Last week, I covered “Diasporicans” as part of a serious discussion of Puerto Rican identity within the context of the island’s status debate. Today, we get a chance to explore the story behind Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook, and its author, Illyanna Maisonet, a Puerto Rican born outside Puerto Rico who is part of a diaspora of 5 million members in the mainland United States.
RELATED: Caribbean Matters: Puerto Rico's lone representative in the House disparages 'Diasporicans'
Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
Illyanna Maisonet is certainly not your typical celebrity food writer. Her blog, Eat Gorda Eat (Eat Fat Woman Eat), is brutally honest about where being a fat woman places her in mainstream society.
Maisonet wrote this righteous rant for BrokeAssStuart in 2016— “I’m Fat, Latina, and a Phantom in Mainstream Culture”—which leaves the reader no way to avoid confronting her reality.
I’m fat and Latina. I belong to a phantom culture; a society that solely exists as a result of colonialism and where women were born in their mother’s beds to midwives. I grew up in an underrepresented and underserved socioeconomic neighborhood where the crack epidemic came tumbling through like Winnie-the-Pooh’s little black rain cloud. I made it out. But, that didn’t solve the problems. It left me more lost. It’s especially difficult if you already live as a first generation bi-cultural paradox that grew up in the ghetto and now belongs to the list of women behind the glass case who gained upward mobility. It’s like Donald Glover says, “…it’s weird. You’d think they’d be proud of him, but when you leave the hood they think that you look down on them.”
[...]
My motherland has been sold to PROMESA; colonialism by consent. My nation is drawing lines in the sand and forcing us to choose sides. Eric Ripert included three episodes in Puerto Rico for his Avec Eric show, the last episode was a party in Puerto Rico where everyone is drinking and eating…ain’t one dark Puerto Rican in sight. My white husband makes nearly a six digit salary working at an advertising firm in San Francisco. We’re DINKS (double income no kids). His family helped build San Francisco and he is a descendant of the Rice-A-Roni/Ghirardelli empire (something he never talks about because how déclassé). We go to the ballet and opera. We’ve eaten at the quintessential fine dining establishments of the Bay Area. Do I not see me because my husband can trace his family roots back to the 1700s on a genealogy website within a single day, and I can’t even find my mother’s name? His roots dig deep and tie up in a neat little package. There’s no paperwork for my family. The roots are above ground, wildly grasping for any piece of foundation they can find. The colonialism permanently emblazoned on the ids of my ancestors. But, I know they’re there. It’s in the food I cook, the only way that I can connect to my ancestors…cooking their food. The recipes of phantoms.
[...]
And if I had to wait this long for Edourado Jordan to be on the cover of Food and Wine Magazine, can you imagine how long it’ll be until a Fat Latina is on the cover? I never thought about women’s issues. I never thought about Feminism. Feminism is about equal rights; men and women should be paid the same for the same job. Even if that ever happens, it won’t apply to me or women who look like me. If I can find them. The system is stacked against us. Feminism didn’t do anything for my mom or my grandma. They were in the workforce long before women took to the streets and burned their bras, they were in the workforce long after. Still toiling, still picking, still raising someone else’s children while their children watched themselves.
When she closes with “For who can find a phantom? I am nothing. I am hollow. I am dust,” I felt Maisonet’s pain. I’ve read her essay five times now; please read the whole powerful piece—I’ll wait.
I am hoping that the publicity around her newly published cookbook has changed Maisonet’s past feelings of complete erasure, though the scars of years of externally inflicted pain can never be wiped away.
This glowing recommendation from Chef José Andrés sure must have felt good.
The cover of Diasporican is so striking. Those hands look like the hands of some of my aunts. The multiple silver bracelets and the one with the Puerto Rican flag remind me of … me.
RELATED: Caribbean Matters: A salute to the Nuyorican Movement
This cookbook opens the doors not just to wonderful recipes, but to Maisonet’s life, and her family. It takes to Puerto Rico and visits Puerto Ricans from the island and those on the mainland—and not just from New York, because Maisonet is a Cali-Rican.
Jaclyn Diaz reviewed the book for NPR in October.
