food and praise our island’s menu. Any gastronome will tell you that Mexican cuisine is extraordinary, and no less than a sophisticated Cuban intellectual, Alejo Carpentier, wrote that there are three great world cuisines: French, Chinese, and Mexican. Still, with no more evidence than a visit to a third-rate Tex-Mex joint, a Cuban will boldly state that Mexican food doesn’t measure up to our great cuisine.

Some of us promote ourselves with well thought-out strategies. Take the home of the classic mojito cocktail, Havana’s Bodeguita del Medio, an internationally famous watering hole that has spawned knock-offs throughout the world. (In the movie version of Miami Vice, Collin Farrell and Gong Li visit a big salsa-dancing club that is ostensibly the original Bodeguita, whereas the real place is the size of a bathroom.) Everywhere you find a clone of the Old Havana hole-in-the-wall, you will find this quote by Papa Hemingway: “My daiquiri at the Floridita, my mojito at La Bodeguita.” Which is a bold-faced lie. While Hemingway did favor the upscale Floridita, home of the frozen daiquiri, at most he may have staggered, drunk and ornery, into the funky La Bodeguita once. Ah, but that did not stop a Cuban publicist and Bodeguita regular from coining the phrase for his friend the bar owner. Yes, we’re good publicizing ourselves. And our food.

But what is Cuban food?

Go to any number of Miami Cuban restaurants and you will find identical menus. Nothing out of the ordinary here. The same is true for Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Thai, and countless other national cuisines. Popular joints all serve up the same limited list of dishes. It’s not that the national menu is so narrow; it’s that only a fraction of a country’s dishes cross over to el Norte. Sometimes the menu is delineated by a large immigration from a particular region. Thus, many Colombian restaurants in the US serve up the cuisine of Medellín or the surrounding Antioquia province, while one is hard-pressed to find the interesting dishes of the country’s Caribbean coast. In Cuban Miami, the menu is fixed more by time than by geography: It’s what came over with the first wave of Cuban exiles in the early 1960s, the group that calls itself el exilio histórico. I have yet to find, for example, a Miami restaurant that serves pescado en salsa de perro, a fish recipe from the coast near my father’s hometown.

Because of the toll the Revolution took on the island’s food (more about this later), the Miami Cuban menu did not vary much with subsequent waves of immigration such as the marielitos (the Mariel boat lift of 1980) and the balseros (the rafters who still make the journey today). Instead, the menu began assimilating influences from other countries.

The most notable is the cortadito, espresso served in a demitasse cup with a dollop of milk foam. To begin with, very few places are strict about the foam, and a cortadito in Miami has become a junior café con leche, i.e. a short latte. That lackadaisical attitude is probably due to the fact that though the cortadito today is a staple of Cuban Miami, it’s not Cuban at all. We Cubans have always had our coffee dark roasted and heavily sweetened—after all, we’re sugar producers. Before Italian espresso machines, Cuban coffee was dripped through a cloth and served either black with sugar or with boiled milk, also with sugar. Italian machines gave us a taste for espresso—Cuban coffee is nothing but sweetened espresso. All over the Havana of my childhood, there were espresso stands where you could have a tiny cup for five cents in the good neighborhoods and three cents in less tony ones. I don’t recall ever seeing a woman standing at an espresso stand. For one stood. No stools, no chairs, never mind Starbucks sofas. Men adopted a certain stance, as writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante observed: leaning forward so as not to let any drops of coffee drip on his white linen suit, and with the free hand on the solar plexus to keep his tie out of harm’s way or restrain his billowing white linen guayabera. To this day, even in jeans and T-shirt, I drink my coffee that way.

In the old Cuban days we drank espresso in a demitasse and café con leche in a regular cup (some preferred it in a glass on a saucer). But never a cortadito. Cortado is the Spanish word for what Italians call macchiato, espresso cut (cortado) with steamed milk foam. I first encountered it in Spain, during my first trip there in 1969. And so did other Cubans—Spain, the mother country, being one of our favorite destinations. Plus a number of exiles fled first to Madrid instead of Miami, where they eventually resettled. (Miami is where old Cuban elephants come to die, as the saying goes.) The cortado—or cortadito, given our affinity for the diminutive that makes a café a cafecito—was imported to Miami, and caught on to the point of becoming synonymous with our culture. A snob and a curmudgeon, I only drink cortadito at the most important Cuban coffee stand in town, the window at the huge and famous Versailles coffee shop on Calle Ocho, where they make it properly, with foam. And I even love their wicked twist, making it with evaporated rather than fresh milk, a true oddity that is absolutely delicious.

