Eating Chilean

Do they eat Chilean Seabass (Dissostichus eleginoides) in Chile?

2012-01-25T14:13:00.003-03:00

The short answer is “almost never,” but there’s more to it than that.

Fish names are funny things. Wherever they went, European colonists called the local fish by the names of fish back home in Europe. So the European perch (genus Perca) gave its name not only to the North American yellow perch, but to over a dozen other fish including the Nile perch and the Chilean percha de boca chica (smallmouth perch). Similarly “bass,” from Middle English bars (also meaning "perch") became the white bass, the black bass, and lots of kinds of “sea bass” including, of course, the “Chilean Seabass.” In this case however, it was not homesick colonials, but seafood marketing gurus (the same folks who turned “Slimeheads” into Orange Roughy) that came up with the name. They evidently thought that neither “Patagonian toothfish,” the species’ official English name, nor any of its Chilean names merluza negra, bacalao austral or bacalao de profundidad (“black hake,” “southern cod,” or “deep sea cod”) would be a plus on US restaurant menus or in supermarket fish cases.

Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides)

Back in Chile restaurant owners were having a similar problem with their fish names. Many up-scale (and some decidedly mediocre) restaurants provide English translations of their menus, giving sometimes useful and sometimes bizarre names to their dishes. The most notorious is probably locos con mayo, Chilean abalone with mayonnaise, sometimes translated as “crazies with May.” One of Chile’s most popular and common fish, the corvina[1], is called the “corvina drum,” or “Chilean croaker” in English, but neither “drum” nor “croaker“ is likely to attract English speaking tourists. So what to call it?

Corvina (Cilus gilberti)

Why not “Chilean sea bass?”

Of course the reason “why not” is that many English speaking tourists know that “Chilean sea bass,” AKA Patagonian toothfish, is one of those fish on the AVOID list for the ecologically conscious. The resulting confusion prompts lots of questions. And some happy, if mistaken, consumers. One visitor wrote “I was able to buy Chilean Sea Bass [at Santiago’s Mercado Central] which retails at $20 a pound in the U.S for under $5 a pound. Very good stuff.”

I’ve never seen or heard of Patagonian toothfish being served or sold in Santiago or anywhere else in Chile outside of the far south, although there are lots of dishes called “Chilean seabass.” So, if you are concerned (or thrilled) about eating dishes translated as “Chilean sea bass” in Chile, don’t be. Unless you happen to be in Chile’s southern-most city, Punta Arenas, you are probably getting corvina. And if you are in Punta Arenas where several restaurants serve it, it will be called “merluza negra” on the Spanish menu. (But if you do find some in Santiago, let me know.) See comments.

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Meanwhile the story of Chilean seabass/Patagonian toothfish is interesting in its own right. They occur throughout the southern oceans in cool temperate and sub Antarctic waters, from the east and west coasts of Patagonia eastwards through all of the sub Antarctic islands, submarine plateaus and seamounts to south of New Zealand, and probably in the far south Pacific between there and Chile as well. But since their habitat is in waters from 300 m to over 2000 m (1000 to 6500 feet) deep, they were unknown to science until F. A. Shmitt described and named them in 1898. And it was not until the 1980s that Chilean fishermen, who had been catching them while fishing for merluza australis/Australis hake, which were becoming scarce, began offering them on the commercial market.[2]

Patagonial toothfish range in blue, Antarctic toothfish range in black

Source: “Chilean Seabass”[3]

Toothfish had also been appearing as “bycatch” in the nets of trawlers fishing the waters around the South Georgian Islands (SE of the Faulkland Islands) in the 1970s and by the 1990s a fishery for toothfish had developed there as well, followed by Australian and South African fisheries in the southern Indian ocean, and by New Zealand in the Ross sea off Antarctica.

Why?

The Patagonian toothfishery is a 'gold mine' fishery; it is a premium product, especially on the U.S. and Japanese market where it is sold for up to $30 U.S. per kilo, it is not a cheap product. When you can realize a lot of money from what may only be a few weeks of fishing, then the fishery becomes extremely attractive.[4]

And what makes it so valuable? “Chef’s Resources,” a web site whose “purpose is to provide culinary resources for chefs, foodies, and culinarians” says:

Chilean Sea Bass is “a wonderfully flavored fish with a high oil content which keeps it moist during cooking” and “which gives it a rich, moist, tender flavor profile which melts in your mouth. It has white flesh with large, tender flakes.”

