Illyanna Maisonet's Cookbook Celebrates Puerto Rico’s Diaspora

Which recipes did you find to be most successful?

I always start with one recipe, which is actually three recipes. Pollo Guisado is a simple braise: It’s something most people will recognize, you don’t need any special equipment and it doesn’t take a lot of time. In order to make it, you still need to make sofrito (first recipe), which goes into the chicken braise (second recipe) and serve it over Puerto Rican white rice (third recipe). Puerto Rican white rice hits different because it technically uses the pilaf method; the rice is cooked and coated in fat before the water is added, and some people toast the grains giving it a nutty flavor. I’d love to be able to teach people how to make Arroz con Gandules [Puerto Rican Rice with Pigeon Peas]. I try to tell them that if you’re not using a caldero [cauldron] or a rondeau [wide, shallow pan], it’s not going to come out right. Something about the thinness of the aluminum or stainless steel walls of those two pots makes the rice turn out right every time.

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How did you become a writer, and what led to the cookbook idea?

I started writing professionally in 2015, which is around the same time I got the idea for the cookbook, which really was my brother-in-law’s idea. Writing about Puerto Rican food, that idea happened organically. It was a way for him to work on more creative stuff. I knew how to cook the food and he knew how to shoot the food, so together we learned placement of food, what they call prop or food styling. We made a tiny cook-booklet out of the photos, maybe 10 pages of recipes.

You dedicated a portion of the book to Puerto Rican products, cooking techniques, tools and flavors. Is that an essential element that you had an idea about since the beginning?

A very, very small version of that existed in that little cook-booklet that me and my brother-in-law did 10 years ago.

How do you go about sourcing products or ingredients to find something as close as back on the island. Or do you adapt to what you have around you in California?

We’re in California, so it’s not really hard to find very good substitutions. The only thing that I find impossible to get here is ají dulce, which are really sweet peppers that go with sofrito. I can find recao [Culantro]. I’ve been able to find it within the last 10 years. But there’s only a handful, if that, of stores that have it, and they cater to the Southeast Asian demographics, because Vietnamese people also use recao. When it comes to ají dulce, I use bell peppers (purple or green). You know a lot of the sofrito recipes already call for bell pepper, which is already a substitution. My grandma had to use bell peppers.

You state in the book that: “There’s no passing down of heirloom cookbooks.” What was your approach to writing and testing out recipes?

A lot of my grandma’s recipes I already had. I just wanted to see how she made some things, because I would try to make them, and they wouldn’t come out, and I just said, “We’re going to go to the kitchen and I’m going to watch you cook and I’m going to measure while you cook.” I just watched her and chronicled everything. You already know the basics by cooking growing up, but then culinary school helps you hone in how to be more precise, how to be more mindful, how to be more organized.

You’ve said of Diasporican: “This is not a Puerto Rican cookbook. This book is for the Diasporicans — the 5.5 million people living stateside.”

I intended it to be truthful. It’s for people like you and me who may not necessarily speak Spanish or speak Spanglish. I’ve been trying so hard to prove that I was Puerto Rican — writing this book allows me to realize I’m not necessarily Puerto Rican; I’m a Diasporican, and there’s nothing wrong with that.