The other item that’s popular at the Versailles coffee shop window, besides passionate discussions of anti-Castro Cuban politics, is croquetas. The croquette is a Miami Cuban staple. I have never figured out how it became so, other than that it was a popular Cuban fast-food snack back home. We Cubans love them. God knows I used to devour them as a kid, and my US-born children, once introduced to them, got hooked as well. A traditional French croquette—or Spanish croqueta, which can be had at most Miami Spanish restaurants—is made from a thick béchamel flavored with minced ham, chicken or fish (codfish croquetas are a Spanish restaurant staple), sometimes cheese. The mixture should be thick enough to hold its cylinder shape while it is rolled in egg and breadcrumbs and deep fried.

My older sons only visited Miami once or twice a year and always had the jones for Cuban croquetas, so when they began cooking for themselves, they asked me for the recipe. I obliged by sending them two versions. One was from the high road: Julia Child’s recipe from The Art of French Cooking. The second source was more authentic: Nitza Villapol’s classic Cuban cookbook, Cocina al minuto. They tried both. They didn’t like them.

“Dad,” they told me over the phone, “these don’t taste like what we eat in Miami.” “That’s because they’re too refined,” I replied. “Even the Cuban recipe won’t taste the same because you’re frying it in fresh oil, not something that’s been used for a week, and the croquetas haven’t been sitting under a heat lamp all day.” I exaggerated, of course—the fast turnover at Versailles assures fresh-fried croquetas, which sometimes require a wait, and it’s one reason I like them. But if you make them at home, a certain element of funk will be missing. As for authentic Old World croquetas, I ordered some at a good Spanish restaurant in Miami when one of my sons was still a pre-teen, and he didn’t like them either. The béchamel sauce was just too authentic. You could taste the nutmeg. He wanted the vulgar version from a Cuban street joint, which he consumes in large quantities to this day.

I can understand. In my own pre-teens my parents enrolled me in a class at a Havana swim club that had a coffee shop. Every day after class I’d have a ham croqueta. Today, the combination of tropical climate and a swim elicits a Pavlovian hunger for a greasy croqueta. So I’m like everyone else, susceptible to comfort food and drink. And since I was born and raised in Cuba, Cuba BC (Before Castro), when foodstuffs were varied and plentiful, I can hang at the coffee window of Versailles, sip thick, sweet coffee and wolf down croquetas fresh from the fryer with the best of them.

But I’m avoiding the question—and will probably do so throughout this essay. What is Cuban food? Or more precisely, what is Cuban about Cuban food?

●

There is a flavor thread that runs through Latin American food, and if one were to name it, the word would be criollo. It’s the Spanish for Creole, and it describes what happens to culinary traditions, particularly the vernacular ones passed from generation to generation of home cooks, when they grow roots in the Americas. Some call it fusion because on American soil different traditions meld to create new flavors. But fusion is an overworked word that has to do with innovative cuisine, and there’s nothing innovative about criollo cooking, unless it’s the innovation created by the accidents of history.

In the States we use the word Creole to refer to the people and, most famously, the cuisine of New Orleans. Indeed, when one thinks of that city and its region, various cultures come to mind: Native American, French, African, Spanish—in very broad terms, since each of those categories encompasses multiple cultures. And one could deconstruct a New Orleans or Louisiana dish, like a gumbo or a jambalaya, to locate the sources of the ingredients and techniques. But this highly celebrated cuisine—rightfully so, I would say—is more than the sum of its influences. In other words, nothing tastes like it. In part this is because as cultures come together, their offspring ripen into something distinct. And in part it is because the women and men in the kitchen have made a difference. This is evident in the city’s rich restaurant scene. On a visit there I get news that a new restaurant is the place to go. And that the restaurant is the idea of a chef who was the sous-chef at another celebrated restaurant, who was the sous-chef at another, all the way back to one of the old classic French Quarter restaurants.

On a visit in the early ’90s, I was fortunate to be in the company of a friend of the seminal San Francisco Bay Area chef Alice Waters. And thanks to that connection, the group I was with was able to secure a table at the restaurant that was all the rage, a new spot called Emeril’s. Little did any of us know that the eponymous chef would become a celebrity and the head of a culinary empire. What impressed me was how the menu had taken the basics of New Orleans cuisine and tweaked it just enough to make a difference. One had the comforting experience of dining on local flavors, but not the same old same old. Emeril Lagasse was one more step in the Creolization process of Creole cuisine.