Nutritionally it is similar to salmon in calories, but with about 2/3 the protein and 1.4 times the fat. (And it's high in mercury; it's recommend that you eat it no more than 3 times a month.)

Chilean Sea Bass Fillet Photo: Le Maitre d’ & Sommelier

The add accompanying the photo says:

It is a versatile fish which can be cooked with white chocolate or champagne. Ten, 10 oz. filets sell for $175

So what’s the problem?

There are several: Only two of its fisheries have been certified as sustainable, toothfish sold as being from those fisherise may or may not be, much of the toothfish sold in the past was harvested illegally and some continue to be illegally caught today, the fishery has been responsible for the deaths of large numbers of sea birds; and it is very dangerous, having resulted in the deaths and injuries to fishermen and the loss of boats.

Sustainability [5]: The Patagonian toothfish is a large predatory fish that grows up to 2 meters in length, may weigh over 100 kg. and lives up to 50 years. They live from mid depths to near the bottom in cold southern waters. They take 6 to 9 years to grow to 70 to 95 cm in length and to become sexually mature. The Antarctic toothfish (D. mawsoni) which is sometimes caught with and sold as Patagonial toothfish, is slightly smaller and lives further south, but has similar characteristics.

Fisheries scientists have argued that heavy exploitation of slow-growing, low-fecundity deep-sea species is inherently unsustainable. The history of large-scale deep-sea fisheries has been a “boom-and-bust” pattern of rapid development, resource depletion, and very slow recovery. As such species, the two toothfishes would appear to be poor candidates for sustainable large-scale exploitation. Both species of toothfish grow slowly, reach sexual maturity after they reach market size, and live in a fragile ecosystem. All of these factors make them inherently vulnerable to overfishing. It is questionable whether large-scale exploitation of such a species could ever be considered sustainable.[6]

In fact however, two fisheries have now been certified as sustainable; the South Georgia Patagonian toothfish longline fishery and the Ross Sea Toothfish longline fishery are certified as sustainable to the standard of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)[7], although the sustainability of the Ross Sea fishery has been challenged. [8]

Identity: Toothfish from certified sustainable fisheries have the label at right, but all may not be well.

A [2011] study conducted by molecular geneticist Peter Marko of Clemson University in South Carolina and several colleagues found several irregularities. Posing as consumers, they bought single fillets of MSC-certified toothfish from supermarkets in 10 states across the United States. Then they looked at short genetic markers to identify the species. Three of the 36 fish samples turned out to be tuna, greenling, and mackerel, the researchers report online today [22 August 2011] in Current Biology. When they examined DNA markers of the 33 actual toothfish, five of these fish had markers that differed from those of fish caught near South Georgia Island. All told, 22% of the samples appeared to be something other than MSC-certified toothfish. "I was stunned," Marko says. The trouble with selling consumers something other than what they want is that it can erode trust in the MSC brand, says Gulbrandsen, which is intended to generate profits that lessen the environmental impact of fisheries. [9] [emphasis in original]

Illegal, unregulated and unreported (“IUU”) fishing: Toothfish is very valuable, they are found in remote seas and historically there was little policing of the fishery, thus it is unsurprising that a great deal of illegal fishing went on in the past, and some continues today. From 1996-7 to 1999-2000 an estimated 49% of toothfish came from IUU fishing.

Australia’s legal catch quota is 2,900 mt/year, but, in 2003, Australian enforcement agencies estimated that 2,000 mt per month were fished illegally from Australian waters. TRAFFIC reports that the illegal fishery is dominated by Spanish owned fishing interests which employ vessels registered through “flag-of-convenience” states, such as Panama,Vanuatu and Belize. The Chilean fishing industry is alleged to be heavily involved in the illegal trade in toothfish. A good deal of illegal fishing is reported from the Indian Ocean sector of the subantarctic, including areas around Heard and MacDonald Islands. Ports known to support offloading of illegally-caught toothfish include Walvis Bay, Namibia ; Port Louis, Mauritius; Montevideo Port, Uruguay; and many ports in southern Chile. [10]

In the last decade policing has improved greatly. For example:

In February 2002, the Australian navy captured two Russian vessels fishing toothfish illegally off Heard Island. Some of the difficulties of toothfish enforcement are revealed in details of the story. To make the captures, armed Australian troops and fisheries officials were lowered from helicopters onto the Russian vessels in hazardous conditions of extreme cold and rough seas. The Australian enforcement personnel met resistance from the Russian crews.[11]

Photos: Uncharted Waters [12]

Thanks to this policing and public awairness, in recent years the IUU catch of toothfish has been dramatically reduced to around 4% of the total catch, according to COLTO (Coalitition of Legal Toothfish Operators). [13]

Bycatch: Although some toothfish are caught by trawling, the most common method is called “longlining.”

