The Caribbean · Volume 12, The Sofrito, the Libreta and the Ninety Miles to Miami
Pru oriental
Granma, Santiago de Cuba and the east
Illustration
- Time
- 240 hours
- Researched
- Researched from 106 sources in the brief
Pru is eastern Cuba's fermented soft drink: a long boil of vines, roots and leaves, sweetened with brown sugar and fermented about three days on a starter, the pru madre, kept back from the last batch. It comes out amber and foaming, "de color champaña", champagne coloured, as the Cienfuegos paper 5 de Septiembre puts it. The Slow Food Ark of Taste names the plants: bejuco ubí, Cissus sicyoides; raíz de China, Smilax domingensis; jaboncillo, Gouania polygama, whose saponins make the foam; and the leaves of allspice, Pimenta dioica.
Both Cuban sources trace it to the French and Haitian families who came east after the Haitian Revolution, and the ethnobotanists Volpato and Godínez write that it spread across the island in the 1990s, when industrial soft drinks disappeared. The quantities are the Santiago chef Jorge Méndez Rodríguez-Arencibia's, from Excelencias Gourmet in 2014, for about 25 litres. Island clock. His pru is buried three days after the ferment; 5 de Septiembre ferments it three days in wood or steel and keeps the burial for a version with aguardiente added. Nobody we read measured its alcohol.
As tradition built it
Makes about 25 litres. About 10 days from the boil to the bottle on a first batch with no starter, and 8 once you keep one.
Ingredients
- 60 to 70g bejuco ubí, a piece of vine, scraped
- 60 to 70g jaboncillo, a piece of vine, scraped
- 25 to 30g ginger
- 300g raíz de China, a piece of the tuber
- 5 to 6 allspice leaves
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 25 litres drinking water
- 2.5kg brown sugar
- 1 litre pru madre, the starter, if you have it
- to taste caña santa, lemongrass leaves
Method
- Boil the bejuco ubí, the jaboncillo, the ginger, the raíz de China, the allspice leaves and the cinnamon stick in the drinking water for no less than 2 hours.
- Strain the decoction into a wooden vessel and leave it to rest no more than a day.
- Add the pru madre, if you have it, and the brown sugar, and stir well.
- Leave it to ferment 3 days, or 5 days without the starter. Keep back a litre as the next pru madre.
- Move it to a vessel that is not metal, cover it and bury it for 3 days.
- Dig it up, let it rest a day, and bottle it in glass with a piece of caña santa leaf in each. Keep it cold.
Notes
5 de Septiembre's version, for 20 litres: boil 2 hours, strain into wood or stainless steel, rest 12 to 24 hours, add the starter and 2.2kg of brown sugar, rest 3 days, keep back a litre, serve very cold. Its table prints the water as 5 litres beside 100 cups and a yield of 20 litres; the 5 is a slip.
What a modern chef changes
The ferment watched, the fizz trapped, and the mother kept
Method
- Measure the sugar before and after with a hydrometer. The gravity drop says how far the ferment went and, roughly, what alcohol it made; nobody's pru has been measured, and yours can be.
- Bottle in swing-top glass at the end of the ferment and leave it a day at room temperature, then chill it. The burial does the same job: cool, dark, closed, so the fizz stays in the drink.
- Keep the pru madre in the fridge between batches, fed with a spoon of sugar each week, so the next batch starts on a living culture and takes three days, not five.
- Say what you used. Bejuco ubí, jaboncillo and raíz de China do not grow in Britain; Jamaican chaney root is a Smilax like raíz de China and is sold by Caribbean grocers, and a pru made with it is a cousin, not the drink.