In my native Cuba, I am a criollo, of course. But most notably, so were about half of my mother’s siblings, who, like her, were born in Cuba to Spanish parents. The other batch of siblings, who were born in Spain, were peninsulares, i.e. from the Iberian peninsula. My grandmother, a legendary cook, would make mostly Spanish dishes. She served them with a side of rice for the criollos and a side of potatoes for the peninsulares. Except for some regional cuisines, like that of Valencia, home of the paella, Spaniards are not as fond of rice as Cubans, and when they eat it, they want it flavored—with saffron, tomatoes, broths, aromatic vegetables. What they like is patatas, as in Spain’s national dish, tortilla de patatas—an omelet with nothing but potatoes and onions. Cubans, for their part, along with other Latin Americans, must have rice, preferably white, with every meal, not unlike the Chinese.

A Cuban meal will feature a Spanish recipe as the main dish. Say, an arroz con pollo. Rice, made yellow with saffron, if one can afford it, but more likely the cheaper annatto. And chicken cut up in pieces. The whole thing is flavored by a sofrito, a classic Spanish sauté of onions, garlic, sweet peppers, and tomatoes. It’s a kind of modest paella, with chicken as the only protein. What makes it Cuban, besides the substitution of annatto for saffron, is the side of fried ripe plantains that always accompanies an arroz con pollo. And so it is with many other dishes, most of them cooked in sofrito, that are served with rice, or rice and beans, plus sides of plantains, yuca, malanga, boniato, ňame—root vegetables of either American or African origin. Or the meal will consist of a big potaje, the kind of bean stew that Spaniards are known for, like fabada (with blood sausage), caldo gallego (chorizo and greens), or sopa de garbanzos (a simplified version of Castilian chickpea cocido). The criollo touch is that these hearty Spanish soups are served with white rice, while at a Spanish table you sop up the broth with crusty bread.

Creolization implies more than a mere change in side dishes. The Spanish word criollo is not racially charged, as Creole sometimes is. In my native Cuba, a criollo, back in colonial days, could be black or white. The word simply meant the person was born on this side of the ocean—an African-born black was called negro de nación, a black of (his) nation. And yet, a subtle racialism, a “taint,” as a nineteenth-century Southerner might have put it, is implied in Creolization. For food is the child of miscegenation. African influences wind their way into Cuban criollo cuisine, as do Native American traditions. The most obvious influence is in the products themselves.

Though the potato my peninsulares aunts and uncles preferred is actually a Native American root (unlike rice, which is Asian in origin), its place in the Spanish menu is well fixed and of long standing. But not so the other root vegetables Cubans eat, like yuca (cassava), a staple of the people Columbus called “Indians.” And, as in the American South, okra, from Africa, is an established criollo vegetable. Thus, the Cuban menu is a mishmash of influences.

Creolization implies a melding of the races, and, more importantly, of cultures. In broad terms, it accounts for a relaxation of a certain European stiffness that was untenable in the New World. Particularly in the heat of the tropics. But further north, this Creole relaxation of manners and mores was also true. In John Barth’s masterful novel The Sot-Weed Factor, the protagonist arrives in the American colonies to find that English ways have degenerated into a kind of, well, sleaze. Another word could be sensuality, an enemy of stiffness. Thus, the Spanish criollo, in contact with the cultures of Africa and the Americas, and in an environment where European culture is not firmly established, is tempted, one might say, to chill—after all, it’s too damn hot. To indulge in pleasures of the senses unknown in the metropolis.

To me, the ultimate criollo dish is the tortilla de plátanos. It’s a variant of the Spanish tortilla de patatas: sliced potatoes fried in olive oil with onions, dumped into beaten eggs, salted, and fried again like an Italian frittata, first one side, then the other. The ultimate Spanish dish, it’s eaten at room temperature. It’s the quintessential tapa to have with wine, and field workers will take it for lunch, stuffed between the top and bottom of a round loaf of bread. Tortilla de plátanos is the same, except that semi-ripe plantains take the place of the spuds. The result is a dish that recalls the original but, I would say, subverts it. For the impartial austerity of the potato yields to the sweetness of the plantain, which is a fruit. That sweetness is almost cloying, but it suits the Cuban sweet tooth. While the quintessentially European flavors of onion and olive oil are satisfying, the sweet notes of the plantain are voluptuous. They are a siren call. Yield to the New World, they say. Yield to the tropics. Regress to your sugar-hungry infancy and childhood. Relax. Recline. Allow seduction.

