Photographs by Jesse Kornbluth
Puerto Rican Thanksgiving is an exhilarating holiday remix. Think turkey marinated in garlic, lime, and oregano, then stuffed with fried green plantains and chicharrón mofongo. Gravy is more likely to be made with guava than with giblets, and flan stands in for apple pie. “Pumpkin spice” is nowhere to be found; here, the local winter squash calabaza takes center stage. And in lieu of warm apple cider, sweet coconut water is sipped beachside straight from a coco.
Thanksgiving is just as cherished in Puerto Rico as it is on the mainland. Celebrated locally since the early 20th century, shortly after the United States invaded in 1898, it marks the beginning of the island’s rambunctious holiday season. It is also a favorite of chef and restaurateur Giovanna Huyke, who over four decades has become the feast’s culinary authority in Puerto Rico.
I meet with Huyke, widely considered the Puerto Rican answer to Julia Child, on a hot summer day at SatoFino, a neon-hued, woman-owned restaurant in San Juan. The bartender quickly spies her—Huyke is a regular, and her signature red hair makes her easy to spot—and prepares the chef ’s go-to drink, a stiff Manhattan. We settle into our barstools, readying to plan what will ultimately unfurl into an epic cooking adventure. Huyke has a propensity for them, she tells me. In the preceding days she traveled to Atlanta to cook for Ser Familia—a nonprofit that specializes in supporting Hispanic families—before she rushed back to Caguas, a city 20 miles south of San Juan, where she fed VIPs attending the Miss Universe Puerto Rico pageant. Then she raced across the island to teach a traditional-methods cooking class in San Germán, the second-oldest city in Puerto Rico. Now, she’ll show me how to prepare a Puerto Rican Thanksgiving feast.
“We have a rich and resilient food history—it came from necessity, lack, and a bounty from the land,” Huyke says. It’s a complex cuisine informed by both a deep agricultural heritage and a modern reliance on imported and shelf-stable ingredients, which, despite many obstacles, manages to emerge beautiful and full of flavor—the continuation of a culinary evolution ongoing for centuries. “Our food comes from Spain, Indigenous Taíno people, and [enslaved] West Africans,” Huyke continues. “But it grew from our land and from our history, mixing every influence in our pilónes and our cauldrons.”
Being around Huyke is a joy. A local TV personality, newspaper columnist, and cookbook writer since the late ’80s, Huyke has taught generations of Puerto Rican home cooks how to prepare the island’s most treasured dishes. Among them was my grandmother, Sara, who I call Tata. Like many members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, my family traveled back to the island for the festivities, alternating each year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’d enter Hartsfield- Jackson International Airport in Atlanta in heavy winter coats and leave San Juan’s Luis Muños Marín in shorts and tank tops.
Tata’s Thanksgiving table centered on the expected turkey, but her stuffing was exceedingly Puerto Rican. To a base of Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, she added picadillo: ground beef cooked with sofrito—the fragrant blend of garlic, onions, peppers, and the punchy native herb culantro that is the cornerstone of the Puerto Rican palate—and pimiento-stuffed Manzanilla olives, all seasoned with the golden spice blend sazón. When Tata died I inherited a weathered copy of Huyke’s 2004 recipe booklet Celebraciones. Within it were recipes that clearly informed Tata’s tremendous Thanksgiving menu; it turned out Huyke had been influencing my holiday for even longer than I knew.
Although formally known in Puerto Rico as El Día de Acción de Gracias, in true Boricua fashion, Thanksgiving is often referred to as Sanguiving, a play on words that gestures to the Roman Catholicism that remains the region’s predominant religion. It’s also El Día del Pavo, which directly translates to “Turkey Day,” and Sangiving, spelled like it sounds. We islanders have a fondness for clever, shortened expressions, an example of our natural tendency toward Puertorriqueñizar—in English, “to make Puerto Rican.”
“Our adobo goes on the turkey, and all the sides have something to do with sofrito,” Huyke tells me, walking me through the standard Puerto Rican Thanksgiving table. In Puerto Rico, adobo takes two forms—one wet and one dry. Each is a spectacular blend of Spanish, African, and Indigenous ingredients and techniques—garlic, onion, peppers, and herbs pounded in a wooden mortar and pestle with Taíno roots called a pilón, binding the island’s ancestral and colonial cultures.
