Notable Sandwiches #96: Jibarito
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I and my longsuffering editor David Swanson stumble our way through the strange and mutable document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, a Puerto Rican specialty by way of Chicago: the jibarito.
Most of the time, when writing, I feel a sort of bullish pride in my abilities—honed over a decade of pitches, pieces, and newsletters—to plod my way through just about any subject, particularly the historical, social and literary anatomy of a sandwich. But sometimes I feel a hesitation of unknown provenance, and it gives me pause. I’ve learned to pay attention to that hesitation. It’s usually trying to tell me something, even if that something is just you haven’t eaten anything today, you weirdo. A week ago, I fumbled the jibarito, causing David to have to pull together a last-minute tribute to Steve Albini while I dithered in the background. This week, I find the same internal reluctance pushing me away from the pen—and I am going to pay attention to what it means. I am trying to tell myself something, and my struggle with the jibarito is a lesson.
It’s not as if it’s a particularly daunting sandwich, although it may be the only one on the list that doesn’t actually use any bread. Instead, its exterior carb component consists of smashed, fried plantain—a slightly sweet, starchy, greasy slice of heaven.
It may not contain bread, but unlike most of our notable sandwiches, it has a very clear and well-attested provenance: it’s a product of the Puerto Rican diaspora, via Chicago, where an enterprising restaurateur named Juan C. “Pete” Figueroa first put it on the menu of the Borinquen Restaurant in Humboldt Park in the 1990s. From there it spread, across Chicagoland and its environs and to the rest of the Puerto Rican-American community; you can order a serviceable one in Manhattan, and its Venezuelan sister sandwich, the patacon—likewise served on smashed-plantain slices—abounds throughout the boroughs. Semi-exotic starch aside, the jibarito (a diminutive for jibaro, an alternatively derogatory or affectionate term for “someone from the rural, mountainous region of Puerto Rico” according to Thrillist) is a pretty bog-standard American sandwich, filling-wise. It’s got meat, lettuce, tomato and, according to frequent consumers, no small amount of garlic. (One recipe I found called for two smashed cloves plus one quarter-teaspoon minced garlic, which just about satisfies my minimum allium quota).
Tostones are plantain chips rather than planks, and they are delicious; using them as a building block for protein, vegetable and spice accouterments makes a lot of sense. A few facts about the plantain, alias the cooking banana: its botanical name, Musa paridisiaca, has been linked in Biblical exegetics to the Tree of Life, and the probable plant whose leaves a hid the nakedness of the ashamed Adam and Eve. To those passingly familiar with the term “banana republic,” it is also the foundation for the colonial commercial empires that toppled governments in Central America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and whose malign legacies live on to this day.
It’s a very old, very tropical plant, whose first recorded domestication is in the Kuk Valley of New Guinea around 8000 BCE, but whose cultivation by early man kept cropping up around the world in tales of convergent domestication: mainland Asia, Madagascar, Africa. It also served as abundant, inexpensive fodder for the enslaved in said tropics, when white imperialists decided to grace the natives with their presence, their Bibles, and their diseases. In short, this is a plant that’s absolutely loaded up with history—although in the jibarito’s case, it’s busy holding a critical mass of sliced meat and garlic sauce.
But, having divested myself of the burden of describing the jibarito, I still have to reckon with the inner gulf that appears to have opened up between me and this sandwich. And I think it comes from—surprise!—a severe, late-onset case of impostor syndrome.
This week, I published a piece for New York magazine about a crisis within the culture I grew up in, Orthodox Judaism. It was an in-depth exploration of a protest movement against a specific kind of religious divorce, and the arcane proceedings of Jewish religious courts in one of the several shtetls that dot upstate New York (Kiryas Joel, or the City of Joel, established in the 1970s in an attempt to preserve 19th-century Hungarian Hasidism). I wrote about the kosher laws, and modest dress; I interviewed a variety of Orthodox women from different sects; I talked about gefilte fish, and challah, and all those things I grew up with in.
