Writing recipes means rarely knowing whether you’re stealing or not. Cooking is the sum of every bite we’ve ever taken informing our palates. And so one must ask, where does inspiration end and the need for citation begin? How can you cite every meal, every spice, every scent and experience that has influenced the way you eat and the way you want to eat? If you can’t—and you can’t—where do these come into recipe development and the way we write headnotes? It’s in the singular voice of the recipe writer.
I’m going to return to my kitchen in San Juan, Puerto Rico, after this conference and try to make a version of my mom’s arroz con pollo with jackfruit. I’m a vegetarian and haven’t eaten meat in over a decade. I’ve never eaten arroz con jackfruit, but I remember the sazón-tinted yellow rice, the frozen peas, and the tender meat, all fragrant with sofrito, that I grew up eating and recently watched my mom make again, inspiring me. I’m going to reference, in my development of this recipe, my mother’s cooking, my nostalgia, Instagram videos of women making arroz con pollo, and the ways in which I’m taking lessons from a Dishoom recipe for jackfruit biryani to influence how I flavor my chosen chicken substitute. I’m going to talk about why I’m using gandules, or pigeon peas, rather than the English peas of my mother. The reason will be—yes, they’re local, and also that I’ve had a bag of them in the freezer for months, so they will go into my Dutch oven.
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