I ate my first Venezuelan "hallaca" for the Christmas season on Sunday. Venezuelan hallacas, together with the excellent French baguettes from Hi-Lo, washed down with Venezuelan coffee and Trini sorrel. Hallacas are similar to our pastelles but make them look like they have maljo. A Venezuelan hallaca is almost one pound of yellow cornmeal stuffed with stewed meat, pork, chicken, raisins, olives and slices of egg. The ones we made on Saturday morning require an assembly line of family members, one sipping ponche de crème, one flattening the cornmeal dough and filling it with the stew, another adding the other ingredients and the third and, most importantly, wrapping the meal in banana leaves of various sizes. Once, in Baltimore, because we do this every December wherever we are, we could not get banana leaves and used tinfoil and vowed never to do so again. Something from the leaves seeps into the corn as it is boiled and gives it a unique flavour. So does the ponche de crème.
Christmas would not be the same for me without hallacas. Making them is a huge Christmas tradition. In Venezuela it is an occasion for the extended family to get together, drink, sing, fight and make hallacas. And they make hallacas in the hundreds, most to eat themselves but also to give away and it is considered a big thing when a Venezuelan gives you an hallaca that his family has made. The recipe we use comes from Maracaibo, from Emilio Borbeg's wife, who was from Maracaibo of course. Other regions of Venezue-la, the Andes, the Llanos or plains, and the area nearest to us, the Oriente or eastern Venezuela, used to have their own way of making hallacas, minor variations on a theme. Channa is added to the stew in the Andes. Potato is used in the Llanos. In the East, the stew, which includes sweet pepper and onion, is cooked after being wrapped up in the cornmeal and bacon is used instead of egg. In Maracaibo, the stew is cooked first.
I don't know that this is still so. Probably not, since uniformity seems to be a by-product of Americanisation and Mr Chavez can rant all he wants, his people still look to Uncle Sam for their commodities and comfort. Hell, for all I know the Venezuelan hallaca industry is probably owned by some American businessman based in Tennessee. So traditionally, Venezuelans imported their black beans or "caraotas negras" so they could eat their beloved "pabellon criollo," the national dish of black beans, rice, shredded beef and fried plantain, from the USA. That has changed recently and most of their imports for pabellon now come from Argentina. Because of Mr Chavez's personal interests, China has now entered the fray. Black beans and rice with fried plantain and shredded meat, plus or minus a slice of zaboca, is also the national dish of Cuba, which must make the many Cuban doctors in Venezuela feel quite at home. On my many visits to Cuba, I have never been able to find out where the Cubans get their black beans from.
Their dish is famously called "Moros y Cristianos." Moros y Cristianos means Moors and Christians. It really stands for blacks and whites. White Cubans have an interesting saying, quite racist, which they are blissfully unaware of: "The best thing the Spaniards left in Cuba was the mulata." They could say the same about their national dish. Another Cuban bean favourite from the east of the country, often confused with Moros y Cristianos, is "congris." Congris means "with grey" and I suppose refers to the grayish tint you may get by mixing red beans with white rice.It's also called "dirty rice." Emilio Borbeg was the young Trinidadian overseer mentioned in Fr Anthony de Verteuil's Magnificent Great Estates of Trinidad, published in 2000 and which I take out to reread every December. Borbeg gave a description of life and work on the Tucker Valley Estate in Maqueripe in 1932. He was 20 at the time.
Years later, in the fifties, like many native Trinidadians unable to get a job, he emigrated to Venezuela to work in the oil fields and met his wife there. By chance they had moved to Caracas and lived in the same building as my parents. Being fellow Trinidadians, my father and Borbeg would meet up on Sundays to "fire one," do the Cinco y Seis racing form together and discuss politics. His son, Christian, and I went through six years of medical school at the Central University of Venezuela where I was known as "Trini uno" and he as "Trini dos." When that first Christmas in Caracas came around, who better than his wife to show my mother how to make her tasty hallacas. That recipe is now known and relished in Caracas, Texas, Florida, Baltimore, Diego and more recently in Paramin where another woman born in Croatia has just been taught to make Mrs Borbeg's Maracaibo hallacas. From Maracaibo to Paramin, foods travel.