Why Malanga?

A curious thing happened the first time I travelled to Cuba, nearly ten years ago. I went in search of family and history that I had no personal memory of since my parents left Havana before I was born. I sought to connect to my sister who had grown up on the island through our common language, Spanish, but all words seemed to fail me when faced with the overwhelming emotion of meeting her for the first time. There I was, feeling so hopelessly foreign in a place I thought my deepest senses would recognize, when I was served a plate of mashed malanga for dinner one night. That malanga on my tongue unlocked the flood gates of memory. It brought back my mother and grandmother in the kitchen of my childhood, spoon-feeding me, caring for me, bringing me up "Cuban" as best as they could in a place like Philadelphia. The malanga was, in a sense, a big part of my portable homeland.

This portable homeland is what I want for my daughter. She is now part of the second generation of our family born in the United States, but in a city like New York, I have all the resources at my disposal to raise her to celebrate her heritage. I just have to do a little research. And task number one is to figure out how to feed her malanga, because this vegetable doesn’t appear in any of my baby food recipe books. Nor do mamey or guava for that matter.