Puerto Ricans officially became American citizens (and draft eligible) in 1917, just weeks before the US entered World War I. As many as 20,000 locals served, and Puerto Rican soldiers have played a role in every US military conflict since. In many respects, Thanksgiving traditions rooted en la isla are part of a broader military promise: American soldiers always eat well on Thanksgiving Day. Puerto Rican soldiers brought many wartime foodways home with them, and this combined with government subsidies means that today staples can at times feel military-adjacent—especially given the reliance on shelf-stable foods required by a storm-prone island. Over time, the territory’s once agrarian economy (centered around sugar, coffee, and tobacco exports) was transformed into an industrial manufacturing system. Puerto Ricans still consume many foods like tinned corned beef, Vienna sausages, Spam, club soda crackers, and canned vegetables; roughly 85 percent of all food in Puerto Rico is imported.
When Huyke’s father, Hector, served in the Korean War, he encountered the military’s famously bland instant mashed potatoes. From then on, he flat-out refused the dish except during holidays, when Huyke’s mother, Alice (herself a trained cooking instructor), made an impossible-to-resist version: yellow potatoes slowly simmered in cream, enriched with chicken bouillon, then whipped until fluffy with butter. Today a garlicky variation features on Huyke’s Sanguiving table.
Huyke, for her part, wants to steer Puerto Rican cuisine away from processed ingredients and back toward fresh foods—not only because they’re healthier, but also because they are richer in flavor and better convey the layered story of the island’s culinary heritage. She favors from-scratch dishes that lean on regional bounty, from Indigenous staples like maize, peppers, yuca, and other root vegetables to later introductions like plantains and coconuts.
The best way to explain, she tells me, is to cook together. A few weeks later Huyke joins me in my own kitchen in North Carolina. I quickly learn that cooking alongside her is a lot like having your own personal instructor. At each step she explains how she’s arrived at a certain preparation and why she uses specific ingredients over others. It’s clearly a familiar role: Education remains a central focus for Huyke, and she counts among her mentees young women like Natalia Vallejo, the island’s first James Beard Award–winning chef. She frequently enlists up-and-coming chefs to cook alongside her and makes herself available for mentoring phone calls. I now feel lucky that I can count myself among them.
Although Huyke auditions new Sanguiving dishes every year, Puerto Rican favorites are always on the menu, many of them influenced by her mother’s recipes. Key among them is yuca stuffing—or “estuffing,” as Puerto Ricans commonly pronounce it. Huyke’s family version, Agüeybaná stuffing, is named for the island’s powerful Taíno chief who led the local people at the time of the Spanish invasion in 1493. Huyke peels and then grates fresh yuca before grinding it to a paste in the food processor. Meanwhile, she instructs me to sauté sofrito in olive oil before adding ground and salt pork, annatto, herbs, and aromatics. It’s all piled into a high-walled dish and baked.
Next we turn our attention to pastelón, a lasagna-like layered casserole of fried sweet plantains and creamy queso fresco. The dish was likely born in New York City, where Puerto Rican and Italian communities converged, before finding its way to the island.
“The Puerto Rican and Italian diasporas were physically close in New York during the ’50s—they were exposed to lasagna and mozzarella,” she explains.
Then come more sides. Gandules, or pigeon peas, are a treasured crop. Though they’re frequently served with rice at Sanguiving and other times of year—arroz con gandules is Puerto Rico’s national dish— Huyke instead opts for an escabèche-style salad that marries gandules with tomatoes, avocado, and herbs in a tangy vinaigrette. Another island staple, canned beets, gets a fresh reinterpretation as Huyke roasts a local-grown variety and tops them with crumbled queso fresco.
Many Puerto Rican families choose pernil, or roast pork shoulder, as their Sanguiving centerpiece. It is typically marinated overnight in an adobo of minced garlic, sour orange juice, olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper. But Huyke sticks to turkey, brining it first in a mixture of salt, brown sugar, dried bay leaves, fresh herbs, and peppercorns before pushing butter under the skin and brushing the bird with a blend of rum, melted butter, and guava jelly. Huyke preserves the drippings for a tangy-sweet guava-infused gravy. She also shows me how to make ajilímojilí, a highly adaptable, herbaceous sauce of garlic, ají dulce peppers (similar to bell but fruitier and more delicate), culantro, cilantro, olive oil, vinegar, and her own signature addition: a copious amount of capers. Guests will drizzle it over nearly every dish on her Sanguiving table, she tells me.
After hours of cooking and using every imaginable tool, from a traditional pilón to a modern Vitamix blender, we sit down to enjoy the fruits of our frying, molding, steaming, sautéing, and roasting. The result is unmistakably an American Thanksgiving spread, refracted kaleidoscopically through a fresh, colorful Puerto Rican lens.
Puerto Ricans have both embraced and resisted US imperialism at various points. There always lingers the question of statehood, which exists alongside the island’s long-standing and active independence movement. As Huyke’s cooking demonstrates, this push-pull relationship only continues to play out in all sorts of dynamic ways.
“I believe every cuisine evolves,” she says. “But traditions should be kept and taught. So we do not lose the roots that make us unique.”