Chef and culinary historian Maricel Presilla owns two restaurants and has written many cookbooks. But her newest book, Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, is her attempt to give fans a heaping helping of the many cultures she blends into her world.
"It's my whole life," she tells Morning Edition host David Greene. "There are recipes there of my childhood, things that I remember my family, my aunts doing. But also things that I learned as I started to travel Latin America."
Greene recently invited Presilla into his kitchen to whip up a batch of yuca fries with cilantro sauce, a dish served in many Cuban restaurants. The fries are authentic, but the now-common sauce isn't, Presilla says. "It's my recipe," she told Greene, created while she was a consultant for Victor's Cafe in the 1980s in New York and Miami.
Inspired by an Indian cilantro chutney, she created an aioli with garlic and cilantro to accompany yuca fries on the restaurant menu. "Everybody who tries that thinks it is a traditional Cuban recipe when, in reality, Cubans don't like cilantro that much," she says.
You don't often get yuca fries without the green stuff on the side these days — at least not in the U.S.
As the pair prepared Presilla's famous sauce, Greene asked her about the value of sitting while cooking, something she calls the "Zen of the Latin kitchen."