Illyanna Maisonet's cookbook Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook doesn't fit neatly into one, set box. Then again, neither does actually being a Diasporican — a member of the more than 5 million-strong tribe of "Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá," as Maisonet writes. Her book is a memoir, cookbook and retelling of Puerto Rican history and it's a testament to her life's work of documenting and preserving food throughout the Puerto Rican diaspora.
Maisonet, a longtime food writer and the nation's first Puerto Rican food columnist, is herself Diasporican. She's the only child of her mother, Carmen (who was just 3 years old when her own parents arrived in California).
Maisonet, her mother and her grandmother (Margarita) all became cooks "out of economic necessity," the book details. "We did not have the privilege of cooking for pleasure or joy. Our story is one of generational poverty and trauma with glimpses of pride and laughter, all of which have been the catalysts of ample good food in my life," Maisonet explains in Diasporican. She grew up in Sacramento, Calif., where the area's diversity influenced Masionet's "Cali-Rican" style of cooking.
Rachel Wharton covered the book’s release and interviewed Maisonet for Taste.
If you’re one of the thousands of folks that follow Illyanna Maisonet on social media or Substack, then you already know how the Sacramento chef and food writer has pushed through years of rejections (first from her own father, later from food magazine and cookbook editors) and struggles (financial, familial) to bring her brand-new book—Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook—to the new-release table. You also know that Maisonet is funny as hell, a great storyteller, and a really excellent cook.
Named after the idea that many Puerto Ricans living stateside feel like their identities and their cooking are “not from here, not from there,” Diasporican blends Anthony-Bourdain-style food memoir and travelogue, meandering through the expansive farmland of Maisonet’s central California home turf and small Puerto Rican communities like the Afro-Caribbean coastal town of Loíza. It touches on Maisonet’s stints in culinary school and as a Puerto Rican food columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as on the pop-ups and cooking classes she still runs to make ends meet.
[...]
WHARTON: This book has been a long time coming. Does it feel like you thought it would feel to have it (almost) out in the world?
MAISONET: It definitely doesn’t feel like I thought it would. I legit thought the brands who wanted to pay to work with me would be knocking on my door by now, and they’re not. But I’m still happy and elated that it’ll live on in the world. Hopefully it does really well, so it’ll outlive me, because that was kind of the point of making the book: that pieces of me and my family would live on, but in a positive legacy type of way.
RELATED: Caribbean Matters: A visit to Loíza, Puerto Rico—which was almost left behind after Hurricane Fiona
In September, NPR/KQED’s food editor Luke Tsai also interviewed Maisonet.
Her award-winning column about traditional Puerto Rican foodways in the San Francisco Chronicle made Maisonet the first Puerto Rican food columnist in the United States. She is as fierce an advocate for the city of Sacramento as you will ever find—particularly when it comes to the immigrant and working-class food businesses that populate her neighborhood in South Sacramento.
And when the glossy food magazine Bon Appetit had its racial reckoning moment of 2020, those who know Maisonet were not surprised that she was the one who kicked the whole thing off. Her series of tweets about the rationale the magazine offered for rejecting one of her pitches—and about the publication’s glaring lack of Puerto Rican food stories overall—ignited such a high-profile discussion of tokenism and racism in food media that the company eventually underwent a massive reshuffling of its leadership and staff. She’s never been shy about speaking truth to power.
She also happens to be a beautiful writer. Maisonet’s full powers are on display in her forthcoming debut cookbook, Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook. “Culantro,” she writes, describing an herb central to Puerto Rican cooking, “is like cilantro’s cousin who comes to visit from the hood. Yeah, they’re family. But it’s also way more ‘punchy,’ ‘vocal,’ ‘spirited’—all those politically correct euphemisms—and possibly wearing FUBU.” About the salted codfish fritters known as bacalaitos, Maisonet writes, “The center was toothsome like our gente’s—our people’s—resistance, salty from the tears we’ve shed, but the edges were delicate and vulnerable, like when we reveal our underbellies.”
