A Night in Havana

Like the country itself, Cuban cuisine is both familiar and exotic to Southwest Floridians. Cuban cooking takes well-known tropical ingredients-backyard limes and oranges, freshly caught fish, onions, garlic and tomatoes-and combines them in a way that is reminiscent of many other cuisines-Mexican, Mediterranean, French-but creates a taste mysteriously, inimitably its own.

Cuban food is essentially a "peasant cuisine," based on native ingredients and simple cooking techniques, says Naples' Mary Urratia Randelman, whose Memories of a Cuban Kitchen has been the country's top-selling Cuban cookbook for more than seven years. The colorful, accessible cuisine has caught the attention of some of the nation's toniest restaurateurs and chefs in the last few years. Now, as interest in tourism and trade with the once-forbidden nation keeps increasing, a craze for all things Cuban is sweeping the country. Randelman's Cuban-themed dinner parties are legendary among locals, and the vivacious hostess recently welcomed us into her home as she prepared a traditional Cuban feast.

Randelman left Cuba as a child in 1958 with her family and has never returned. More than just a collection of authentic, practical recipes, her book is a heartfelt valentine to a homeland that remains a vivid, cherished memory. "We always want what we can't have," says Randelman, who has turned her longing for a vanished place into a determination to make her own home a haven for festive occasions, where the food is flavorful, the surroundings elegant, and family and friends always welcome. Just as in the home she remembers, those two categories expand easily. "There was always room for one more place setting," she says of those long-ago childhood meals. "And every meal turned into a party."