Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Stew of Global Threads

For my brother, Manuel Pino, who keeps our family’s best memories alive through his cooking.

Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
By Alessandra Pino

Recipe: Ropa Vieja (Serves 6)

Legend has it that a poor man once cooked his old clothes because he had nothing else to feed his family. His love and care transformed the rags into a rich and comforting stew known as Ropa Vieja.

Although today it is considered a symbol of Cuban cuisine, both the story and the dish originated in the Canary Islands. The first known mention of the recipe appears in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857).[1]

First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111
First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111


In my Venezuelan family, this recipe has been passed down through generations. We call it
carne mechada and serve it inside arepas, a corn-based flatbread. I am recording it for the first time as I cook it for this piece.

Ingredients:

  • 900g flank steak, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • 1 onion, peeled and quartered
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, sliced lengthwise into strips
  • 1 small red bell pepper, deseeded and sliced
  • 120g tinned chopped tomatoes
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Method:

  1. Place the beef, quartered onion, garlic, and bay leaf in a pot and add enough water to cover. Bring to a slow boil over medium heat, then reduce to low and simmer for 2–3 hours.
  2. Strain the beef and broth through a fine-mesh strainer, reserving the liquid. When the beef is cool enough to handle, shred it with your fingers or two forks.
  3. In a skillet, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the sliced onion and green pepper and cook for 3–4 minutes, until softened. Stir in 360 ml of the remaining broth, tomatoes, shredded beef, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes to combine the flavours.

A Stew of Empire and displacement

Few dishes embody the entangled histories of empire, trade, and transcultural adaptation as vividly as ropa vieja, the “old clothes” stew that today stands as a culinary emblem of Cuba and the Canary Islands. Its name conjures up rags and scraps, yet its history is anything but threadbare: Jewish Sabbath traditions, Iberian colonial expansion, African slavery, and Indigenous ingredients of the Americas are stitched together in this deeply resilient dish.

Because cooking was prohibited on the Sabbath, Sephardi Jews often prepared a hearty stew the night before, allowing it to cook slowly until the following day. Ropa vieja is often understood as echoing these Iberian Jewish culinary traditions of the late medieval and early modern period. Sabbath dishes such as adafina or cholent — slow-cooked blends of legumes, vegetables, and meat — sometimes left behind strands of beef once the broth was consumed. These remnants could be reheated with onions, garlic, and chickpeas, producing a dish that resembled tattered rags, perhaps inspiring the evocative name ropa vieja. Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversions that followed, such recipes circulated into new cultural contexts. Adapted and reinterpreted over generations, they persisted within Iberian domestic cooking, carrying traces of memory and identity even as Jewish ritual and language were suppressed. As Gitlitz and Davidson explain, Spanish and Portuguese mariners began exploring the off-shore African islands — the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira — in the early fifteenth century. By its end, farming colonies and trading posts had been established, turning the islands into key “stopover points” for Atlantic galleons engaged in the South Atlantic and American trade.[2]

Crossing Oceans: From Canary Islands to the Caribbean

The dish entered global circulation with Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands and subsequently the Caribbean. In Cuba, ropa vieja adapted to locally available ingredients. Cattle introduced by Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 thrived on the island, becoming central to ranching economies and local diets. African enslaved cooks contributed slow-braising techniques and sofrito — a base of onions, garlic, and other vegetables gently cooked in olive oil —  while Indigenous crops such as tomatoes and peppers transformed the dish’s flavour. Ropa vieja thus became a product of empire, blending Iberian culinary traditions with African labour and American ingredients in colonial households. Each component reflects a history of circulation and encounter: beef reshaped Caribbean landscapes, supplying hides for European markets and meat for colonial stews; chickpeas, central in Iberian and Canarian versions, sustained sailors and settlers but were less prominent in Cuban adaptations; and tomatoes and peppers, native to the Americas, were cultivated in the Caribbean alongside Iberian staples like onions and garlic, exemplifying the transatlantic movement and exchange of crops.

As Fernando Ortiz observes in his discussion of plantation life in Cuba in his essay Los factores humanos de la cubanided (1939), “In Cuba’s pot there is always a constant renewal of roots, fruits, and exotic meats, an unceasing bubbling of heterogeneous substances.”[3] The plantation system that shaped the Caribbean landscape violently brought together people from diverse origins who, despite profound inequalities, interacted socially and culturally. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s perspective was that the Caribbean could not be considered a single cultural area, since the mix of different colonial powers made it too heterogeneous to fit that definition. Instead, he proposed the term “societal area,” describing the region as a socio-cultural space structured by the plantation system. (Mintz, 1966).[4] Mintz’s concept captures the fragmentary nature of Caribbean cultures, stitched together by a language of colonial dominance until they fused into something new. I argue that this dynamic extends to food itself: the region’s culinary cultures reflect a constant process of interaction and adaptation, where ingredients and techniques from Africa, Europe, and the Americas combined to create shared expressions. In this way, a common language of flavour emerged from displacement, survival, and creativity. The dish becomes, in effect, a ragged form of globalization, stitched together from uneven power, movement, and culinary ingenuity. In my chapter on “Dark Food” (Palgrave, 2025), I explore how violence is integral to this process, showing how food can carry and transmit memories that continually reconstruct narratives of oppression and suffering.

