MIAMI — When the Cuban socialite Elena Ruz Valdés-Fauli was in her early 20s, she would usually go to a present or a film and have a late-night chew with mates on the restaurant El Carmelo in Havana. Her common meal was an off-menu request: a turkey sandwich on medianoche bread, with cream cheese and strawberry preserves.
She needed to clarify the sandwich so many occasions that she requested the restaurant’s supervisor to place it on the menu to make it simpler to order. In some unspecified time in the future within the late Twenties or the early ’30s (no person remembers when), she returned to seek out her title in neon lights, with the sandwich on the menu for 25 cents.
“It was fairly a shock for her,” Margarita Ulacia, 82, of San José, Costa Rica, stated about her mom’s response to the signal. “However she was delighted, and my grandmother was horrified.”
A pal of Ms. Valdés-Fauli’s even had a dream that the sandwich would change into well-known. And it did. When Cubans left the island after the Cuban revolution, the sandwich adopted.
Practically a century after the sandwich was invented, traditional Cuban institutions like Versailles, La Carreta or Pinecrest Bakery nonetheless have a spot for the Elena Ruz on their menus.
“It grew to become an icon of Cuba,” stated Antonio “Bobo” Llizo, the second-generation proprietor of Los Bobos Cafeteria in Doral, Fla. “It’s one of many sandwiches that my dad needed to recreate and place on the menu.”
At Mr. Llizo’s restaurant, cooks butter the medianoche bread — a sweeter, softer sibling of Cuban bread, just like brioche — stuff the sandwich with thinly sliced turkey breast, Philadelphia cream cheese and Smucker’s strawberry preserves, after which warmth it.
Ms. Ulacia stated that her mom, who died in 2011, most likely didn’t request butter on her sandwich. However cooks have discovered it helps brown the toasted Elena Ruz.
Regardless of its long-held fame, the sandwich is barely ordered anymore, Mr. Llizo stated. Younger Cubans are forgetting in regards to the sandwich and its historical past. When his daughter introduced little Elena Ruz sandwiches to her elementary faculty for a presentation on Ms. Valdés-Fauli, many of the Cuban mother and father had by no means heard of it.
However Mr. Llizo and different restaurateurs wouldn’t dare take it off the menu.
“Not having it will form of take away your Cuban card,” stated Daniel Figueredo, who serves a model of the sandwich at his restaurant Sanguich de Miami on Calle Ocho.
His Elena Ruthless is an adaptation of the unique Elena Ruz, substituting home made guava marmalade for the strawberry preserves and including bacon to combine. It’s on his secret menu as a result of it’s a sloppy sandwich to arrange.
“I imagine traditions must be protected,” Mr. Figueredo stated. “However I do imagine that you’ve some parameters you possibly can develop and have enjoyable.”
Michael Beltran, who was raised in a Cuban family and runs Ariete, Navé and Chug’s Diner, agrees.
“Folks must cease stepping into, ‘Nicely that’s the way it’s presupposed to be,’” he stated. “Cuban meals is up within the air for interpretation. Interpret it all of the methods.”
The truth is, there have been many interpretations of the Elena Ruz, one thing that her daughter takes difficulty with, no less than with regards to the origin of the dish.
“Respect the shape through which the sandwich was created, and in the event you do a variation,” Ms. Ulacia stated in Spanish, “don’t play with the title.”
Recipe: Elena Ruz Sandwich
Susan Campbell Beachy contributed analysis.