This long-running annual festival "celebrates the African influences of Loiza, Puerto Rico, in New York City." The percussion-driven rhythms of bomba and plena may reach your ears from several blocks away, but to appreciate the roots of pasteles, you'll want to get right up close.
Traditional Puerto Rican pasteles consist of dough, usually prepared by grating several different root vegetables, that is stuffed with a well-seasoned meat stew, wrapped in a banana leaf, and boiled. Variations, developed over many generations, are innumerable. "After a long period of experimentation and improvisation," Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra wrote in Eating Puerto Rico, the pastel "ultimately became a dish whose ingredients genuinely mirrored and combined the gastronomic traditions of the island's major population groups, incorporating Arawakan chili peppers, tannier, and achiote; Iberian garbanzos, raisins, olives, and pork; and plantains and bananas from the Canary Islands and parts of Africa. If one focuses, however, on what truly makes pastel unique — the mashing of the dough to give it a certain texture and its being wrapped in leaves and cooked by boiling, three features that were constant — then the African element seems especially prominent."
My two pasteles, the first heavier with pork, the second more abundant in olives and red peppers, also display a more recent Puerto Rican gastronomic tradition, one that I adopted only after several fellow diners took the lead. Each pastel wears two condiments, one a hot sauce, the other a thicker, sweeter, tangy sauce applied from a nationally branded squeeze bottle: tomato ketchup.
Loiza Festival of El Barrio (also known as the Festival of Santiago Apostol)
105th St. between Park and Lexington Aves., Manhattan
(The 2015 festival was held on July 24-26)
