Rosie will be on vacation until mid-February—guest blogger Melody Kettle will post in her place.
Maricel Presilla is a culinary historian specializing in the foods of Latin America and Spain. She holds a doctorate in medieval Spanish history from New York University. Presilla has taught medieval history at New York University and Rutgers University, where she created courses in culinary history. Born in Santiago de Cuba, Presilla is the first Latin American woman to have cooked as a guest chef at the White House. She is also the author of Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America (W.W. Norton, 2012), a cookbook that explores the cuisines of twenty Latin American countries. Gran Cocina Latina was selected as Cookbook of the Year by the James Beard Foundation in 2013 and as Best General cookbook by the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) in April.
Presilla is the co-owner and chef of Zafra, a pan-Latin restaurant, and Cucharamama, a South American restaurant, both in Hoboken. In four consecutive years, Presilla has been nominated as Best Chef for the Mid-Atlantic Region by the James Beard Foundation. In May 2012, she won the award as Outstanding Best-Chef in the Mid-Atlantic region; the first Latin American woman to have received this distinction and the second chef since 2000 to have received the award for the State of New Jersey. In 2010, she opened Ultramarinos, a gourmet Latin American market, bakery, chocolate shop, and cooking atelier, also in Hoboken.
Cucharamama, 233 Clinton Street, Hoboken, 201-420-1700. Zafra, 301 Willow Ave, Hoboken, 201-610-980. Ultramarinos, 303 Willow Ave, Hoboken 201-238-2797.
What is your earliest memory of food? What did it smell like?
The flavor of café con leche, the Cuban latte. A cup of steamy milk spiked with ink black espresso is the ultimate comfort food for most Cubans, even children. It is what starts and ends our day. As a child my mother gave me café con leche in my bottle and I have craved its dark sweetness and its caramel aroma to this day.
What or who has been the most influential on your ethos and cuisine?
I can’t think of just one individual but of a number of people who have played the role of pole stars in various stages of my culinary awakening. I must start with my maternal aunts Ana, Belén, Carolina, and Elena, who were refined and thoughtful cooks; my paternal grandmother Paquita, who was a fearless country cook, and my own father, Ismael Espinosa, who saw cooking as great adventure. Later when I arrived in the US and was a college student in Miami, my first English teacher, Piedad Robertson, who was an elegant cook, introduced me to Julia Child and Gourmet magazine. When I moved to New York and was doing my Ph.D. in medieval history at NYU, I met Felipe Rojas Lombardi, a Peruvian chef, who changed my life unwittingly and prepared me to become a chef by letting me work at his restaurant, The Ballroom, on my day off from the university.
Do you recommend formal culinary education?
I recommend any kind of culinary training. There are basic skills, from organizing a kitchen to butchering a pig, that a chef needs to master. But nothing replaces the real life experience of eating and researching great food on your own.
What are your passions or hobbies outside the kitchen?
I am a serious gardener and every year I grow hundreds of peppers in my Weehawken garden. I have also raised chickens and pigeons and have inherited my father’s passion for art. I paint and would rather spend a Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art than shopping or going to the movies.
What is your perfect day off like?
Staying at home with my husband taking care of my garden gives me great pleasure. I love to walk with my dogs down Boulevard East to see the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline at different times of day. I usually drive to Mitsuwa, my local Japanese market, to do some food shopping and to eat ramen, and perhaps go to Manhattan in the afternoon to see a particular exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I am a voracious reader, but that is something I do religiously every single day of my life before going to sleep, and not on my day off.
What was your most memorable meal?
I have savored many memorable meals, each special for different reasons: the food, the company, the place, or the occasion. But I do recall fondly an elaborate dinner I cooked for my husband when he turned 40. It was a Babette Feast of sorts, where I served a large number of complex dishes of my invention that took me days to prepare, made with expensive ingredients like lobster and quail for a small and select group of friends who came to our home dressed in formal attire as if they were attending the most elegant banquet. The only guests who did not take me seriously were my godfather, the late sculptor John Nickford and his wife, Jean, who came to the party dressed like Guatemalan peasants.
Do you have a favorite city or location? If you could open another restaurant anywhere, where would it be and why?
London has a dynamic food scene that I find very attractive, but they are missing good Latin-American restaurants. I travel often to London because of my work as partner of the International Chocolate Awards, the largest independent chocolate competition in the world, and feel very much at home there. But I also have dreams of opening a small country restaurant in a tiny medieval village north of Madrid that I know very well where I can also make a real contribution. There are no good places to eat there though the area has enormous culinary promise.
What ingredient or technique are you most excited about right now?
I have always been fascinated by all forms of fermentation and my kitchen often looks like a mad scientist laboratory or more accurately described, a witch doctor’s cave, where all kinds of mysterious brews are fizzing and burbling at the same time.
