Pollo Habanero

There's a big pot of Caldo Pollo Habanero...Havana style chicken soup on the stove in Modern Alchemy. The weather is cold and getting wet again.  I am transported back to the streets of Isla Mujeres Mexico the last time that I was there... in 2008, waiting to sail back across the Gulf of Mexico to Port Isabel.

There was this little restaurant on one of the narrow old streets. It was more of a house really, with a small courtyard and several tables under a lamina (tin) roof. There was no menu. The menu consisted of whatever was being cooked that day served with thick, homemade corn tortillas. Mixed with the steamy Caribbean sea breezes, it was not food.

It was therapy for the soul.

My favorite dish was a big bowl of a strange and aromatic soup.  Chicken, green chiles and garlic. Raisins and plantain. In a broth rich with the flavors of the Islands. Tomatoes, onions and spices from the Spice Islands.

The soup and its flavor remained a definitive mystery for the next several years. I would revisit that place in my mind whenever I needed a Caribbean vacation. I did my best to recreate it, but there was always something missing. .

I finally found it in an ancient text that I found in an ancient book store. Then it all made sense.

It was a Cuban soup. Not a Mexican soup. Cuba lies less than 90 miles across the Yucatan channel, so many of the residents of the tiny island are of Cuban descent. Many are Cuban expats. So the food followed them from Cuba to Mexico, undoubtedly changing, fusing with ingredients and techniques endemic to Mexico....

And then I took it and twisted it ever so slightly here in Texas, customized it with an ingredient here and there that didn't quite change the profile, the chemistry of the thing but rather just enough to enhance some of the tropical flavors and bring them out. One of the traits of being a restless scientist in a former life...

Created a fusion.

That's how the whole thing begins. We find a food that creates a memory, we seek to recreate that memory (the food is ancillary), perhaps we don't have just the right ingredients, so we add our own. Make a guess. Sometimes it works....sometimes it doesn't. That's the beauty of it.

Foods travel through our societies like a gossamer spirit on the breeze, just begging us to be part of the whole thing. If we open ourselves up to it, it becomes part of who we are along our and it's restless journey. We share it, we enjoy it, we make it our own. In doing so it becomes everyone's food.

I think that's pretty groovy, don't you?

I'll have that pot of Pollo Habanero (no it doesn't contain Habanero peppers.....Habanero simply means "of Havana") for you to sample on this cold and perhaps a bit wet evening. It's on the house. I want you to taste the fusion of the tropics.