Cuban cooking for all

Unless you live in Florida or the metropolitan New York area, chances are your community is lacking a good Cuban restaurant. It’s a pity, because Cuban food — with influences from Spain, France, Portugal, Africa and the rest of the Caribbean — is a delicious cuisine, soulful and satisfying.

I was lucky enough to be introduced to such Cuban staples as rice and beans, chicken and rice, tostones, Cuban sandwiches and the like at a relatively young age, because my father, who worked in Union City, N.J., — home to many Cubans and Cuban-Americans — frequented Cuban restaurants for lunch and would sometimes bring home a plate or two. “Cubans really know how to cook!” he would say, which was high praise indeed from an Italian native who steered clear of most restaurants and thought no dish on earth could surpass one made by his mother, sister or wife. I moved to New England as a young adult and have been missing those flavors ever since.

Now, those of us who are not Floridians or metropolitan New Yorkers have a chance to experience — or re-experience — Cuban food. “The Cuban Kitchen,” by Miami writer Raquel Rabade Roque (2011 Knopf), provides the home cook with 500 “real” recipes from the Cuban home kitchen.

When I opened this friendly looking cookbook, I was hoping for a bit of background on Cuban cookery; Roque supplies only the briefest of descriptions, saying that it “combines the simplicity of peasant food, which has little regard for measurements, with elegant European cookery traditions.”

After a short trip down memory lane — she spent her childhood in Havana — she rolls up her sleeves and dives into the kitchen, offering 24 chapters on everything from Cuban cocktails to Cuban candies, with stops along the way for plantains, rice, pork, salads, eggs, fish and more, all written in a straightforward style that inspires confidence. Opening this book makes you hungry ... fast.

The base of many Cuban dishes is “sofrito,” a lightly sauteed mixture of fragrant vegetables and herbs. According to Roque, she and her childhood friends playing in the streets of the Fontanar neighborhood of Havana knew when it was time to go home for lunch or dinner because of the smell of sofrito wafting through the streets.

“We could actually identify our own mom’s sofrito,” she writes. The shrimp dish below begins with the “Famous Sofrito Fontanar” that her mother made.

Shrimp Camaguey is named after its origins in the largest province in Cuba, known for its historic cities and gorgeous beaches. Dive in!

Ÿ Marialisa Calta is the author of “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family” (Perigee, 2005). More at marialisacalta.com.