Advent Calendar: arroz con dulce

Advent Calendar:

Dec 17
ARROZ CON DULCE

At first blush it might be called rice pudding but that would be like equating Provo Utah with New Orleans, Louisiana. Yes, our rice pudding looks like your rice pudding. It has rice. But I think a fairer comparison would be to that sticky desert that you find in Thai restaurants. I have never cared for the rice pudding that we get here. I think the difference, like the Thai delicacy, is that - like most things Puerto Rican - ours is sticky sweet and has the extra ingredient of coconut and cloves. Yours comes off as some sort of gruel made to assuage a desperate hunger. No, at Christmastime our houses have been steaming all day with myriad smells and arroz con dulce is a main contributor: coconut (that, yes, your mom made grate, maybe even let you poke the coconut eyes out and drain his milk); burned coconut hair (after you’ve smashed the coconut you must still separate the meat from the shell. You burn the hair off the coconut on the stove and it becomes separated); cloves, raisins, cinnamon, and sugar. You’ve watched the cook, got shanghaied into helping, poured the concoction onto the plates, covered them with Saran wrap, put them in the fridge and waited for the evening meal, and, at last, dessert.