Source: Greenpeace

Photo: Toothfish fishing

In this system an 8-12 kilometer main line is anchored to the ocean floor at both ends with marked radio beacons for later recovery. Thousands of baited hooks attached to the main line hang and float at the appropriate depths for toothfish, 800-2,500 metres below the surface. As these baited hooks are cast from the vessel, albatrosses and other seabirds dive for the bait and swallow it, hook and all and are pulled under the water and drowned. In addition, losses to killer and sperm whales that eat the catch and frequently become tangled in the lines have averaged 5% of the total catch and up to 100% on some occasions. IUU fishermen have reportedly attacked whales with dynamite.

Fortunately a new longline system has been developed and implemented in Chile that is reported to have virtually eliminated deaths of birds and substantially reduced the loss to whales by 2006. The extent to which it has been adopted in other fisheries is unknown. [14]

Danger to fishermen and rescue expenses: Although the toothfishery is not inherently more dangerous than other fisheries, recent incidents in the Ross Sea by unprepared boats or careless crews have cost many lives and great expense. In December 2010 a South Korean fishing boat capsized in the Ross Sea killing half its 42 man crew, and in December 2011 Sparta, a Russian-flagged vessel that was not ice-strengthened, hit ice that ripped a hole in the ship’s hull and requiring the Royal New Zealand Air Force to drop repair supplies to the crew by plane. Rescue efforts were hampered by heavy sea ice, with help only coming seven days later by the South Korean icebreaker Araon. Fortunately, the entire crew survived the ordeal. Another incident occurred on January 11, 2012, when the Korean fishing vessel Jeong Woo 2 experienced a fire on board. Three crew members died, and several others were injured. [15]

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I’ve never eaten Patagonian toothfish, and although I might try it if I go to where it’s caught by artisanal fishermen (Punta Arenas or Ushuaia in Argentinean Tierra del Fuego),I’m not going to be looking for it in LA or Chicago. First it’s too damn expensive; and second, I’m not interesting in eating fish from fisheries that may or may not be sustainable. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.

[1] “Corvina Drum is a popular fish in South America, but little information exists on its biology, abundance or fishery. They are found from Peru to Chile and around the Galapagos Islands, and are caught by hook and line, longline and gillnets. The abundance of Corvina Drum is not known but their landings have decreased over the past decade. Management is poor overall for Corvina Drum, and essentially the fishery is unregulated. Hook and line fisheries generally cause little habitat damage.” Blue Ocean Institute, Corvina Drum. On line at http://www.blueocean.org/seafood/seafood-view?spc_id=267

[2] Toothfish Fact sheet FAO 78—Chilean EEZ below 47°S. Coalition of Legal Toothfish Operators inc. On line at http://www.colto.org/fisheries/chilean-eez/ and Patgonian Toothfish, Center for Quantatitive Fishery Ecology, Norfolk, Virginia, USA on line at http://www.odu.edu/sci/cqfe/Research/Southern%20Ocean/Patagonian%20toothfish/Patagonian%20toothfish.htm

[3]Cascorbi, Alice. 2006 (amended 2011) Chilean Seabass, Seafood Watch Seafood Report, Monterey Bay Aquarium. On line at

[4] Johnson, Genevieve. Voyage of the Odyssey, Log Transcript. On line at http://www.pbs.org/odyssey/odyssey/20020326_log_transcript.html

[5] Merriam-Webster defines sustainable as “being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.”

[6] Cascorbi 2006. Op. cit.

[7] The MSC is an independent non-profit organization that has developed an environmental standard for sustainable and well managed fisheries.

