The Arepa Lady

Jackson Heights’ Arepa Lady is featured in a Times story about “Street Corner Cooks”.

The Arepa Lady is covered obsessively at chowhound.com. Chowhound has a good primer about her which is worth a read:

When people ask me to name my favorite food in New York, I inevitably answer–without hesitation–“arepas from the Arepa Lady”. This saintly woman grills Colombian corn cakes on her street cart weekends after 10:30 pm, and they are magical.

I don’t know her name; such knowledge would detract from my appreciation of her as an archetype. While I speak pretty decent Spanish, I’ve never been able to fully follow her conversation, but it doesn’t matter. I go when I’m feeling blue, stand under her umbrella, and feel a healing calm wash over me as she brushes the sizzling corn cakes with butter. Zen master-like in her complete absorption in the task, she grills the things with infinite patience and loving care.

Everyone adores the arepa lady. The people on the street treat her with reverence and respect; there’s always a small entourage of hangers-on standing around her cart or sitting on folding chairs. Fast cars and smoke-billowing trucks zoom down the street, the 7 train crashes by overhead, partying Latinos cavort up and down the block, but the arepa lady’s peacefulness absorbs it all, transforms it, and gives back…corn cakes.

The arepas themselves are snacks from heaven. Coursely ground corn, fried in pancakes about 6 inches in diameter and an inch thick, slathered with butter and topped with shredded white cheese, they’re brown and crunchy, chewy and a little bit sweet, the butter and cheese imbuing the whole with salty dairy meltiness.

And thanks to the Times, we now know her name — Maria Piedad Cano:

Ms. Cano is known to many as the Arepa Lady, which amuses her deeply. She didn’t prepare these traditional snacks until 1986, two years after she fled her home in Medellín. She was a judge, she said, and the drug wars made her beautiful town, and her job, too dangerous.

She reminisced, through a translator, about her former good life, before turning to the subject of her culinary accolades. She cited articles on the Internet about her and scoffed at a cookbook author who claimed to have published her recipe. “She didn’t have the right proportions,” Ms. Cano said.

No matter how she makes them here, it’s hard to match the flavor of the arepas in Colombia. The corn here is of a different variety, she said, and not as sweet. Still, the demand is high for her arepas, including the inch-high pancake of cornmeal, mozzarella, milk and sugar that she makes at home.

“Restaurant food is very industrialized,” Ms. Cano said. “It loses much of the flavor that’s made at home.”