Pasteles Period COrigin theory DVerified

Pasteles are a Puerto Rican home dish: a dough of grated root vegetables filled with pork and other meat, wrapped in banana leaves and boiled. In the Christmas season a whole family gathers to make them, and the community shares them as festive fare.

At the heart of the dish is a dough of grated plantain, the cooking banana. The plantain was originally a crop of the Old World, and it reached the Caribbean in the sixteenth century. In 1516 the friar Tomás de Berlanga carried it from the Canary Islands to Hispaniola, as a contemporary chronicle records. The dough's other element, yautía (malanga), stands in contrast: it was a local crop rooted in the Caribbean and South America long before Columbus. The Taíno had grown this tuber from early times and used it in their daily food.

So a root long native to the land meets the plantain and the pork that crossed the sea, together in one dough. Along with the way of wrapping it in banana leaves and boiling it, the pasteles we know took their present shape only after the plantain had settled in the Caribbean, over the course of the colonial period. The dish's name first appears in writing in 1843, in El aguinaldo puertorriqueño, a collection of verse that sang of Christmas food.

"Pasteles are exactly the dish the Taíno invented"—this account has been handed down with the island's pride. The Taíno did indeed have an old tradition of leaf-wrapped steaming, in which a dough of ground cassava or yautía was wrapped in corn husks. The antiquity of that technique is beyond doubt, and it deserves respect as a distant forerunner of pasteles.

But when you follow the contents of the pasteles actually made today, the story parts ways. Neither the plantain that forms the body of the dough nor the pork of the filling was on the Taíno table. Both were brought across the sea by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Since a contemporary chronicle records the plantain reaching Hispaniola in 1516, the present-day pasteles built around it cannot have been made by the hands of the Taíno before that date. The antiquity of the wrapped-and-steamed "genre" and the time at which the dish before us came into being are two things that have to be kept apart.

So who did make today's pasteles? No single inventor emerges from the sources. What emerges instead is a process of merging: the Taíno root-vegetable dough and leaf-wrapping technique, the plantain and pork and the very name the Spanish carried, and the adaptations that people brought from Africa worked upon limited ingredients—all fusing between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The name appears in the 1843 collection of verse; a printed recipe waits until a Dominican cookbook of 1938. Being written down for the first time is not the same as being born. It is by letting go of the search for a single origin that the history of this dish—where three cultures crossed—comes into view.