Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is about Cuban immigrants in the 1950s. Music and food sometimes blend, and at a hotel club, there are platters of roast suckling pig, rice and beans, and a chocolate-éclair cake drenched in honey. But for a regular gig, the musician’s wives served arroz con pollo (chicken and rice), black bean soup, and sangria, supplemented with beer.
But at a picnic in Riverside Park, Nestor Castillo, the novel’s main character, and his girlfriend eat ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on seeded rolls and drink beer.
See Oscar Hijuelos. Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989