48 Fun Facts About Cuban Food

Cuban sofrito, the sautéed base of most of the island's beans and stews, combines onion, garlic and what?

Bell pepper completes the base: cooks soften it with onion, stir in mashed garlic, and build ropa vieja, picadillo or a pot of black beans on top.

Which fruit do Cubans call fruta bomba, steering clear of its usual Spanish name?

Papaya: its usual Spanish name doubles as a vulgarity in Cuban slang, and the fruit goes by fruta bomba instead, even in a milkshake.

What distinguishes Moros y Cristianos from plain arroz con frijoles?

Beans and rice cooked in one pot make Moros y Cristianos; plain arroz con frijoles cooks the rice on its own and ladles the finished beans on top.

Moros y Cristianos uses black beans; which beans make eastern Cuba's congrí?

Red beans make congrí in eastern Cuba, though the two names are swapped so often that recipe writers warn cooks against confusing the dishes.

What does "ropa vieja" literally mean?

Old clothes: the name is said to come from the tattered look of the shredded beef, and in a folktale a poor man's stewed garments turn into the meat.

Which animal is roasted whole as the centrepiece of a Cuban Nochebuena, or Christmas Eve, dinner?

Pig: a whole one takes hours, sometimes a full day, to roast, and a popular way is the caja china, a box that cooks the animal under a tray of hot coals.

Ropa vieja's slow-cooked ancestor is often traced to which community of medieval Iberia?

Sephardic Jews are said to have slow-cooked the stew a day ahead because cooking on the Sabbath was forbidden; the recipe later crossed the Atlantic with settlers.

Which era of shortages took ropa vieja off most Cuban tables?

The Special Period put beef out of reach of most Cubans, and cooks who kept ropa vieja going made it with other meats.

Havana's block-sized state ice cream park, opened in 1966, is named after which ballet?

Coppélia was the favourite ballet of Celia Sánchez, the Castro confidante who named the park, conceived as a place where rich and poor could share a subsidised treat.

Which ingredient divides the Tampa and Miami versions of the Cuban sandwich?

Salami goes into Tampa's version, probably thanks to the Italian immigrants who lived beside the city's Cuban cigar workers; Miami leaves it out.

What is the sandwich press used to toast a Cuban sandwich called?

A plancha has no grooves, unlike a panini press, so it squeezes the sandwich flat as it heats, until the crust is crisp and the cheese starts to melt.

Which tropical fruit, cooked into a thick red paste, fills the classic Cuban pastelito alongside cream cheese?

Guava is boiled down with sugar until it sets into a paste firm enough to slice, then baked inside flaky puff pastry, often with a layer of cream cheese.

A Cuban flan is baked in a mould coated with what, which becomes its sauce when flipped?

Caramel, made by melting sugar in the pan itself, lines the dish under the custard and runs down as sauce once the flan is turned out; Cuban cooks steep a cinnamon stick in the milk.

What fat does Cuban bread contain that sets it apart from French bread?

Lard or shortening goes into the dough, and the loaf is at its best the day it is baked: by the next it has turned hard and dry.

What do traditional bakers lay on Cuban bread loaves before baking to score the crust?

A palmetto frond, laid wet along each loaf, leaves a shallow trench where a French baker would slash the dough; it is lifted off before the bread is eaten.

An immigrant from which Mediterranean island opened an early Cuban bread bakery in Tampa in 1896?

Sicily: Francisco Ferlita's La Joven Francesca was probably the first bakery to sell Cuban bread, and his delivery boys hung each loaf on a nail beside the customer's door.

What is a medianoche sandwich made on instead of the usual long Cuban loaf?

Sweet egg bread, soft like challah, sets the medianoche apart; its name means midnight, the hour it was eaten as a late snack, likely in Havana's nightclubs.

The Elena Ruz sandwich pairs turkey and cream cheese with what?

Strawberry jam joins the turkey and cream cheese because Havana socialite Elena Ruz talked the restaurant El Carmelo into putting her own order on its menu.

The name picadillo comes from which Spanish word?

Picar, to mince, names the dish for its method: beef chopped or ground fine, then simmered with tomato and plenty of garlic.

Which two briny ingredients are typical of Cuban picadillo?

Olives and capers give Cuban picadillo its salty bite; raisins are the traditional sweet counterweight, though many cooks leave them out.

What are tostones?

Twice-fried plantain slices: the green fruit is fried, smashed flat in a hinged press called a tostonera, then fried again until crisp.

Casabe, a crisp flatbread Cubans have eaten since before Columbus, is made from which root?

Yuca, or cassava, is toxic in its bitter form until the juice is pressed out, the step that turns it into casabe; UNESCO added the bread to its heritage list in 2024.

What citrus traditionally goes into Cuban mojo sauce?

Bitter orange juice and plenty of garlic make mojo; its diminutive, mojito, is also used for the sauce, which gets it confused with the cocktail.

Where did mojo sauce originally come from?

