Vegetarian recipes from Puerto Rico

Meatless Puerto Rican cooking rests first on two preparations kept ready in advance: sofrito, a raw purée of onion, garlic, pepper, culantro and mild chilli, and oil coloured with annatto, which gives the characteristic orange. Rice is the everyday grain, cooked in one go with its garnish so the bottom caramelises, as in arroz con gandules with pigeon peas. Pulses, pigeon peas, red beans and chickpeas, are simmered with squash and a diced root that thickens them.

The second pillar is fried plantain, handled at two stages of ripeness. Green, it is cut into rounds, fried, flattened and fried again: these are tostones, salted while hot and dipped in a garlic sauce. Ripe, it turns sweet and plays counterpoint to the salt of the rice. Roots, cassava, yam and taro, are boiled in salted water and then mashed with oil and onion. The meal is assembled as one plate where rice takes half, the pulse a quarter, and the rest goes to plantain and something raw.