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Hugo Acosta misses the Venezuelan flan that his mother would make as an incentive to finish meals, a celebratory treat or a comfort after an injury. Acosta enjoys the flavor of the custard dessert, which is made with eggs, milk, sweetened condensed milk and sugar. But he misses flan for another reason — it connects to his family and evokes memories of growing up in Venezuela.

For Latino/Hispanic Heritage Month, Latino community members shared family recipes and their memories of these dishes with The Daily Orange.

Acosta recalls eating with members of his family at the dinner table and talking with them about political issues and what happened at school. For Acosta, these family dinners fostered unity within his family. And flan was a dessert that Acosta would look forward to enjoying after a meal.

“Flan is like the jewel, the special moment thing,” he said. “We don’t have flan every night.”

Though he has not made the dessert himself in the United States, Acosta still eats flan during special moments when he gets the opportunity. When Acosta, who is the founder, owner and publisher of CNY Latino newspaper, had an office in Syracuse, he would get flan from Las Delicias restaurant on Westcott Street to decompress during times of stress.

In addition to connecting to Acosta’s own family experience, flan is significant to Venezuelan culture, he said.

“There are particular dishes and particular types of plates or foods that identify that country. So flan would be one with a few that might identify Venezuela,” Acosta said.

Arepas, a type of bread, is another example of a traditional food in Venezuela, as well as other countries such as Colombia.

In Peru, Mary Cullipher would eat huancaína sauce with meals about once a week. Now in the U.S., she eats “papa a la huancaína” at family gatherings. Courtesy of Mary Cullipher

Mary Cullipher learned how to make papa a la huancaína, a popular Peruvian dish of potatoes in a huancaína cheese sauce, from her mother. The dish gets its name from the town Huancayo, Peru. Cullipher explained the story behind the dish, saying that during the construction of a railroad, a woman from Huancayo prepared a cheese sauce to accompany potatoes and topped the dish with hard-boiled eggs. Workers on the train then started calling the sauce “La Huancaína” in honor of the woman.

In Peru, Cullipher would eat huancaína sauce with meals about once a week. Now in the U.S., she eats papa a la huancaína at family gatherings.

Cullipher said papa a la huancaína is perfect because it is balanced. The dish’s base layers are followed by potatoes covered in sauce and then finished with a hard-boiled egg and olives.

The Peruvian meal is important to Cullipher because it is a representation of her home country and because her family taught her how to make the dish. In Peru, mothers traditionally pass along recipes to their daughters and teach them how to cook. Cullipher learned all her recipes from her mother. The dish shows that Peruvian people make delicious food that doesn’t cost a lot of money.

“In Peru, the food is cheap. It’s very natural,” Cullipher said. “You don’t need to go to the supermarket to buy the food. You can buy potatoes in the farmers markets very cheap, and the people save the potatoes.”

Rafael Seguinot’s favorite type of pasteles are “pasteles de yuca,” a traditional Puerto Rican dish made with yucca root. Courtesy of Rafael Seguinot

Rafael Seguinot’s favorite type of pasteles are pasteles de yuca, a traditional Puerto Rican dish made with yucca root. Some people like to put ketchup on pasteles, while others like Seguinot do not. Instead, he adds Puerto Rican hot sauce.

Pasteles de yuca are typically made for Christmas, specifically on four days of the year: Dec. 24, Dec. 25, Jan. 5 and Jan. 6.

Seguinot’s family prepares the pasteles de yuca in a different way than others. Instead of mixing the ingredients together, they keep the ingredients, including chickpeas, red pepper and the olives on separate plates. Other parts of the process include putting plantain leaves into fire to soften them and then assembling the pasteles by folding them with the pork filling inside.

“My greatest memory of the pasteles is not eating it; the even better part is making them,” Seguinot said. “And then you see the faces of the people enjoying the pasteles.”

Seguinot’s family prepares the pasteles de yuca in a different way than others, he said. Instead of mixing the ingredients together, they keep the ingredients, including chickpeas, red pepper and the olives on separate plates. Courtesy of Rafael Seguinot

To Seguinot, the dish is about family, Puerto Rico and his culture. The recipe for pasteles is over 500 years old and comes from the Taíno people, he said.

Seguinot’s family makes about 150 or 160 pasteles at once, which takes about eight hours, and it is a team effort, with each of the family members helping out with a part of the pasteles. Seguinot has helped with making pasteles as long as he can remember and said that making them was the first time that he worked on a team.

“A pastel is like tasting Puerto Rico. That’s the main thing of a pastel,” Seguinot said. “When you have a pastel, you taste Puerto Rico.”

Published on October 14, 2020 at 11:27 pm

Contact Mandy: ackrayna@syr.edu | @MandyKraynak