A family kitchen. A town's memory.
San Basilio de Palenque is the first free town in the Americas, built in the 1600s by Africans who freed themselves from slavery. Walk in today and you hear it before you see it: Palenquero, a language spoken nowhere else on earth, drums on the corner, something on the stove.
In one of those kitchens are Víctor Simarra and Rut Teherán Blanco. For more than forty years they have opened Palenque to the people who come to learn from it, from the very first researchers to today's visitors.
Víctor is the storyteller. He never went to school, and learned to read at 55. A few years later his arroz con bleo was in Cocina Palenquera para el mundo, the book that won at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Beijing. Ask him about Palenque's history, or the plants growing in the yard, and the afternoon is gone.
Rut is the serious one. Víctor is the joker. Watch them cook together, telling each other off over the pot, and you get a cooking class and a double act at the same time.
