During one of our visits to Andres and Valentina at La Caleñita, the café they’ve been running for nine years in one of the adapted railway arches at Elephant and Castle in South London, we were greeted with a coffee accompanied by a soft, warm, cloudy, savoury sphere-like bread, known in their native Colombia as pandebono. It was meant to be accepted as an act of generosity and hospitality in the vein of Marcel Mauss’s idea of the gift, a form of exchange underpinning the formation of alliances and solidarity beyond self-interest.① It is through these dynamics of altruistic reciprocal relationships that La Caleñita operates on a daily basis. 

Recipe as knowledge infrastructure

The etymology of the bread in question is somewhat of a mystery, yet the most commonly accepted version is that it derives from the Spanish words pan (bread) and de (of) and bono (from buono, Italian for good), attributed to an Italian baker who used to sell the pastry on the streets of Cali, chanting ‘pan del buono!’. Another version is that it was named after the Finca El Bono, an eighteenth-century rural stately home in the small town Valle del Cauca, in Cali, where the bread originated and was sold. 

The mythology and folklore surrounding its origins encompass a sort of syncretism that is reflected in the ingredients themselves: blending yuca (or cassava) and corn, both autochthonous to South America; cheese and butter made with cow’s milk, introduced to the Americas by European colonisers; and the artisanry of the Italian immigrants of Cali who allegedly initiated its production. Pandebono is often accompanied by dulce de guayaba (guava jam) and a cup of hot chocolate, both tropical fruits that, as Gabriel Garcia-Marquez wrote in The Fragrance of Guava,② evoke memories of his childhood and permeate the imagination through their very smell. Smell as memory. Texture as memory. Vivid, tangible yet somehow intangible in the imagination. A glutinous dough that agglutinates individuals from diverse Latin American countries in a faraway city and acts as an infrastructure for sustaining everyday life. The amulet of the nomad, embodying both displacement and persistence at the same time. 

When Valentina was prompted to share her recipe, she smiled and said, ‘Pandebono is something that I relate to that time of the day in the afternoon before late dinner. I always had it at my home after school.’

Pandebono ingredients:

– Almidón de yuca

– Harina de maíz

– Huevos

– Queso costeño 

– Mantequilla

– Levadura

Valentina describes her process:

“Mix all the ingredients

grate the cheese finely

knead

form bollos in your hands

make a hole 

preheat the oven to 190 degrees

leave it in for 15 minutes (or so) until… you know…”

Tacit knowledge reigns. When it’s ready, you should ‘feel’ it. Don’t overthink it.

Bake until golden. 

The way the recipe is enunciated is in the manner of an oral culture. Or alternately, a manual or embodied culture, that of the craftswoman who performs the task with mastery, yet also with an over-familiarity, with the object at hand that makes it hard for her to rationalize and put it into words: ‘[it is] a process essential to all skills, the conversion of information and practices into tacit knowledge’,③ and ‘what you know may be so familiar to you that you might take for granted its touchstone references, assuming that others have identical touchstones’.④

Improvised adaptations

Although this recipe travels with its makers as a kind of cultural heritage – already stabilised in form – it becomes the basis for improvisation when relocated from Cali to London, necessarily so. In Andre’s words: ‘you don’t find all the necessary ingredients here… Everything here tastes very different!’. Like other restaurants forming the Latin American cultural hub nested in the railway arches of Maldonado Walk, Andres and Valentina source many of their goods from the neighbouring shop La Chatica, which specializes in importing regional products. But they must also resort to stand-in ingredients from the British supermarket chain TESCO, like the ersatz queso costeño, mimicked by the more readily-available feta cheese, or indeed, ‘Greek-style salad cheese’ – a simulacrum of one immigrant food, masquerading as another.

The import of certain Latin American animal products has been banned due to health and safety regulations in the United Kingdom.⑤ As a remedy, La Chatica (registered as La Casa de Jack Ltd.) sells its own line of products that resemble the ‘real thing’.Other delicacies, such as dulce de guayaba, are imported directly from Colombia in big batches and then repackaged in small quantities for sale in shops across Europe. Ingredients that are not produced in London are distributed and exported from Spain, an important Latin American migration node in the past three decades. The Spain-United Kingdom connection has been reinforced since the 2008 crisis when migrants relocated from Southern European countries to London, perceived as a better place for economic prosperity.

In London, one of the most popular food brands amongst Latin immigrants is Sol Andino, a Peruvian-owned shop with an online and high street presence at Old Kent Road in South London, a spot where Latin migrants live and gather. Sol Andino is one of the biggest distributors, catering to several shops and restaurants in the city. These kinds of networks of specialist food supply and consumption produce and reproduce this area of South London, stretching from Kennington to the Old Kent Road via Elephant and Castle, as a zone of Latin American culture. Unlike the specialist coffee joints of the aspirational middle classes (which no-one knows exactly how to define but everyone can instantly recognise) this particular entanglement of food, culture, and socio-economics is focused around ingredients, available in particular locations, rather than aesthetics which can be reproduced anywhere.