Favorite kitchen tool?
Traditional Latin American grinding tools, from a Caribbean-style wooden mortar and pestle to a three-legged Mexican metate.
What was your worst cooking-related injury?
I once sliced off a fingertip using a ridiculous box grater to make malanga chips.
Favorite cheap eat?
Plantain balls with pork cracklings (bolones de verde con chicharrones), the way they are prepared by the women of Esmeraldas, Ecuador.
Favorite childhood dish? Who prepared it for you?
The fragrant rice and chicken (arroz con pollo) that we used to eat at my grandfather’s house on Sunday, always prepared by my maternal aunts. Sometimes they made it creamy like a great risotto and brought it to the table dressed to the nines garnished with fire-roasted peppers and canned asparagus to be served on fine china. But my mouth also waters when I recall the way in which my father cooked the land crabs that we caught ourselves in a big cauldron, seasoned with a rich tomato sofrito laced with beer.
What is your favorite dish on your menus today?
I love every single item on my menus as each dish tells a part of my own story of culinary discovery in Latin America. Though I am usually infatuated with my latest discovery, I am partial to my Cuban-style fresh corn tamales and would not live without our beans and rice.
What’s the wildest thing you’ve done in the kitchen—culinary or otherwise?
I do most recipe testing at my home kitchen and it is there that I take great chances. I once filled a gigantic cauldron with pork lard that I had rendered myself and propped it perilously over a wood fire in my backyard to fry a suckling pig. I was testing recipes for a long story that I had written for Saveur magazine on my return to Cuba and I wanted to duplicate the dish in exactly the same way I had experienced it at my family’s remote farm in eastern Cuba. I have also dug big holes in my backyard to duplicate South American earth ovens like the Peruvian pachamanca and the Chilean curanto that I had seen during my research trips. Installing a wood-burning oven at Cucharamama and building a menu around it with the little experience I had gotten about it in Paraguay was risky. On the first day we used the oven, the fire department closed our block because someone reported seeing smoke rise from our rooftop.
What change(s) do you look forward to in today’s food industry?
I envision a wider availability of fresh Latin American ingredients like hot peppers from South America either grown here in the U.S. or imported from their native countries.
So, what do you think about food bloggers?
I appreciate them immensely. Many have a refreshing point of view as they do not have to deal with editorial restraints. I still love glossy food magazines like Saveur, Food & Wine, and Bon Appetit, but bloggers are here to stay.
Any advice for upcoming chefs? Advice for food authors?
To work in the food business and to write about food, it is important to be passionate. But skill, deep understanding of food, and total dedication to one’s chosen field without expecting too much in return too soon are equally important. Thinking of food as the very essence of your life and treating the quest for food and its enjoyment as cherished and seamless parts of your life experience is the way to reap the greatest rewards from fields that make great physical and mental demands.
What was your most embarrassing cooking moment?
I have faced many challenging cooking situations, but I have been able to curtail complete disaster and deep public embarrassment, not without a lot of internal anguish. Years ago, while working as a consultant for a restaurant that will remain nameless, we were cooking outdoors at a historic Miami mansion for at least 1,000 people. We had rigged several grills to heat the food and to create a bit of smoky drama and we had placed trays containing morsels of cooked pork on portable tables behind the grills, right on the sandy edge of a gorgeous fountain and a shallow pool. It had rained and the legs of one of the service tables wobbled and collapsed creating a domino effect. Except for three trays of food, hundreds of pounds of pork, ended up in the water, plop, plop, plop. We had to act and fast. We sent one of our waiters to buy roasted pork at a couple of local Cuban restaurants on Calle Ocho, and managed to feed our guests as best we could. When the party was over, we waded into the pool to retrieve the trays and the pork and emerged wet and smeared in pork fat. During the next few days, all the beautiful goldfish living in the pool were found floating belly up, dead of indigestion, and the pool’s drains were clogged with pork. Our restaurant was banned from participating in any event at the aforesaid historical mansion and its gardens. I have no idea if they ever forgave us.
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Chef Lance Knowling to Open Blujeen in Harlem
South Orange resident and restaurateur, Lance Knowling, of Indigo Kitchen Catering, (formerly of Indigo Smoke in Montclair and Indigo Kitchen & Bar in Maplewood) is taking his contemporary soul cuisine to Harlem. According to Knowling, the new restaurant, Blujeen, will be a “modern comfort food concept that is structured in tradition, but has a few twists and turns while staying true. I call it urban comfort. “
Blujeen will offer many organic and sustainable ingredients, a vegetarian menu, and an American wine list. The dining room is eclectic with some modern, mid-century touches, and original art. Blujeen is scheduled to open in February 2015. 2143 Frederick Douglass Blvd, New York, NY 10026 (Harlem, between 115th and 116th).