Food & Nutrition Scholar
A few years back, I briefly got into collecting cookbooks – a side effect of my first food studies article, Writing Cuisine in the Spanish Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Iconic Puerto Rican and Cuban cookbooks (Food, Culture, and Society, 2015). I do not have too many of them, but I’ve been revising these as … Continue reading Healthy Latin Cooking: Book Review and Testing
Close to three years ago I discovered the parallel stories of Carmen Aboy Valldejuli and Nitza Villapol, the Julia Child caribeñas. These women and their cookbooks left a lasting impression in the culinary histories of Puerto Rico and Cuba, respectively. This serendipitous discovery led me to many hours interacting with their work, both in the … Continue reading Cookbooks in transitioning societies – a new publication
I met Erisbela Garriga almost three years ago. She was participating in a book festival at La Marqueta, a historical marketplace in El Barrio. I was just starting my research on Spanish Caribbean diets, at the time focused on cookbooks. We started talking, and, as I browsed through her cookbooks, the title, De la Tierra … Continue reading Meals without meat?
“When I read Julie and Julia, I remembered the unopened book, as well as the [copy of the] book my grandmother brought from Cuba. My grandmother sent her sons ahead to Miami with Pedro Pan and she still had to bring that book from Cuba. So I had to see what was in that book.” – Cristina Gomez Pina, interviewed … Continue reading Julie and Julia, a lo Caribeño
Cucuyé lives in the Fairy Kingdom. He is a kind and adventurous elf. He is the creation of Carmen Aboy Valldejuli the author of Cocina Criolla, the go-to reference guide in Puerto Rican cooking and subject of a recent posting. I stumbled upon Cucuyé through my current research on Valldejuli and her work. It was … Continue reading An Elf in an Imaginary Kitchen
Ha llegado inesperadamente un amigo, el cual se quedará a comer. ¡¡¡Qué problema!!! ¡¡¡Qué aturdimiento!!! Y a esto yo contesto: ¡Nada de eso! Manos a la obra, y mientras el esposo lo obsequia con un “cocktail” o “highball”, nosotras hábilmente, sin carreras ni precipitaciones, preparamos un menú sencillo y atractivo. – Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, Ideas … Continue reading Society a la Valldejuli
Melissa Fuster, PhD 