Queso costeño, a soft salty cow’s milk cheese originating from the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and a key ingredient in pandebono, is also made in-house by Andres and Valentina themselves, which allows them to cut costs compared to buying it ready-made. “The queso that you find here doesn’t even come close to the one from Colombia”. In their café, this improvisation is also evident in the construction of the space itself. A railway arch, emblematic of a very Victorian, very British kind of progress, is reconfigured as a mini ecosystem of Latin businesses, from money transfer to the making of clothes and the making of pandebono. A lead tenant renting directly from the landlord – once the public Network Rail but now the private ‘Arch Company’ – has created sub-lettable units through simple plywood partitions, which have in turn been adapted by their own tenants for a multitude of uses. What makes this place ‘Latin American’, or in La Caleñita’s case, Colombian? Language, smells, tastes, sounds from the TV. Things that cannot be made through architecture, but through use. However, it is not only the sensorial environment that constitutes a cultural space, but the way of producing it. 

Take a blank railway arch 

provide cheap rent 

adapt the space for basic needs and desires with simple materials

allow basic sub-divisions to be made without requiring permissions

allow subtenants to add the finishing touches 

A recipe for coping

Informality and self-reliance have travelled in the bodies of people like Andres and Valentina, another unwritten recipe allowing local spatial ingredients to be recooked into something distinct and culturally enriching. As a La Caleñita habitué puts it ‘[pandebono] brings memories of driving to the outskirts of Bogotá to have it on Sundays with my family when I was a child. It’s like you need to know it. Visually it’s not appealing; you need to feel it. I personally love the warmth and elasticity of it.’ Another customer from Chile, new to the place, inquires about the different baked goods displayed on the counter at La Caleñita, unsure of which one to pick: ‘I am Chilean, but there are so many commonalities between Latin Americans anyways, it feels like home.’ These often unspoken, shared codes are held together by what Benedict Anderson coined ‘imagined communities’,⑥ the idea of a Pan Latin American community based on affinity brought by the peculiar needs of relocation and infrastructures of coping.

In Andre’s words: ‘This place acts as a social hub, not only a restaurant. When a new migrant [from Latin America] arrives with just a suitcase and nowhere to go, we provide them with food and shelter. This pays back, as they always return once their situation gets better.’ Pandebono fulfils a social function and enhances the power of imaginations through the sensorial, acting as a pillar for coping with the vicissitudes of instability. When it’s consumed, it elicits memories of place, bringing to mind that ‘all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’.⑦

Coping is a creative act, an improvisational activity, an attitude towards the world of uncertainties, focussing on opportunities, and forging solidarity. Migrants coping with structured inequalities in everyday life highlight their creative and experimental performance as they go; no matter that Andres and Valentina can’t get the same ingredients for pandebono in London, they are confident in themselves and their community for finding alternative resources and mutual support. Pandebono cannot be simply reduced to a recipe of ingredients, like those attempted at formulating context-free suggestions for the problems our cities deal with. The recipe, rather than a prescriptive form, becomes support for a kind of improvisation that allows the immigrant to reconfigure the unfamiliar materials of the host country into an embodiment of home. It is an organising framework that allows unrelated elements– Greek-style salad cheese, yucca, British eggs – to participate in the construction of something not constituted by any one of them individually but by their relationships.

Cooking and infrastructuring

What do we learn from pandebono, then, about culture and its infrastructure, the conditions that enable those without institutional or political power to make and remake the city? Like recipes, infrastructures can be used to enable or to constrain. If they fix a set of predefined elements so rigidly that the malfunctioning or unavailability of one of them invalidates the whole structure, they bring about situations of control and redundancy. We can think of ‘recipes’ for cultural regeneration in the Bilbao model, built around a ‘flagship’ museum, preconceived from building to programme. If the museum does not work, both itself and its surrounding ‘cultural district’ can become deserted wastelands, unable to be rethought and readapted from the bottom up by virtue of being designed for institutional-scale actors. Like the proverbial soufflé in which one failure renders the whole thing useless, such masterplanning is what Sennett calls ‘closed’ or ‘complete form’.⑧ Alternately, recipes can be ‘open forms’, organising frameworks choreographing a set of relationships between interchangeable elements, a way of passing on ideas and methods for making form with the materials to hand. This points to a different kind of cultural planning in which a broad set of infrastructures are understood, and individuals and small collectivities make their own forms of cultural space, which then become infrastructures for other things, like sensing and coping.