Peruvian Food Recalled

Press, 10 April 1981, Page 7

Peruvian Food Recalled

By

JOHN WILSON

The New Zealand diet is not as stodgy and unvarying as it once was. But food remains one of the good reasons to travel overseas. It was certainly one of the delights of several trips I made to Peru some years ago. Hearing that there’is to be a Latin American food fair tn Christchurch this week-end at once brought back a flood of culinary memories.

One of the most vivid is of my first taste of “ceviche,” a dish of marinated raw seafood, which I was pressed to sample in a restaurant in the Peruvian port of Callao. I eyed the dish with trepidation — I could identify starfish and octopus at* least mixed up with more familiar seafoods. There were also a few tiny red and green flecks which I disregarded, to my cost, for they were bits of chilli peppers, the most burn-

ing. biting chillis that have ever passed my lips. I still run my tongue nervously over my lips when I remember that first mouthful of “ceviche.” In Lima, Peru’s capital. 24 km from Callao. I would customarily buy for my lunch from streetside stalls “palta rellena” — avocado cut in half and stuffed with chopped ham in mayonnaise. At the other extreme in Peru from huge, cosmopolitan Lima, lunch in the high, small town on Juliaca, close to Lake Titicaca, was usually an “empanada,” a sort of Cornish pasty but with tasty differences. The “empanada” is common in at least Peru, Bolivia, and Chile and it is one Latin American taste I have experienced in Christchurch since the arrival of Chileans here. In the old Inca capital of Cuzco, a common evening snack was an anticucho, bought from Indian women

in the market place who cooked them in open braziers, by which you could stand as you ate the skewered ox heart and potato, the red glow and the aroma of cooking meat adding to the pleasure. Another pleasure in the market at Cuzco was “piccarones." The women who sold “piccarones” had in front of them bowls of hot cooking oil. Into these they would drop strands of a runny batter which popped instantly into a crunchy, golden twist. They were served on chipped enamel plates sprinkled with crude sugar. “Piccarones” were a problem — irresistible, they had to be resisted because of the almost invariable consequence of indulgence was the upset stomach, dread of all Latin American travellers. But “piccarones” were worth it.

At the food fair it wHI be possible to sample some of

these and many other Latin American foods. The organisers cannot provide the atmosphere of a Peruvian street market, but they can guarantee there is no risk of upset stomachs like those “gringos” usually suffer eating the foods’ in Latin America itself. The fair will be held at Aldersgate, 309 Durham Street, tomorrow from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. Most of Christchurch’s Latin American community are Chilean, but the fair’s organisers, the Latin American group, hope to have at least one dish from every country in South America and Central America. This is the first time a Latin American food fair has been held in Christchurch, although there have been Malaysian and African food fairs. The proceeds from this fair will go to support relief projects in various Latin American countries.