Shrimp Moqueca

Bold Afro-Brazilian flavors are on display in this comforting dish from cookbook author and culinary historian Maricel Presilla.

- Jane Sigal

MANY OF MARICEL PRESILLA’S FANS know the Cuban-born James Beard Award-winning chef from her restaurants, including Cucharamama in Hoboken, New Jersey, named after the long wooden spoon used in Latin American kitchens. But none of her three businesses survived the pandemic. “You had to be there in person to experience it,” Presilla says. “A pair of customers cried as I was locking up after the last service.”

What Presilla’s patrons might not realize is that her cooking is informed by decades of scholarship. Her PhD dissertation on West Africa and its Latin American diaspora was initially centered on Cuba and then morphed from there. “I spent too much time on it,” Presilla admits. “My adviser said, ‘It’s a paper, not your life’s work.’”

But her life’s work it became. Over the years, Presilla poured her tendency toward exhaustive fieldwork into books on chiles, chocolate, and the indigenous cultures and cuisines of Latin America; her magnum opus, the 500-recipe compendium Gran Cocina Latina, was published in 2012. Ten years into this massive research project, Food & Wine asked the culinary historian and author for a first look, which appeared as a feature titled “10 Top Dishes from South America.” The May 2003 story led with creamy, spicy shrimp moqueca (recipe p. 128) from coastal Brazil.