[8] Seafoos source staff. 2010. Ross Sea certification criticized. SeaffodNews Environment & Sustainability. On line at http://www.seafoodsource.com/newsarticledetail.aspx?id=8456

[9] Stokstad, Erik. 2011. 'Eco-Friendly' Chilean Sea Bass May Not Be So Green. Science Now. On line at http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/eco-friendly-chilean-sea-bass-ma.html

[10] Cascorbi 2006. Op. cit.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Willock, Anna. 2002 Uncharted Waters: Implementation Issues And Potential Benefits of Listing Toothfish in Appendix II Of Cites. Traffic International. On line at www.traffic.org/species-reports/traffic_species_fish20.pdf

[13] Toothfish fact sheet: The IUU fishery. COLTO. On line at http://www.colto.org/images/Draft-COLTO-IUU-Fact-Sheet.pdf

[14] Moreno, C.A., R. Castro, L.J. Mújica and P. Reyes. 2008. Significant conservation benefits obtained from the use of a new fishing gear in the chilean patagonian tothfish fishery. CCAMLR Science, Vol. 15: 79–91; Longline fishing, Grenpeace. On line at http://archive.greenpeace.org/oceans/southernoceans/expedition2000/expedition/longline.html; and Patagonian Toothfish. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

[15] Christian, Clair. 2012. Dying for some fish. National Geographic Daily News. Tuesday, January 24, 2012 on line at http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/01/17/dying-for-some-fish/, and Mussen, Deidre. 2012. Danger and death in the south's cruel seas. The Press. Jan. 12,2012. On line at http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/6255575/Danger-and-death-in-the-souths-cruel-seas

Eating Chilean Erizos, Sea Urchins

2011-12-30T11:45:00.004-03:00

Like foie gras, egg yolks and pork belly, sea urchins have a lusciousness and weight that make chefs drool. “The mouth-feel is pure cholesterol,” said Michelle Bernstein-Martinez …who helped create a pressed sea urchin sandwich that is legendary in food circles. She spreads slabs of Cuban bread with soy-ginger-flavored butter, stuffs the bread with sea urchins and presses the sandwich on a hot griddle until crisp and melting. “I eat it all day long — the only problem is that I am eating my profits. “Escape from the Sushi Bar,” Julia Moskin, New York Times, May 12, 2009.

Sea urchin sandwich: Flickr, thewanderingeater

In case your experience with sandwiches in Chile has been limited to completos (hot dogs with everything) or ave paltas (chicken with avocado) something a bit more elegant is possible. Of course you’ll have to make it at home, since the sangüche de erizos has not yet arrived at Santiago restaurants. But then it won’t cost you $15 plus air fare to New York either.

A bit of history and biology

In spite of the lack of sangüches de erizos, sea urchins have been part of Chilean cuisine for millennia and continue to be popular today. Their remains are prominent in coastal archaeological sites dating back 11,000 years[1] and were appreciated by the coastal Mapuche, who the Spanish met upon their arrival. The Spanish had known, eaten and used sea urchins of the Atlantic and Mediterranean medicinally, although I doubt that Chile’s conquistadors, who came mainly from landlocked Extremadura, knew much about them. Never the less, the young Chilean-Spanish soldier Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, who was captured and held prisoner by the Mapuche in the 1620s seems to have known enough to have mentioned erizos in his account of his “happy captivity.”

By the 1670’s Chile’s sea urchins were well enough know that Diego de Rosales’ wrote about them in his Historia general de el Reyno de Chile:

Sea urchins are round and flat, and defend themselves not only with their shell, but they also arm themselves with sharp spines, with which they are filled all round. …Enclosed inside is a meaty substance divided into tongue-like yellow forms… These tongues are soft and very tasty and greatly heat the stomach and easily provoke urination. [2]

Photo: Enrique Pérez E

Loxechinus albus photo: Shallow Marine Surveys Group

He also says that they have a little crab inside with which, when food is scarce, “they sustain themselves, they eat them,” and in fact there are species of small pea crabs that are found inside sea urchins in the Caribbean… and perhaps in Chile too.[3] But I don’t think the urchins eat them.

One hundred or so years later, Abate Molina, Jesuit naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina, also wrote abut Chilean sea urchins:

The Echinos or sea urchins are divided into several species, the most notable being the white urchins and the black urchins. The white ones, Echinus albus, [now Loxechinus albus (Molina, 1782)] are globular, three inches in diameter; they have a white shell and spines and the internal substance, which is extremely delicious, is of a profoundly yellow [amarizllazo] color. …The Chilean Indians call them jupe.