Invisible Hands: Women and Enslaved Cooks

Although colonial records often privilege governors, merchants, and planters, the making of ropa vieja depended on domestic cooks — many women, many enslaved or otherwise marginalized. African-descended cooks in Cuban households brought Indigenous crops and African cooking techniques into Iberian stews, layering them with flavour and complexity. Women have long been central to the transmission and transformation of Caribbean traditions, even if historical documentation has largely obscured their contributions. As Keja L. Valens observes,

“Ropa vieja” inscribes a mixing of ­ European (flour, beef, wine), Indigenous (tomatoes and peppers), and African (plantains) ingredients, doing so ­ under a recognizably Spanish-­ language title. As much as they declare its ­ independence from Spain, ­ these White Criollo authors claim the dish. “Ropa vieja” serves settlers who occupy, incorporate, and claim as their own the ­ tables and kitchens of Cuba. As they break from the colonial center, the settlement remains. (Valens 2024, p.62)

Valens further notes that cookbooks rarely include detailed biographical information, meaning that the labour and expertise of women — often exercised in domestic or informal spaces — is transmitted primarily through recipes rather than through explicit authorial self-representation.

Recipes as Memory and Metaphor

The name “old clothes” resonates powerfully in this colonial context. Just as the dish turned scraps into nourishment, displaced peoples — Sephardic Jews, conversos (converted Iberian Jews), enslaved Africans, and Canarians — wove fragments of memory, ritual, and foodways into continuity. The preparation of traditional dishes like ropa vieja involves more than following a recipe; it encompasses embodied knowledge passed down through generations. This tacit knowledge includes techniques, timing, and sensory cues that are often not documented but are crucial for authentic preparation. The act of cooking such dishes serves as a living archive, preserving cultural practices and memories; as Francisca Sinjae has argued, “across the world, food is not just sustenance; it is a living archive, a record of migration, survival, identity, and belonging.”[5] Food preparation is a form of cultural expression and memory, where each dish tells a story of migration, adaptation, and survival. The recipe’s adaptability made it a form of culinary survival: to simmer shredded beef with onions and tomatoes was to claim a taste of familiarity while fashioning something distinctly of the Americas. In this sense, ropa vieja embodied the patchwork realities of colonial life.[6]

From Stew to Symbol

By the eighteenth century, ropa vieja was firmly recognised as part of Cuban cuisine.[7] Today, it is celebrated both as Cuba’s national dish and as a heritage food of the Canary Islands. Its survival illustrates how recipes forged in colonial entanglements persist as markers of identity, memory, and resilience.

Centuries later, in Miami, Cuban exiles revived and popularised the dish, transforming it into a symbol of home and memory within the American landscape. In Cuba itself, it acquired poignant resonance during the 1990s Período Especial, when meat shortages forced cooks to adapt. On television, culinary icon Nitza Villapol famously demonstrated a version suggesting the use of plantain skins in place of beef, a modern echo of the “old rags” metaphor and a reminder of the creativity born from scarcity.[8]

A Global Ragout

Ropa vieja is a culinary palimpsest, its flavours carrying the traces of Jewish exile, Iberian colonisation, African labour, and Indigenous ingredients. To taste it is to encounter the fragments of empire itself, scraps reassembled into sustenance like old clothes patched into new garments, carrying traces of resilience and creative adaptation that give the dish new life with each preparation. In her review of Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast for The Recipes Project, Peggy Brunache emphasizes how Indigenous communities have long used food as a form of resistance and cultural assertion, noting that “Indigenous communities performed culinary resistance through a politics of food and stood culturally resilient against colonial manipulation and assimilation.”  As a platform, The Recipes Project itself sustains this ongoing conversation between food, history, and identity, revealing how culinary practices can serve as both archives and acts of meaning-making. This perspective illuminates how cooking, including the preparation of ropa vieja, transcends mere sustenance. It becomes a deliberate act of cultural preservation and identity maintenance, an embodied form of resistance through which displaced or marginalized communities uphold heritage, reinforce communal bonds, and assert belonging in the face of colonial and postcolonial pressures. In this sense, ropa vieja not only preserves the past but also speaks to the present: a dish refashioned across generations, carrying in each bite the intertwined histories of memory, survival, and identity.

