Red Hook June 2009

Several newspaper articles over the past year have lauded the wonderful food purveyed by the Central and South American crowd from the lunch wagons crowding around the football (soccer to you) fields of Red Hook Park. I have had the greatest doubts because certain food ingredients and cooking techniques are an abomination to the gods. The loathsome ingredients and techniques include deep frying, tropical tubers, and plantains. And I have tried Mexican food many times. While I do not find it repulsive, I yet cannot get excited over it either. To me the cuisine of the Americas is greatly inferior to that of Europe. I had read that Brazil is putting real science behind an effort at developing a strain of wheat that will grow in their tropical country. I read this as a desperate effort to be able to eat real food and to get away from those detestable tropical tubers.
And so, with grave misgivings, I ordered myself two Pupusas. These are maize pancakes stuffed with a mixture of pork and cheese. I have no problem with the ingredients but the whole is less than the parts. The pork and cheese do not improve the taste of the pancakes. I would rather have had the pancakes separate from the pork, with maybe a little maple syrup. Mixing the two ingredients creates an inferior outcome such as might be achieved by mixing caviar and whipped cream.
From a Colombian wagon, I ordered a sausage that appears to have been deep fried and a misshapen lump that also appears to have been deep fried and contained (within a pastry shell) chunks of whole potato surrounding chopped meat and rice. Compare this tasteless concoction to a sublime stuffed cabbage. The sausage was also largely tasteless. However, Colombians are not the only people who can destroy foods by deep frying. A so-called German restaurant in Staten Island achieves the same destructive effect by deep frying bratwurst.
Maybe the problem is me. I am one of those mutants to whom cilantro tastes like old dishwater.

Red Hook June 2009