The Deeply Spiced Meatballs That Call Back to Haiti

Growing up in Jérémie, Haiti, Elsy Dinvil often spent Sunday mornings watching her mother prepare meatballs: first at the market, picking the most marbled filets she could find, then at home, pulling out a manual grinder to prepare the meat. It was an education in cooking with care.

Ms. Dinvil’s mother died in 2018, two years before Ms. Dinvil self-published the recipe — and its story — in her e-book, “Cooking With My Mother: Your Guide to Haitian Homecooking.”

“My mother couldn’t even write her own name in Creole, so I know she’d be proud of me writing a book in another language,” she said.

Based in Oregon since the 1990s, Ms. Dinvil has become a beloved member of Portland’s food scene, sharing homey Haitian dishes like her mother’s meatballs at cooking classes and farmers’ markets through her company, Creole Me Up. She’s even worked with the award-winning Haitian chef and author Gregory Gourdet helping with his first pop-ups and in the lead-up to opening his restaurant Kann in 2022.

“She showed me less ‘cheffy’ dishes,” he said, “and more rustic Haitian cooking.” Haitian patties, flakier than Jamaican ones and a touch less spicy, were also a lesson, he said.

Oregon wasn’t where she envisioned herself landing. But as part of a scholarship through the Haitian government in the early 1990s, she was sent off to the state, where she studied food science at Mount Hood Community College, using a French-to-English dictionary to understand her textbooks.

It wasn’t until two decades later, when gastrointestinal issues prompted her to start playing with the Haitian food she knew and loved, that she became passionate about owning her own food business. In 2016, Jaime Soltero Jr., the chef and owner of Tamale Boy, a food truck and catering business, encouraged her to start her own pop-ups and even loaned Ms. Dinvil a free commercial space to get started. “People started asking me if they could buy the pikliz I made,” she said, adding, “so I started bottling it.”

Her journey hasn’t been without challenges: There have been periods of homelessness, illness and grief. But sharing her family’s story and recipes, and serving as a kind of cultural ambassador for Haiti, combating negative misconceptions in a predominantly white city, has become her guiding mission.

“The Haiti I know is a country where the people are full of hope, love life, want to work,” she said, adding when she listens to a foreigner’s views about Haiti, she sometimes has to bite her tongue to stop herself from getting angry at their negative generalizations.

By 2017, she was selling her pikliz, Haiti’s spicy cabbage condiment, offering cooking classes and talking to people about Haitian cuisine — the flavors, the techniques, the home that she missed. These days, she’s growing her business to include spice blends, pickles, dressings and marinades, seeking to share them nationally. She’s even working with a local vineyard to create and release her own white wine and rosé.

But keeping those rustic dishes alive and sharing those memories of Haiti are still guiding missions for Ms. Divil, so she stays close to home in her cooking, and to her mother’s recipes. A few years ago, at an estate sale, she bought a manual hand grinder because it reminded her of the one her mother used so long ago. Ms. Dinvil hasn’t used it yet, preferring to keep it in its box, but its presence is a reminder of those childhood lessons.

“I’m never letting this grinder go,” she said, “it feels like carrying a piece of my mom with me.”