Comida criolla from puerto rico

As I introduce new Puerto Rican dishes through this blog, I realize that it may be helpful to give you a once around the world on Puerto Rican cuisine.  As someone who loves food, I enjoy many different types of cuisine however, deep in my heart my first cuisine love is for Puerto Rican food.  Not only is the food I grew up with in the island, but I think it really shows who we are as a community.  Our cuisine really started with the heritage of our Taino Indians, the indigenous inhabitants of the island when Columbus discovered it.  With Columbus arrival, the Spanish introduced many new things to the islander, and with them they also brought the African slaves, as they made their way to the Americas.  These two new groups brought with them their own cuisine style and this amalgamation of cooking styles developed into a more complex type of Puerto Rican food. As the Caribbean developed into a main trade route to the Americas, settlers and travelers from France, Italy, China and Denmark also left their mark into our cuisine and eventually all these influences created a style of cuisine known as Comida Criolla, which is what we call the typical food from the island. 

As with every cuisine you have the very fancy dishes but you also have the dishes that had humble beginnings.  These dishes are those created by the Taino indians, the farmers, slaves, and poor people.  And these dishes I think is where we really see our food heritage at its best.  Beautiful and simple dishes that let the fresh ingredients from our island shine on their own.  Here are some other interesting facts:

1. The Tainos (Arawaks) are the first first people known to make a grate of thin green wood strips on
which they slowly cooked meat, allowing it to be enhanced by the flavor of the wood.  This grate was called a barbacoa, and the word we know today as barbeque is taken from this early Indian cooking method.