Tembleque is a coconut dessert pudding from Puerto Rico similar to blancmange and related to Latin American manjar blancos and Filipino maja blanca. It is one of the most popular desserts in Puerto Rican cuisine.

Ingredients

Tembleque is made by cooking coconut cream, coconut milk, heavy cream (optional), salt, cornstarch, sugar, and garnished with ground cinnamon. Tembleque can also be topped with a fruit relish or syrup usually made with sugar, liqueur, spices, fruit or simply chocolate shavings on top. Other flavors excited such as added chocolate, cream cheese, ginger, orange blossom water, or adding other spices.

Cultural importance

It is a holiday dish, served on New Year's Day throughout the island of Puerto Rico. While the recipe may have originated in Puerto Rico, there are variants on the dish manjar blanco in Latin America, manjar branco in Brazil, and maja blanca in the Philippines. According to the Encyclopedia of Puerto Rico, published by the Foundation for the Humanities, each time a Puerto Rican migrant to the United States comes closer and closer to forgetting their roots, foods like tembleque bring them back and remind them of who they are, of their island, and of their grandmother.

Tembleque

In Spanish, the word tembleque is an adjective used to describe something that shakes, or a noun to describe the shakes themselves. The dessert, due to its Jell-O-like gel texture, trembles, shivers, and shakes if it has been prepared correctly.

In popular culture