Introduction
Peruvian Cuisine - Fusion of Flavors
We live in a time when we can buy the ingredients for the cuisine from almost every corner of the world. Our children are used to eating with chopsticks and we pepper our conversation with words like chaofan and dim sum. Yet our next culinary adventure is right in the Western Hemisphere: the discovery of the rich diversity of dishes and ingredients that make up Peruvian cuisine.
When you sit down for a meal in Peru nowadays, you may not know that you are experiencing the result of a fascinating evolution of foods and cultures. Many Peruvians themselves are only vaguely aware of the unique story of development and adaptation behind the bases of their favorite dishes.
In fact, the thread begins long before Francisco Pizarro landed in Northern Peru with 13 men-at-arms and claimed an empire of 12 million people for the crown of Spain. The basic foods that are represented on the Inca and pre-Inca ceramics in Lima's museums still appear in dishes served at family tables and in restaurants in Peru today.
The Incas - Quechua cuisine
In the 15th century the Inca Empire, building on earlier cultures, already had an ingenious agricultural system using elaborate terracing and irrigation to cultivate food on steep Andean slopes and on coastal river valleys.
What they grew mostly was potato, the basic element in soups, stews and the pachamanca - a mixture of meats and vegetables cooked with hot stones in a covered pit in the ground-. Another native food crucial to life in the pre-Hispanic Andes was quinua. Held sacred by the Incas, they called it the "mother grain", and at sowing time the soil of the first furrow was ceremonially broken by a golden implement.
Inca farmers cultivated less frost resistant crops and fruits on the lower mountain slopes and river valleys. The most important of these was maize.
The most significant inheritance from the Incas that continues to give contemporary Peruvian food its underlying signature taste, though, is the flavoring from different kinds of aji and rocoto or hot peppers, and from herbs such as huacatay, which were, and still are, used by Andean people to season their boiled and roasted dishes.
The Moors - the Spaniards and their African slaves
During the first 150 years of the Spanish presence in South America, Lima formed the center of one of only two viceroyalties in the Americas. The Spanish brought the social niceties of court life to Peru and, with great mining and agriculturalwealth plus a large native population to provide labor, the leisure class flourished. The biodiversity of Peru's many ecological zones in close juxtaposition is unrivalled in any part of the globe. This newly created leisure class had the time and the wealth to indulge in the fruits of their new land.
The conquistadors brought with them new species of animal and plants, which rapidly flourished and greatly increased the number of ingredients. Unprecedented integration with the indigenous people gave birth to a colorful new Creole or criollo culture and food.
Dishes came to include different types of meat from goats, chickens, cows and sheep that the Spanish introduced. These were added to the local llama's camelid cousin, the alpaca, and to guinea pig, wild hare and various types of fowl. Dairy products were added to the original aji sauces. Rice, wheat, and barley were introduced, along with olives, oils and vinegars, and a myriad of new vegetables, fruits, and notable grapes for winemaking, spices and flavorings. They also brought ovens and introduced new techniques such as pickling and frying.
The new cuisine was an exciting synthesis of ingredients and techniques from the tow continents and at all levels of society new dishes began to appear, which have evolved into the characteristic motifs of the food that Peruvians love today.
The arrival of sugar cane was a delicious surprise to Peruvians and a perfect complement to their herbs and spices. Such a collective sweet tooth evolved that in colonial times the Peruvian viceroyalty was the largest consumer of sugar in the new world. An angelic touch to desserts and candies came from the many newly established convents in and around Lima. Each convent had its own delicious specialty. Convents developed most of these confections, which assured the continuity of both, the convents and the confections from generation to generation. Still today, almost al Peruvian desserts are Euro centric with African overtones.
Soon after the declaration of independence San Martin (the Liberator) issued a decree permitting free entry of foreigners. European immigration took off so effectively that by the year 1857 there were an estimated 20,000 non-Spanish Europeans living in Lima. These included French, Scots, English, Germans, Italians, as well as citizens from most of the Scandinavian countries and the rest of the Mediterranean basin. With the arrival of the French, the cooking and eating habits of France changed forever not only what, but even when criollos ate. Mousse is an example of this. For six or seven generations Peruvians have thought of the many mousse desserts at meals and teas as their own. In fact, the mousse' presence in our diet is a direct result of the Libertadores' fascination with all French things, and dates from the early 19th century and independence from Spain.
Mystic Asia - China
Nevertheless, no one could have predicted that the most dramatic impact on Peruvian food in the 19th and 20th centuries was to come from the other side of the earth. A whole new world of flavors and spices was about to burst onto the Peruvian palate with the arrival in 1849 of the first Chinese indenture servants who came to work on the railroad, on coastal sugar and cotton plantations.
Chinese immigrants imported seeds for vegetables, from snow peas to ginger, which were essential to the Cantonese diet. They introduced soy sauce. Eventually, as they worked off their indentures and settled on the coastal cities, they set up countless small eating establishments. once again Peruvian cooking blossomed with thediscovery of new flavors.
Japan - The Rising Sun comes to dinner
Like the Chinese, the first Japanese immigrants initially came to work the coastal plantations. In the beginning, they, too, suffered hardship but by the 1920's their families had joined them, their numbers had reached 18,000 and they were economically established.
At this time the first Japanese restaurant gently introduced theirown subtle touch to traditional Peruvian dishes. Peruvian cuisine incorporated a delicate hint of shoyu and a dash of miso.
At home with their families the Japanese ate something that well-to-do-city-dwellers were largely uninterested in: fish. In the first half of the 20th century, eating fish was still seen to be less desirable than meat, but by the end of the 1950's there were a small number of Japanese restaurants that were introducing their clientele to the delights of a whole range of fresh seafood dishes.
Although the Inca ate seviche marinated in chicha made from corn and several sour or astringent fruit juices, it was the introduction of limes and onions by the Spaniards, and a new approach to fish by the Japanese that gave us the seviche and tiraditos that we know and love today.
Conclusion
So here we are in the year 2004. The descendants of the Quechua people number many millions. The Spaniards' descendants have lived in Peru for nearly 500 years, the Chinese and their children for 150 years and the Japanese nisei for over 100. During all that time food cultures have been colliding in Peru and succeeding generations have had progressively happier palates as a result.
*From "The Art of Peruvian Cuisine"
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