Altogether it brought me forcibly back to a time in my life—the first nineteen or so years—when I blessed God before and after meals, when I counted the progression of the calendar by the observation of Jewish holidays, and when I ate only kosher food—I had never tasted a burrito before I went to college, let alone a plantain. (My mother didn’t know what a burrito was until a few years ago, when an enterprising restaurant serving kosher Mexican fare—a challenge in a cuisine famous for marrying meat and cheese—opened up in the neighborhood). Before leaving for the sin-drenched shores of Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had grown up in a delicious but highly enclosed world of herring, kishke, cholent, and tuna-salad bagels. It wasn’t until my twenties that I started eating pizza with meat on it; the whole concept seemed quite foreign to me until my first taste of the forbidden pepperoni (pepperonica paradisiaca in botanical terms, probably).
In short, leaving my “daled amot”—a colloquialism for one’s comfort zone—meant that I was leaving not just a faith, but also an entire world, of references (I remember consciously, in my first weeks of college, trimming Yiddishisms from my vocabulary, realizing that I’d grown up with a mild dialectical form of English), but also of food. In one year, I tried pho for the first time, tacos for the first time, learned the glory of Szechuan food and BLTs. I gained a lot more than the freshman fifteen, but with my newfound paunch came the glitter-eyed enthusiasm of a newborn foodie.
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Even now, new culinary adventures—like the jibarito—make me shudder with the small pleasure of the forbidden, and as I continually code-shift between worlds (being very close with my Orthodox family), the patina of prohibition and delight haven’t dulled completely. As one favorite Yiddish proverb of mine puts it, “If you’re going to eat pork, let the drippings run down your beard.” If you are going to sin, sin with relish.
Growing up fundamentalist as I did—albeit in a sect that not only permitted but encouraged a high level of secular education—has enabled me to report on phenomena like the Orthodox women’s sex strike, or Christian fundamentalist parenting, with a level of empathy for the complexity, density, and insularity of religious systems that (hopefully) keeps me from sounding too sneering in my analysis of even the most zealous and harmful strata of faith.
Nonetheless, writing this particular story snapped me backwards to the young Orthodox girl I once was—the one who stood under the chuppah trembling at all of 24, the one who knew how to cook for Shabbos by the age of sixteen, the one who still loves chopped liver. While I knew, thanks to this upbringing, what a beit din and a get and a siruv and a bittul kiddushin all were—an invaluable aid in reporting out a thorny tale—it also reminded me of my own provincialism, the fact that I am a parvenu at the table of worldly sophistication.
And so I felt the gulf between me and the jibarito—a product of another diaspora and another people. The great task of any writer’s life is cultivating curiosity, and I was excited to learn that the name plantain comes from colonial Spaniards’ blundering comparison of the tree to their native plane trees. The name banana, likewise filtered though Spanish or Portuguese, comes from the West African Wollof language, thus neatly illustrating this model of convergent agricultural evolution.
To know the world, you must leave the Garden, even if the scratch and rustle of your new banana-leaf clothing takes some getting used to. Neither my curiosity nor my appetite are yet quenched; but sometimes a sharp reminder of my origins—of the sealed world from which I emerged—daunts me, makes me feel like a fraud writing confident little dissertations about the sandwiches of the world. (Not to mention, as my family has repeatedly remarked, so many of them seem to be full of ham—the most forbidden meat, practically a symbol of defiance where I come from).
Still, I left a long time ago, even if that leaving wasn’t complete, and may never be. You can’t deracinate yourself completely from a religious upbringing as total as mine without the risk of drying up completely. And I value my heritage and the languages—Hebrew and Aramaic—that came with it, and all the esoteric knowledge I acquired over those two decades of religious observance, all the quandaries posed in the Talmud about goring oxen and demon-catching bowls that I soaked up like the eager little nerd I was. But there are no plantains in the Pentateuch, or the Talmud—or the midrash, or the tosafot, and all the commentaries that adorn them. Plantains are of a new world, the one I chose to enter long ago. I have tasted the forbidden fruit—smashed, fried, and used to build a sandwich—and it is delicious.
A wonderful, beautiful piece. Thank you!