Ensalada de Coditos is a Puerto Rican Macaroni Salad. This Puerto Rican recipe is easy to make and incredibly delicious. This refreshing Macaroni Pasta Salad is a Latin dish favorite that’s a must-have for the Holidays and Family gatherings.
Puerto Rican Macaroni Salad is made with macaroni pasta, ham, cheddar cheese carrots, red onions, olives, hardboiled eggs, mayonnaise, heavy cream, and red bell peppers.
Ensalada de Coditos is a quick side dish and one that you can make ahead. In fact, the longer Puerto Rican Macaroni Salad sits in the refrigerator, the better it tastes! Although pasta is not known as Puerto Rican it has become a favorite of many Puerto Ricans on the island.
Ensalada de Coditos ~ Puerto Rican Macaroni Salad
Ingredients
- 1 lb cooked macaroni pasta
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 2 cups cooked ham
- 1 cup cheddar cheese diced
- 1 carrot diced
- 1 small red onion chopped
- 1/2 cup olives
- 5 hardboiled eggs chopped
- Mayonnaise as desired
- 2 teaspoons heavy cream
- 1 red bell pepper diced
Instructions
- Cook the pasta according to the package instructions, adding a little salt. When ready, drain well and set aside.
- Combine the pasta with the rest of the ingredients, diluting the mayonnaise with 2 tablespoons of cream before adding.
- Stir once more and garnish with a few pieces of red bell pepper and hardboiled egg.
Notes
The History of Pasta
In the 1st century, the writings of Horace said that Lagana was fine sheets of fried dough and was an everyday foodstuff. Writing in the 2nd century Athenaeus of Naucratis provides a recipe for Lagana which he attributes to the 1st century Chrysippus of Tyana: sheets of dough made of wheat flour and the juice of crushed lettuce, then flavored with spices and deep-fried in oil.
An early 5th-century cookbook describes a dish called Lagana that consisted of layers of dough with meat stuffing, an ancestor of modern-day lasagna. However, the method of cooking these sheets of dough does not correspond to our modern definition of either a fresh or dry pasta product, which only had similar basic ingredients and perhaps the shape.
Historians have noted several lexical milestones relevant to pasta, none of which changes these basic characteristics. For example, the works of the 2nd century AD Greek physician Galen mention itrion, homogeneous compounds made of flour and water.
The Jerusalem Talmud records that itrium, a kind of boiled dough, was common in Palestine from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD. A dictionary compiled by the 9th-century Arab physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali defines itriyya, the Arabic cognate, as string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking. The geographical text of Muhammad al-Idrisi, compiled for the Norman King of Sicily Roger II in 1154 mentions itriyya manufactured and exported from Norman Sicily.
There is a legend of Marco Polo importing pasta from China which originated with the Macaroni Journal, published by an association of food industries with the goal of promoting pasta in the United States. Rustichello da Pisa writes in his Travels that Marco Polo described a food similar to “lagana”.
Jeffrey Steingarten asserts that Arabs introduced pasta in the Emirate of Sicily in the ninth century, mentioning also that traces of pasta have been found in ancient Greece and that Jane Grigson believed the Marco Polo story to have originated in the 1920s or 1930s in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company.
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