*****
Alessandra Pino is an expert on the intersections of the Gothic, food, and cultural memory. Born in Hampstead, London, to an Italian mother and Venezuelan diplomat father, Alessandra grew up in different countries and across cultures and languages. She holds degrees from ‘L’Orientale’ University, Naples (Italy), and from the University of Westminster (UK, MA in Translation Studies); she was awarded a PhD in Food, Cultural Memory, and the Gothic in 2022. Alessandra worked with a Michelin-starred chef for nearly ten years before moving to academia, researching and publishing on food, cultural memory, the supernatural and the Gothic.

Alessandra is the co-author of A Gothic Cookbook, which digs into food themes and motifs in a series of classic and contemporary novels from the 19th century to the present day and the co-host of “Fear Feasts,” a podcast which analyses the horror genre- films and books- through the lens of food. She publishes and speaks/lectures on the history of food, cultural memory, the supernatural, horror and the Gothic in journals, anthologies, TV and podcasts.

FURTHER READING

Barthes, Roland. 1975. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster, 47–59. New York: Harper and Row.

Brunache, Peggy. “New Work Forum: On Food and Identity in Cevasco’s Violent Appetites.” The Recipes Project, July 7. Accessed October 24, 2024.

Cabrisas, Juan. 1858. Nuevo manual de la cocinera catalana y cubana.

Douglas, Mary. 1972. “Deciphering a Meal.” 

Gitlitz, David M., and Linda Kay Davidson. 1999. A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jawhara Piñer, Hélène. 2021. Sephardi: Cooking the History. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Langarika, Enrique. 1862. El cocinero de los enfermos, convalecientes. Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana. Biblioteca Nacional de España; UTSA Digital Collections, Texas.

Legran, J. P. 1857. Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español: con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas. Havana: [s.n.]. 

Mintz, S.W. 1966. “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4), 912-937.

Noviatur, J. F. 1891. Novísimo manual del cocinero pastelero dulcero y licorista cubano. Havana: Imprenta La Idea.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1939. “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” In Ensayos etnosociológicos, 10–31. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Pelaéz, Ana Sofía, and Ellen Silverman. 2014. The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Pino, Alessandra. 2025. “Dark Food.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies, edited by Lucy Bond, Susannah Radstone, and Jessica Rapson, 263–283. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pino, Alessandra. 2020. Hunger and Meaning in the Novels of Cristina García. 

RWI Magazine. The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive.

The Atlantic. 2016. “Cuba’s Julia Child.” The Atlantic, August 2016. 

Valens, Keja L. 2024. Culinary Colonialism. Rutgers University Press.

Villapol, Nitza. 2022. Cocina al Minuto YouTube video. Posted 7 July 2022.

NOTES

[1] There is a reference to this being the first known mention in Pelaéz and Silverman, The Cuban Table (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014) p.162. See also the ‘ropa vieja’ recipe in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857) by J.P. Legran. The complete title is: Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español : con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas.

[2] For the link between Sephardic Sabbath stews and later Iberian/Atlantic shredded-meat dishes, see David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 207; and Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Sephardi: Cooking the History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021). Both discuss adafina/dafina/hamín as a slow-cooked Jewish stew in medieval and early modern Iberia.

[3] F. Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” in Ensayos etnosociologicos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1939), 10-31. “Siempre en la olla de Cuba es un renovado entrar de raíces, frutos y carnes exógenas, un incesante borbotar de heterogéneas sustancias.” Quote is on p. 6. My translation.

[4] “It would probably be more accurate to refer to the Caribbean as a ‘societal area’ based on the plantation system.” Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4) (1966), pp. 912–937.

[5] Francisca Sinjae, “The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive,” Raising Women Magazine, September 15, 2025

[6] My work on comparison between the culinary process and the process of memory formation in relation to constructions of identity and nation is available here. Going beyond the idea of food as being purely nutritional, Barthes’ use of semiotics allows for a contextualisation of food in its role as a signifier. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 47–59. Mary Douglas’ work in “Deciphering a Meal” establishes the importance of memory in creating food patterns. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus Vol. 101, No. 1, Myth, Symbol, and Culture (Winter, 1972), pp. 61-81. Douglas’ work is available here.  

[7] Valens points out that this is evident in the cookbooks of the time: the Manual del cocinero cubano includes just one recipe for “Ropa vieja andaluza,” alongside recipes for both “Ropa vieja cubana” and “Ropa vieja habanera.” In contrast, Legran’s cookbook presents only “Ropa vieja á la Americana,” Cabrisas includes only “Ropa vieja cubana,” El cocinero de los enfermos contains only “Ropa vieja cubana,” and the Novísimo edition of Noviatur features only “Ropa vieja habanera.”

[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/cuba-castro-villapol-julia-child/494342/

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Amanda Herbert (October 29, 2025). Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Stew of Global Threads. The Recipes Project. Retrieved November 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15287


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