●

With anything having to do with Cuba, sooner or later one gets around to sex. I’m not sure Cuban food is the sexiest around. It’s filling and we eat it in large portions, sending all the blood to the digestive system to handle it, which means there’s little to spare for other activities. And we use garlic generously and eat beans with almost every meal, which present other issues. Nonetheless, there’s an element of indulgence, even in overeating. A letting go, a lassitude. And once the senses take over, all bets are off.

The criollo/Creole phenomenon is what happens when traditional cultures lose their stiffness in the brave new world. It is the shedding of tradition to create a new one, but one that is not ruled by strictures as much as by the call of a relaxed sensuality. French food, to take the most noteworthy example, is truly sensual. Its flavors, sometimes simple, often complicated, are calibrated to give pleasure. It deserves its reputation as the world’s greatest cuisine. And like much of French culture, this cuisine is predicated on tradition and discipline. Comme il faut are the key words. As it must be. How should one eat steak or roast lamb? Saignant, of course. Bleeding. To cook it beyond rare is a crime. To what degree should a dish be cooked? Au point. To the point. What point? Why, the point of perfection, of course.

We criollos commit great gastronomic crimes. We overcook meat and fish (don’t get me started on fish). We miss the point, although a true criollo or criolla cook will brag about having punto, knowing instinctively how much time, how much seasoning, how much anything, without having to stop and taste. (I confess to no-punto; I stop and taste.) But when we get it right, the resulting taste yields a pleasure that feels positively illicit. What we’re after is sabor, a word that means taste, flavor. What we ask food to be is sabroso, flavorful, though the vernacular “yummy” is more accurate.

And that’s what we expect, not just from food, but from life. Sabrosura. A reveling in the tastiness of what the senses provide, and a word that has sexual overtones. The concept is palpable in the Spanish Caribbean. Just listen to the music and watch the dancers. There’s a frankly sexual pleasure in the movement of the hips—which is actually how the hips move as the result of the dancers’ steps, something that outsiders often mistake as booty-shaking. There is sabrosura. And even beyond that, there is gozadera.

I was at an alternative art gallery in Havana once when I encountered the term in what I think is its richest context. The show was, outrageously, a series of penis caricatures. They were not clinically drawn, nor were they erotic. Instead, they seemed like the outpouring of a comic-book-addled mind, like one of those ’60s stoned American artists who combined a vernacular style with a total lack of inhibition. The penises were characters in some crazy-ass tableaux. I read the accompanying text, written by a Cuban art critic, in which he observed that all modernist Cuban art was distinguished by gozadera, a kind of visual molasses (the critic’s word) that enveloped the figures (Latin American Modernism was mostly figurative, not, like its US counterpart, abstract) and connected them to one another. He used as example Carlos Enríquez’s famous El Rapto de las Mulatas, the classical Rape of the Sabines transplanted to the Cuban countryside: a group of guajiros (Cuban peasants) on horseback, each carrying off a sexy half-caste young woman. There is no violation in this “rape,” which in this case means abduction, for though the men are bursting with machismo, the ladies are themselves bursting with wantonness. Even the horses’ expressions show arousal. And, yes, there seems to be an enveloping gauze of sugar-sweet brushstrokes that flow among the figures, all wrapped in and enraptured by a molasses-thick gozadera.

The verb gozar means to enjoy. It is often used in a sexual context, no more so than in a religious poem by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila in which she longs to “enjoy” her Lord. A shameless eroticism is the key metaphor for mystical union in the language of St. Theresa and her fellow poet and person of the cloth, St. John of the Cloth. So shameless that one can read them as sexy love poets. And here is the crux of the matter. A Spanish tradition, already “Creolized” by the fusion of Arabic, Jewish, and Christian poetic languages, migrates to the New World. It’s already a tradition in which the pleasures of the table, the bed, and the soul are indistinguishable from one another. Add to that mix the rich juices that flow from Native American and African attitudes and you get, to use culinary metaphor, a very tasty gumbo. An attitude toward food and sex and divinity that says laisser les bons temps rouler.