Black urchins, Echinus niger, [now Tetrapygus niger (Molina, 1782)] are oval in shape, somewhat larger than the white ones, and have black spines, shell and eggs; they are called devil’s urchins, and they are never eaten.[4]

The eatable part, the tongue-like yellow substance inside the urchins, is its reproductive organs which produce egg in females and sperm in males. Both are eaten and are usually called sea urchin roe or corals.[5] The white sea urchin (called the “Chilean red sea urchin” in the trade), from the near shore waters of Chile and Peru, is one of hundreds of species found in shallow ocean waters world wide. They feed mainly on sea weeds, but can also eat invertebrates like sea cucumbers, mussels, and sponges. Sea urchin populations sometimes explode, whether from overfishing of their predators (including lobsters, and sea otters) or for unknown reasons, and eat everything eatable on the ocean floor leaving decimated “urchin barrens” behind.

Once sea urchins had been described by Chile’s great colonial period naturalists, they ceased to exist—at least in writing—until resurrected by foreign visitors who found Chileans’ humble every-day foods interesting. Their next appearance in literature seems to be in 1878, when Englishwoman Mrs. (Baroness Anna) Brassey saw (but seems not to have eaten) urchins in the Chilean port of Coronel in 1878. She called them “sea eggs.”

Drawn up by the side of the pier was a picturesque looking market boat full of many sorts of vegetables and sea eggs, with their spines removed, and neatly tied with rushes into parcels of three. The people seemed to enjoy them raw, in which state they are considered to be most nutritious; and when roasted in their shells or made into omelettes they are a favorite article of food with all classes.[6]

If urchins were a “favorite food with all classes” in the 1870s they have now fallen from favor. Only 2% of Santiago residents surveyed in 1999 said that they ate urchins “frequently,”[7] but then all seafood consumption has fallen sharply in Chile. Average per capita consumption in is only 7 Kg. per year. (see Eating Chilean Fish) compared to a world average of 17 Kg. (2008).

But some Chileans, mainly from the upper socioeconomic classes, continue to enjoy urchins, usually raw with a green sauce of parsley, onion, lemon juice and a little oil (at right); in a tortilla (omelet) de erizos like the ones Mrs. Brassey saw; or in sauces that adorn other seafood.

Photo: Boots in the Oven

A few recipes:

The current issue of Paula, Chile’s best known magazine of food, home and style provides an article on urchins, “A Banquet of sea Urchins” including a recipe for a Tortilla de Erizos.

Sea urchin sauce is also popular over baked or poached fish, in this case corvina, as in this recipe from the 1911 Chilean cookbook, La negrita Doddi.[8]

Salsa de Erizos

(for corvina)

In a skillet melt 50 grams [3 ½ T] of butter or lard with 30 grams [¼ cup] of flour and mix until well blended. Add salt and pepper and 200 ml. of [fish] stock and bring to a boil. Remove from the shell and rinse some sea urchin tongues and add to the sauce, continuing to stir until it comes to a boil, and then remove from the stove. Just before serving add 30 grams of butter [2 T], cut into small pieces to melt quickly, and stir gently. Add a few drops of lemon juice if you wish.

And from the same period, here’s a recipe for a Sea Urchin Soup (caldillo) from the magazine Familia of August, 1912.[9]

Caldillo de Erizos

Fry a little flour in butter and color [paprika or ground chili], add onion cut in plumas (sliced vertically) and the urchin tongues, and cover with the liquid from the urchins and when hot add oregano, cumin, salt and pepper. Allow to boil a little while. Then add an egg beaten with milk and lemon juice. Serve with slices of toast.

A little history, a few recipes; that’s about all there is to say about Chilean sea urchins…. Or is it?

Globalization

Chile’s sea urchin fisheries are the largest in the world and have been contributing more than 50% of the world’s production since the mid-1990s. "Sea Urchin Fishery Profiles," 2006[10]

Impetus for this development was not that Chileans suddenly renewed their taste for this traditional product; it was the Japanese. Fresh sea urchins roe, uni, eaten raw as sushi or sashimi is among the most desirable foods in Japan, and the Japanese are the world’s major importers and consumers of sea urchins, importing 246 million dollars worth in 2002.

