SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One of Sacramento’s native daughters just released one of the hottest cookbooks on the market. Her feelings about the city, though, seem conflicted.
Illyanna Maisonet’s “Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook” stands out by refusing to adhere to rigid definitions of Puerto Rican food and recipes. Instead, it’s a celebration of the dishes Maisonet and the other the 5.5 million “Diasporicans” grew up on and made their own, such as Hawaiian-influenced pastele stew or bread pudding known as “budin” with California walnuts.
“Diasporican” has earned glowing reviews from NPR, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Eater, among others, since being published by Ten Speed Press on Oct. 18. It’s a cookbook not for Puerto Ricans, but for “the tribe of Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá (‘not from here, not from there’).”
Maisonet, who previously wrote a column on Puerto Rican food for the San Francisco Chronicle, doesn’t mince words about much, and that includes her thoughts on Sacramento.
It’s a “cultural wasteland. A dust-bucket town that may give birth to creative types but doesn’t nurture them. And it’s only a matter of time before they must flee or fail,” she wrote in the book’s introduction.
Promoted as one of the nation’s most diverse cities, Sacramento is “incredibly segregated” in truth, wrote Maisonet, who declined to be interviewed for this column. Midtown and the Fab 40s have little in common with south Sacramento’s systemically neglected Avondale neighborhood in which Maisonet grew up during the 1980s, she wrote.
That neighborhood was home to a diverse community of immigrants whose food influenced Maisonet’s contemporary “Cali-Rican” cooking style, though, including her mother and grandmother. So too did the culinary traditions of Taino, Spanish and African people who made their way to Puerto Rico throughout the years, along with U.S. colonial rule during the 20th century.
Maisonet, who now resides in the Bay Area, clearly has love for the slice of Sacramento in which she was raised, if not the city as a whole. And like any good Cali-anything cookbook, it focuses plenty on area farmers.
Glossy pictures of Rancho Llano Seco piglets in Butte County and Koda Farms rice from Merced County are interspersed among shots of arroz con gandules and Puerto Rican laab, a Maisonet creation derived from her time living with a Laotian family as a teenager.
No Sacramento-area producer gets highlighted like Camelia Enriquez Miller’s Twin Peaks Orchards in Newcastle, whose stone fruits are a summertime favorite of Maisonet’s as well as high-end restaurants such as Mulvaney’s B&L and Restaurant Josephine.
In Maisonet’s recipe for pasetillos de yellow peaches (nectarines work fine too, she said), the author grieves the 100-year-old farm’s fragility — how long will it continue operating when a booming nearby wine country’s development demands make real estate the financially wiser choice?
You can buy “Diasporican” for about $33 from local bookstores such as The Avid Reader in Davis, California, Underground Books in Oak Park or Capital Books in downtown Sacramento, or from a variety of online retailers.