The Canaries still serve red and green mojos, and the many islanders who emigrated to Cuba took the garlicky sauce with them.

Which Cuban dish is shredded beef crisped with onions and lime?

Vaca frita is beef simmered until it shreds, then fried with onions and lime until the strands turn crisp, where ropa vieja stays in its tomato sauce.

What is a frita?

A Cuban-style hamburger: born in Cuba, it is now found mainly in South Florida, its spiced patty buried under shoestring fries.

Cuban ajiaco is a hearty stew built on what?

Root vegetables, which Cubans call viandas, simmer with a mix of meats; in Camagüey neighbours each bring ingredients and cook a pot of it in the street to open the San Juan festival.

The name of the stew ajiaco comes from which word?

Aji, hot pepper in the island's indigenous tongue, gives ajiaco its name; the stew draws on so many peoples' ingredients that Fernando Ortiz made it his image of Cuba as a melting pot.

Which five ingredients make up a classic mojito?

White rum, sugar, lime, soda water and mint: the leaves are only pressed into the sugar and lime to release their oils, never shredded.

Spearmint stands in abroad, but which herb goes into a mojito in Cuba?

Yerba buena is the mojito's own herb in Cuba; the name just means 'good herb', and in other countries it belongs to quite different plants of the mint family.

Which Havana bar did Hemingway supposedly make famous with his scrawled mojito endorsement?

La Bodeguita del Medio frames a handwritten line in his name praising its mojito, but the claim is doubted and Hemingway is not thought to have been a regular.

Which English privateer is sometimes credited with the mojito's ancestor, a mix of cane spirit and mint?

Francis Drake's name, in Spanish, became El Draque, a drink said to have been mixed on his voyages, with lime to help his crews ward off scurvy.

What is a mojito without alcohol called?

A nojito blends 'no' and 'mojito': it is the same drink with the rum left out.

Which rum cocktail is named after a mining village in eastern Cuba?

Daiquiri: beside the iron mines of Daiquirí, American engineer Jennings Cox is widely credited with first mixing rum, lime and sugar around 1898.

What replaces sugar in the cocktail now sold as a Hemingway daiquiri?

Grapefruit juice and maraschino sweeten it instead; Hemingway took his daiquiris with no sugar and twice the rum, hence the nickname papa doble.

What does the Spanish name of the rum-and-Coke highball translate to?

Free Cuba was the rallying cry of the island's independence fighters, and the drink took the name during the American occupation that followed the 1898 war.

Which fact undercuts the legend that rum and Coke was first mixed in the Spanish–American War?

Coca-Cola reached Cuba only in 1900, two years after the 1898 war the legend names, and Bacardi itself dates the drink to that year.

Cuban fufú, plantain mashed with garlic and pork, keeps the name of a staple from which continent?

Africa: fufu is a pounded staple of West Africa, and its name crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved people who went on making it in Cuba.

What is the whipped sugar-and-espresso foam on café cubano called?

Espumita is made by whipping the first, strongest drops of espresso into the sugar until it turns to a pale foam that rises to the top of the cup.

What is a colada in Cuban coffee culture?

Several shots in one cup to share: a colada comes in a Styrofoam cup with a stack of thimble-sized plastic ones, and the buyer pours rounds for the whole office.

What is the name for the small walk-up coffee windows in Cuban neighbourhoods?

Ventanitas, literally little windows, pass thimble cups of sweet espresso straight to the pavement and have become their neighbourhoods' meeting points.

What is a cortadito?

Espresso topped with steamed milk makes a cortadito; unlike the cortado served elsewhere, it arrives already sweetened, as Cuban espresso always is.

In which city was Bacardi founded in 1862?

Santiago de Cuba is where Facundo Bacardí bought a small distillery in 1862; his wife Amalia saw fruit bats roosting in its rafters and made the bat the rum's emblem.

Which rum brand have two rivals sold since the 1990s, a Cuban–French venture worldwide and Bacardi in the U.S.?

Havana Club was seized from the Arechabala family in 1960; Cuba's venture with Pernod Ricard exports it, while Bacardi bought the family's recipe and sells its own version in the United States.

Cuba's tamal en cazuela skips the corn-husk wrapper and is cooked how?

Stirred in a pot on the stove, the corn dough and its pork cook down into a thick porridge, sparing the cook the chore of filling and tying husks.

Which Cuban beer is named after a Taíno chief burned at the stake by the Spanish?

Hatuey crossed from Hispaniola and fought the Spanish in Cuba until his capture in 1512; promised heaven by a priest, he is said to have refused it on hearing that Spaniards went there too.

What is guarapo?

Pressed sugar-cane juice: fresh stalks are fed through a mill called a trapiche, and the cloudy juice is sold by the glass.

A tres leches cake is soaked in which three milks?

Evaporated, condensed and whole milk (or cream, in many kitchens) soak the cake, whose airy sponge drinks it all in without turning soggy.