The countess of Merlin, Cuban settled in Paris and very well known then for her social gatherings in the French Capital, wrote a book called ¨Travels to Havana¨ (1840). She told how her opulent Creole family put in their dinning table the most select of the Spanish, French and English cuisine, although they preferred the Cuban diet.

They gave the visitors all the European luxury, but they habitually fed with the typical menu of the country.Instead of the Westphalia jam or the roast beef, they surrender to the ajiaco.

The ajiaco is the king of the Cuban cuisine with typical presence in the national kitchen. It’s a thick consommé, full of viands and vegetables, and with the greasy, fragrant and paradisiacal intervention of the pork meat. The ajiaco, mixture of ingredients, is symbol and synthesis of Cuba, its people and its culture.

There is another plate, rice and beans, that, although they are eaten together, they are cooked separately. The commensal mix them both, puts them together in a plate that can be eaten at the beginning or at the end of dinner even as only plate. For Cubans if there are not rice and beans, there is not complete dinner. When you cook them in the same pot, then you get a congrí, which can be served with boiled yucca, seasoned with lemon juice or sour orange and garlic and fried or roasted pork ribs. This plate symbolizes the Cuban Creole food.

The pork meat is considered a divine food in Cuba and it reaches all its magnitude grilled with carbon. The rice and black beans can be also combined with the beef, particularly the ground beef, and especially in its most popular way, which is the Havana ground beef. In this plate the beans are excluded. There is a song that talks about the Cuban cuisine and it says: ¨Rice with ground beef and yucca¨! Another combination is the rice with fried chicken. In this plate the yucca could be substituted with another viand: the sweet potato, fried or boiled, or the malanga and the parboiled pumpkins.

The banana, green or ripen, is another important element of the Cuban cuisine. When it is cooked green it is cut in slices and fried. They are called mariquitas or chicharritas. There is another way of cooking green bananas, which is cut in gross slices and fried, then punched with the hand and refried. They are called tostones, chatinos or tachinos, depending of the region of the country. The ripen bananas can be fried and they become a sweet and delicate flavour.

With bananas it is possible to prepare many plates. Another one is the fufú, which are green bananas parboiled and transformed into puree, seasoned with garlic and any other spices, and blended with pork cracklings. This was a plate invented by the black slaves, but it broke the chains and was incorporated into the Cuban menu.

The Cuban cuisine had the same genesis that culture: it has been integrated by contributions of Spain and other regions. The poor table was conformed, partly, by the Canaries. They left the chickpeas that the islanders ate with corn, and Mojo, a very important dressing for most of Cuban plates where the viands are included.

From Africa came the forced habit of the slaves of eating corn flour, tender or dry, and in tamale. Even the Chinese brought, more than 150 years ago, their culinary ideas. That is why we also have the fried rice, plate combined with multiple meats and vegetables.

In favour of the Cuban culinary art is necessary to admit the creativity of the cookers. A traveller of the XIX century, the North American Luisa Mathilde Woodruff, wrote that she saw in Cuba already known plates, and she found out, when she tasted them, that those plates were different in a way. Due to that capacity the Cuban cuisine stands out in the revenues that the country receives from tourism.

A spirit of renovation and variety is perceived in the Cuban recipes. The ability to combine traditional plates with new tastes has propitiated the invention of new plates.