Puerto Rican Cooking

Puerto Rican Cooking

Although Puerto Rican cooking is somewhat similar to both Spanish

and Mexican cuisine, it is a unique tasty blend of Spanish, African, Taíno, and

American influences, using such indigenous seasonings and ingredients as

coriander, papaya, cacao, nispero, apio, plantains, and yampee. Locals call

their cuisine "cocina criolla".

Cocina Criolla (Créole cooking) can be traced back to the Arawaks and

Tainos, the original inhabitants of the island, who thrived on a diet of corn,

tropical fruit, and seafood. When Ponce de León arrived with Columbus in

1493, the Spanish added beef, pork, rice, wheat, and olive oil to the island's

foodstuffs. Soon after, the Spanish began planting sugarcane and importing

slaves from Africa, who brought with them okra and taro (known in Puerto

Rico as yautia). The mingling of flavors and ingredients passed from

generation to generation among the different ethnic groups that settled on

the island, resulting in the exotic blend of today's Puerto Rican cuisine.

MUSIC:

One of Puerto Rico's notable exports is its music, which probably the

predominant Caribbean music heard in the United States. At least some of

the instruments used in traditional Puerto Rican music originated with the

Taíno people. Most noteworthy is the güicharo, or güiro , a notched

hollowed-out gourd, which was adapted from pre-Columbian days. The

musical traditions of the Spanish and Africans can also be heard in Puerto

Rico's music. At least four different instruments were adapted from the

six-string Spanish classical guitar: the requinto, the bordonua, the cuatro,

and the triple, each of which produces a unique tone and pitch. The most

popular of these, and one for which greatest number of adaptions and

compositions have been written, is the cuatro, a guitar-like instrument with

10 strings (arranged in five different pairs) whose name (translated as "the

fourth") is derived from the tradition of tuning its strings in variables of

half-octaves (that is, fourths). Usually carved from solid blocks of laurel

wood and known for resonances and pitches different from those produced

by its Spanish counterpart, this instruments graceful baroque body has been