Puerto Rican food doesn’t always look like its greatest hits. Puerto Rican food can look like empanada de jueyes, a flat dough disc seasoned with achiote and stuffed with crab. It can look like the endangered mondongo, Puerto Rico’s version of tripe menudo. It can look like tiny canned Vienna sausages floating in a sofrito-seasoned tomato sauce over rice. It can even look like our ancestral pasteles being smothered in American-influenced ketchup. (Note: This is a real thing; for the record, I’m Team No Ketchup.)

This is all to say that a cuisine, and its recipes, can change dramatically, evolving over time based on its people and their influences. Much like the rest of the world, immigrants have come to Puerto Rico in search of a better life or occupation. Even on an island, various cultures eventually influence the gastronomic and genetic makeup.

As these contributions become ingrained in the everyday repertoire, some can also become economically critical. American canned meats stole the affections of Puerto Ricans when they learned to “Creolize” things like Spam and corned beef, adding tomato sauce and sofrito to make dishes more palatable to their tastes.

Black beans came onto the scene when an influx of Cubans fleeing the revolution came to Puerto Rico. As a result, moros y cristianos — black beans cooked in rice — spread across the island, so much that most Puerto Ricans born after the 1960s consider black beans a traditional part of the Puerto Rican diet. The pink beans of my grandmother’s childhood are all but impossible to find today.

The Cuban revolution also brought an influx of Cuban Chinese immigrants.

The earliest documented Chinese restaurant in Puerto Rico is Hing’s Restaurant, which opened in 1951. The Puerto Rico tourism office got on board with helping to market these Chinese restaurants because it was a great tourist attraction. While Chinese immigrants created their own mashups to traditional dishes like mofongo and black pepper steak, their most widespread contribution might have been ice cream.

Los Chinos de Puerto Rico opened ice cream parlors across the island, utilizing the island’s local fresh fruit and selling treats that all Puerto Ricans have come to adore. Most of the shops are modest, a single room, with takeout being your only option. Some of the shops have been remodeled and some have preserved their midcentury modern pastel decor. Your typical commercial ice cream dipping cabinet is front and center. Rex Cream and King’s Cream are the more famous of the parlors, with various outlets scattered across the island, all owned by someone in the families. However, Heladeria Lares stands as its own in the town of Lares. Opened in 1968 by Salvador Barreto Soto, who not only took his inspiration from Rex and King’s Cream on serving local fruit to transform into ice cream, but also more unique flavors like arroz con gandules, bacalao, garlic and avocado.

Angel Pons, a Chinese Cuban, started King’s Cream in 1962. Two years later, Pons sold the business to Mario Lao, who owned a successful hotel and bar in Cuba called Hotel Libertad, which is still up and running.

“Angel Pons was just a Chinese businessman. He might have worked at Trader Vic’s, but I know that is where Don Mario met him,” said Mardie Lao, who is married to Mario Lao’s son, Mario Junior. Together they have been running King’s Cream since 1983. But, they’re soon to retire and their nephew David will take over.

Other shops have similar stories: In the early 1960s, Alfredo Louk, another Chinese Cuban immigrant, opened up an ice cream shop. Louk was a native of Canton (Guangzhou) who lost everything to the Communist regime in Cuba, so he moved to Puerto Rico and married Violeta Louk (née Chang) in 1963.

Violeta was Chinese but born and raised in Cuba’s high society. According to her daughter, Aileen Louk, the family opened the first Rex Cream in 1963. Second, third and fourth stores soon followed. More than a half-century later, the Louks are still running Rex Cream, with Aileen at the helm for the last 24 years.

These natural-fruit ice cream shops became a huge sensation and destination for Puerto Ricans. Because they were known to be owned by Chinese immigrants, most Puerto Ricans simply call these ice cream parlors “los helados de Chinos.” You can still see some of the shops’ older signs in Chinese characters.

Depending on what local fruits are available, most of the ice cream shops skew toward the tropical flavors that Puerto Ricans recognize: tamarind, coconut, mango, banana, parcha (passion fruit), guanabana (soursop), pineapple and some classic hits like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, almond and peanut butter. But one of the most popular flavors is the corn ice cream topped with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. The result tastes like a frozen form of funche, Puerto Rico’s answer to warm farina where cinnamon and brown sugar are usually added.

The ice cream at both Rex and King’s Cream doesn’t feature the typical ice cream texture. They’re actually made in the method of gelato, so the texture is such. You can watch the employees of both businesses make the ice cream throughout the day right at the counter: The mixture inside a deep metal tube container spins, the employee places an oar-size paddle into the spinning mixture, the centrifugal force pushes the ice cream up the paddle, and then it is placed into another metal container for service. Most of the modern ice cream machinery comes from Italy and is made by a company called Cattabriga.

The ice cream is soft; the flavors are pure. There is no middleman with these stores. The shops buy the raw product — sugar, fruit, peanut butter — and then make the ice cream. If they can’t access the product, they don’t make that flavor. Between the cooks and the ingredients, these are recipes that could only come to fruition here.

At King’s Cream, the best seller was coconut, but since Hurricane Maria, the Laos haven’t been able to access local coconuts. That trickled down as bad business for everyone: farmer, business, patrons, local economy. However, the good news is that coconuts are on their way, according to Mardie Lao. And for an island that imports 85 percent of its food from the United States and surrounding islands, that’s a big deal.

Illyanna Maisonet is a first-generation Puerto Rican and a cook. She sometimes writes about food, too. Twitter: @eatgordaeat Email: food@sfchronicle.com