Here’s one of the latest, from The Sporkful podcast. I grinned when I saw “This episode contains explicit language.” Maisonet doesn’t code switch into acceptable Anglo-speak. Good for her.
The episode title is perfect: “Illyanna Maisonet Is Always Pissed Off.” Here’s a partial transcript of a funny exchange about the challenge of converting family recipes into cookbook recipes.
DAN PASHMAN: In 2004, when Illyanna was in her early twenties, she moved to San Francisco to work as a visual artist. She was the first person in her family to move out of Sacramento. She spent several years in the Bay Area art scene, until the Great Recession hit in 2008, and she couldn’t support herself with art anymore. She moved in with a friend, and started cooking and baking every day.
Around this time, she read Anthony Bourdain’s famous book Kitchen Confidential. Illyanna says that she was already obsessed with writers like e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac. When she read Kitchen Confidential, she saw Bourdain writing in the same way as her literary heroes, except about restaurants and food. When her roommate suggested she apply to culinary school, she decided to go for it. She wanted to learn to cook like a chef, and write like Anthony Bourdain.
A few years after graduating from culinary school, she got her first opportunity. In 2014, her brother-in-law, who’s a photographer, came to her with an idea. They should make a Puerto Rican cookbook together. For Illyanna, it seemed like a good first step into the world of food writing. They didn't have any experience making cookbooks, so they decided to start small with a booklet of her grandmother’s recipes.
ILLYANNA MAISONET: And now that I've finished culinary school, now I'm kind of like in my peak “I went to culinary school” phase, so now I need, you know, oh, we need measurements. Oh, I need steps. Oh, you know, I need to like literally describe everything.
PASHMAN: So you go into the kitchen with your grandmother.
MAISONET: Yep.
PASHMAN: And start ...
MAISONET: Watching.
PASHMAN: And measuring.
MAISONET: Yep. Like, you know, when she's like this much water, I'm like, "Wait a minute!"
PASHMAN:[LAUGHS]
MAISONET:Like, let me get this two-cup mold, you know ...
PASHMAN: Right.
MAISONET: And then pour this, pour this water into this, and then I'll subtract how much water you use.
PASHMAN:And what did she think of that process?
MAISONET: Oh, she — of course, she's like, "You don't need that. You don't need that. You just do ... you just do it until it looks like this."
PASHMAN: Right. [LAUGHS]
MAISONET: How much garlic do we use? Mucho, mucho ... okay!
PASHMAN: [LAUGHING]
MAISONET: That's not descriptive. Like, are we talking like — you know, some people think that two cloves of garlic is a lot.
PASHMAN: Right.
MAISONET: You know, and then she's like, "Two cloves of garlic? Who the fuck are these people?"
PASHMAN:[LAUGHING]
MAISONET: You know, she's like talking like, you know, maybe like two heads of garlic. You know what I mean?
PASHMAN: Right, right.
MAISONET: And to me, that — I'm like, okay, you were right. Mucho, mucho.
PASHMAN:That’s mucho all right. [LAUGHS]
I was elated to find this hour-long interview with Maisonet from the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), conducted by New York Times staff writer Eric Kim. As a community of writers, Daily Kos readers might be interested in how Maisonet navigated the publishing world with a book, but no agent.
What I found very interesting—at 37:29—was Maisonet’s discovery of regional variations in food on the island.
Towards the end of the session, an audience member who owns a Puerto Rican restaurant in NYC brought up the name of New York Puerto Rican photographer and former Young Lords Party member Hiram Maristany—my dear friend who joined the ancestors this year.
The restaurateur told Maisonet that “Hiram would be very proud of what you have done.” This former Young Lords Party member agrees.
RELATED: 'Mapping Resistance': Activism past and present and the New York Young Lords
I haven’t posted any of Maisonet’s recipes, but some can be found in her newsletter, and of course, in the new cookbook, which again, is more than “just a cookbook.” It’s history, it’s poetry, it’s politics, and above all, it’s an ode to the Puerto Rican diaspora.
RELATED: Caribbean Matters: Holiday eats and musical treats with sazón, spice, and everything nice
Join me in the comments section for more on Puerto Rican food, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
