Many Puerto Rican families choose pernil, or roast pork shoulder, as their Sanguiving centerpiece. It is typically marinated overnight in an adobo of minced garlic, sour orange juice, olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper. But Huyke sticks to turkey, brining it first in a mixture of salt, brown sugar, dried bay leaves, fresh herbs, and peppercorns before pushing butter under the skin and brushing the bird with a blend of rum, melted butter, and guava jelly. Huyke preserves the drippings for a tangy-sweet guava-infused gravy. She also shows me how to make ajilímojilí, a highly adaptable, herbaceous sauce of garlic, ají dulce peppers (similar to bell but fruitier and more delicate), culantro, cilantro, olive oil, vinegar, and her own signature addition: a copious amount of capers. Guests will drizzle it over nearly every dish on her Sanguiving table, she tells me.
After hours of cooking and using every imaginable tool, from a traditional pilón to a modern Vitamix blender, we sit down to enjoy the fruits of our frying, molding, steaming, sautéing, and roasting. The result is unmistakably an American Thanksgiving spread, refracted kaleidoscopically through a fresh, colorful Puerto Rican lens.
Puerto Ricans have both embraced and resisted US imperialism at various points. There always lingers the question of statehood, which exists alongside the island’s long-standing and active independence movement. As Huyke’s cooking demonstrates, this push-pull relationship only continues to play out in all sorts of dynamic ways.
“I believe every cuisine evolves,” she says. “But traditions should be kept and taught. So we do not lose the roots that make us unique.”
