Nitza Carmen María Villapol Andiarena

Author of Cocina al minuto, her most emblematic and widely distributed book. Host for 44 consecutive years of a program on Cuban television with the same name. She also approached cooking as an economic and dietary problem.

Nitza Villapol Andiarena was born in New York in 1923. Daughter of Cubans who emigrated for their political ideas. This meant that in her childhood she knew and treated Pablo de la Torriente Brau and other revolutionaries of the era. Ten years later she settled in La Habana with her family, and here she studied until earning her doctorate in Pedagogy in 1948.

Her radio and television programs made her enormously popular; her books always broke sales records, and her collaborations in the written press were sought after and preserved by countless readers—both female and male. Few authors approached the topic of Cuban cuisine with as much breadth and depth as Nitza Villapol. A new title of hers has just been put up for sale by the Científico—Técnica publishing house of La Habana. It is titled Desde su cocina, and its pages contain more than 350 recipes.

In her approach to cooking there was much vocation and a bit of chance. She always enjoyed compiling recipes and one day thought it would be useful to publish them. She made a decisive contribution to the study of cooking when she concluded that cooking becomes Cuban when chickpeas are removed from ajiaco. Until then, that thick soup, which is nourished by a great variety of dried and fresh meats, had been nothing more than the encounter of Spanish stew with the island's vegetables. The tasting of rice at two daily meals as the basic cereal, the presence of a stew that "moistens" that rice, the taste for fried foods and the preference for sweets, are constants in the Creole palate.

The difference became more pronounced, Nitza would say, when the domestic servant—Black or Chinese—took over the cooking of the whites. By way of slavery, precisely, and of the sugar industry, a whole series of foods and condiments imposed themselves on the Cuban palate and dietary habits entered that persist to this day.

Nitza Villapol's work went beyond the simple compilation and dissemination of recipes, as important as that may be. The author of Cocina al minuto, her most emblematic and widely distributed book, also approached cooking as an economic and dietary problem that is part of culture and nationality, and she did so with a rigor not devoid of artistic flair. "Cooking," she asserted, "is an art, an art of each people, a minor art that is part of the culture of peoples."

It is said that her television program, for the more than four decades it remained on air, could have been entered in the Guinness Book of Records. In its time only Meet the Press, from the American NBC network, surpassed it in longevity. But if that surpassed hers by four years, Nitza, as a host, had no rivals: no one remained longer than she did at the helm of a TV program. Her closest contender would be journalist Lawrence E. Spivak, who spent 27 years as a panelist or host of the aforementioned program. Nitza did it for 44 years.

Such a long presence on the small screen imposed the image of a sympathetic, meticulous, convincing woman endowed with enormous communication power. Her ease of presentation, her charisma and her ability to communicate would soon make her stand out among those doing the same work—Ana Dolores Gómez, Nena Cuenco de Prieto, Carmencita San Miguel, María Radelat de Fontanills, María Antonieta de los Reyes Gavilán...

This was, however, only one facet of Nitza Villapol. Behind her apparent ease, animated a woman of culture and arduous studies. She demonstrated this when she received a commission from UNESCO to write the chapter on cooking in the book África en América, which would be published in several languages and already has ten editions.

"Cultured, intelligent, endowed with a rare capacity for persuasion and profound knowledge of such complex branches as nutrition and dietetics, Nitza Villapol is, without a doubt, the personality that has most influenced the dynamism and updating of Cuban cooking and, above all, in the extremely difficult task of modifying the country's eating habits," said writer Jaime Saruski in 1986 in his Encuentro con la cocina cubana.

Because Nitza had to undertake part of her work during times of great scarcity; first, when as a result of the American blockade of the island, Cubans were deprived of traditional products and condiments in their cooking. Later, when the collapse of the socialist camp, which thrust the country into the special period, cut off the supply of food items that had already become customary on the Cuban table.

Saruski recalled in his cited article that Nitza, in the 1960s, taught how to prepare and taste dishes such as hake and tilapia, unknown in the diet of the average Cuban, convinced him of the advantages of cooking with less fat, revealed the secret of dispensing with eggs in the preparation of a pudding and told him how to bread meat with water and flour as the only ingredients. That flour was scarce for frying? Nitza then put the solution within reach: it was enough, for it to appear, to melt a package of macaroni.

This is why, in Saruski's opinion, few in Cuba doubt that with the magic and culinary discoveries of this woman a delicious treatise could be filled about the infinite and inexhaustible inventiveness of Cubans. But Nitza always downplayed the matter, and on one occasion confessed: "Simply, I inverted the terms. Instead of asking myself what ingredients were needed to make this or that recipe, I began by asking myself what recipes could be made with the available products."

A Decisive Contribution

When the special period was unleashed, the topic of cooking became taboo in Cuba, and Nitza Villapol's television program disappeared from the air overnight. It was a mistake, José Luis Santana, president of the Cuban Culinary Federation, would say later. "Since the Cocina al minuto program disappeared, a certain erroneous policy has been followed of not addressing the topic of nutrition in the media. Our homes have been deprived of advice, of help, and that should also be rescued," Chef Santana told the press in 1996.

Fortunately, that happened. But Nitza had already deteriorated too much to reappear on screen. Even so, she wrote and published new titles, and they sold with their usual success. People, however, gradually forgot about her. When she died in 1998, only a handful of people accompanied to the grave someone who had been one of the most popular women in Cuba.

She was awarded the Distinction for National Culture.

Some say she made Cuban cooking cheaper. That was not the case, but in very difficult times for the table she offered solutions, some of them—Nitza must have known this very well—temporary, while others would provide permanent gain. This is the case with her vegetable recipes, which she worked on so much during her final years.

"One of the slowest and most difficult aspects to modify in any culture are behavioral habits, among which are eating habits. For that modification to be true, profound and lasting, it must stem from the knowledge of some of the factors that make up those habits and what modifications can be made in the interest of better health," Nitza Villapol affirmed.

She knew this very well and made her legacy in more than 15 titles, thousands of radio and television programs and countless newspaper columns, such as the one she maintained for years in the magazine Cuba Internacional, which kept her among its most distinguished collaborators until the end. Now that she is gone, we will have to turn again and again to that legacy to continue enjoying the delights of the Cuban table and the art and grace that Nitza Villapol knew how to imprint on them.