Uni sushi in two colors: Photo 徒然日記

Japan was the also world’s largest harvester of sea urchins until 1984. But since the 1970s Japanese harvests have declined steadily, due mainly to sea urchins’ declining abundance. The 2002harvest of 13,000 metric tons (mt) was less than half of the record landings of 1969. In 1985 the Chilean harvest surpassed that of Japan and since 1987 harvests in both Chile and the United States have exceeded Japanese landings.

Japanese imports increased tenfold from 1,779 mt ($20 million) in 1975 to 18,535 mt ($246 million) in 2002 when they supplied 88% of consumption. Roe prices have fluctuated from 1986 to 2002 depending on supply, with Japanese roe ranging from about 7,500 to 13,000 yen/kg and imported roe selling for from 5,200 to 6,700 yen/kg in Tokyo’s central wholesale market. Meanwhile, the Japanese yen has surged against the US dollar so that average 1986 import prices of 6786 yen/kg had a value of $33/kg and average 2002 import prices of 5278 yen/kg equaled $42/kg.[11]

So Chile became the world’s major exporter of sea urchins.

Before about 1975 Chilean sea urchins were at best a minor element in Chile’s fishery, mostly collected by artisanal fishermen and their families wading in the surf zone of rocky shorelines during a few days each year with low tides and calm waters. The annual harvest was only a few thousand mt that were sold locally, but by 1975 the harvest had grown to 10,000 tons and reached 60,000 tons in 1992, the peak year. Remarkably, the Chilean catch seems to be sustainable—at least for now; it has been between 40 and 60,000 mt since the mid 1990s. [12]

Today, Chile’s erizo fishery is dominated by owners of lanchas de accarreo, carrier vessels, and small boat operators who work for them. The carrier vessels are 60 to 80 foot boats that guide, supply and collect the catch from fleets of a dozen or so faenas, small dive boats. The “hookah” divers who do the actual collecting are supplied with air through compressors and tubing, and harvest about 1000 lbs a day in 3 to 5 hours of diving. The crews of the faenas live on their boats for months at a time while harvesting the surrounding area. The carriers make almost daily roundtrips from the collecting areas, in the islands south of Chiloe Island, back to their home port of Quellon.

Dive boat with larger carrier (?) in the background photo: German Henriquez

The carrier boats receive (as of 2007) about 240 centavos per kg. ($.48 US) of which about 70% goes to the divers. These urchins go to local processing plants where they are cleaned and shipped onward to be frozen for export to Japan. Local divers whose fresh whole erizos sell in local markets receive up to 1,000 pesos a kg.[13]

Sea urchin processing in Quellon, Chiloé island. (Photo: Proa)

By the time fresh urchins arrive in Santiago, the sell for 7-800 Chilean pesos each, about $1.35 to $1.50 each. By comparison in US you would pay $8 to $15 per urchin. And who knows what in Japan. I’ll eat mine here.

Sea urchins, Mercado Central,

Santiago

Photo: Chile con Karen

But if you can’t get to the Mercado Central, Sea urchins are on sale via the Internet. Those bellow from Catalina Offshore products are sold at about as good a price as you will find and are from California where they are hand-harvested by divers.

Sea urchins are also available from Maine where they are harvested by dredging, a method that is not sustainable and has a by-catch of everything on the bottom. Monterey Bay aquarium’s Seafood watch recommends that you avoid sea urchins from Mane.

Should you try them? Perhaps quote from Julio Camba (1882-1962) Spanish journalist, writer and gourmand will encourage you.

And, by the way: If you are rich enough to worry about getting fat from eating sea urchins, you’re okay. They have only 145 calories per 100 gm. But don’t eat too many, they are high in cholesterol.

And for other Chilean seafood, see these links:

Fish

Salmon

Mussels

Locos, Chilean “abalone”

Jibia, Humbolt Squid
Machas, Surf Clams

[1] Alfaro, Silvia y Claudia Solervicens. ND. Prehistoria del Valle de Choapa. Codelco, ReCrea - Servicios Editoriales y Educativos Ltda. On line at https://www.codelcoeduca.cl/Chalinga.pdf

[2] Rosales, Diego de. 1877. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. ed. Historia general de el Reyno de Chile: Flandes Indiano (1425-1553). I. Valparaíso, Chile: Imprenta i Libreria del Mercurio. P. 304 All translations mine.

[3] Pea crab. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. On line at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_crab. And thanks to the erudite members of WordReverence.com’s forum who helped me translate this quotation and knew that pea crabs live inside urchins.

[4] Molina, Juan Ignacio. 1987. Ensayo sobre la historia natural de Chile : Bolonia 1810 Santiago : Eds. Maule. p. 219.

[5] Sea urchin. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. On line at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_urchin

[6] Mrs. (Ann) Brassey. 1881. A Voyage in the Sunbeam, our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months. Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co. p.159.

[7] Soong, Roland. 2000. Eating Seafood in Chile. Zona Latina. On line at http://www.zonalatina.com/Zldata102.htm

[8] Lawe. 1911 La negrita Doddy : nuevo libro de cocina, enseñanza completa de la cocina casera i parte de la gran cocina : con un apéndice de recetas útiles i de los deberes de una dueña de casa. Santiago : Soc. Impr. y Litogr., Universo. p. 28. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0012281

[9] Menoria Chelina. 2009 Para chuparse los dedos: Recetas de familia. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0052710

[10] Sea Urchin Fishery Profiles: A background document produced by Explorations Unlimited Inc. Pacific Urchin Harvesters Association/West Coast Green Urchin Association. p. 45 On line at http://www.puha.org/assets/resources/SeaUrchinBenchmarks2005_Backgrounder.pdf

[11] Sonu, Sunee C. 2003. The Japanese Sea Urchin Market. NOAA Technical Memorandum (NMFS N OM-TM - N M FS-S W R-040). On line at http://www.d-dpacificfisheries.com/NOAA-Japanese%20RSU%20Fishery%20Report%20Nov%202003.pdf

[12] Molyneaux, Paul. 2007 Sustainable Sea Urchins in Chile: A Rep[ort for the SUZC, http://www.maine.gov/dmr/rm/seaurchin/molyneaux.pdf

[13] Ibid.

German-Chilean food / Comida chilena-alemana

2011-12-03T10:50:00.005-03:00

On my first day in Chile, I crossed the river from my hostel to Bellavista, Santiago’s “Bohemian” neighborhood, sat down at an out door cafe and ordered a beer in my usually serviceable gringo Spanish.

Me: “A beer please.”

Waiter: “A schop?”

Me: “Ah… a beer, I’ll have a beer.”

Waiter, with irritation, while making beer stein gestures: “A schop, you want a schop?”

Me: “Okay, okay, I’ll have a schop.”

Waiter: “Escudo?”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Not a great beginning for gringo Spanish in Chile.

Photo: El Birrerio

As it turns out schop, from the German schoppen, is Chilean for a draft beer and Escudo (shield) is one of the most popular Chilean beers—a descendant of beer made by German immigrant Carl (Carlos) Anwandter who established his brewery in Valdivia, in south central Chile, in 1851.

Carlos Anwandter was among the earliest of some 11,000 Germans who immigrated to Chile between 1846 and 1914, about half of whom settled in the southern frontier zone. There they established German-speaking communities that included many skilled craftsmen and professionals: beer-brewers, tanners, furniture makers, pharmacists, professors and scientific investigators.[1] Today 500,000 to 600,000 descendants claim German ancestry and German-Chileans are prominent in all aspects of Chilean life: politics, business, academia, art, and of course, brewing and food service.

German restaurants, serving a wide variety of German (and German-Chilean) dishes are common in Santiago and surrounding areas. Some of the best known are the chain Bavaria, Tante Marlene, and Restaurant Der Münchner, below.

But perhaps the most popular are the German-Chilean cafes and schoperías (beer joints) where you can have a beer and anything from a sandwich to a full meal. Among the best known are the Santiago classics Fuente Alemana, and the Elkika Ilmenau, or the chain Tip y Top. All serve everything mentioned here along with German sausage plates, hamburgers, hot dogs, and Chilean sandwiches like churrascos (steak), “Barros Lucos,” (hot beef and cheese), and lomitos (below).

The lomito completo (roast pork sandwich with sauerkraut, tomatoes, avocado and mayonnaise) at Elkika.

German influences in Chilean cuisine

Naturally, Germans immigrants influenced regular Chilean cuisine, especially in the south, but also nationally. Today kuchenes, German influenced cakes, and a sprinkling of other German dishes are widely integrated into Chilean diet.

Chilean kuchen

Kuchen, “cake” in German, is among the most mobile of German foods; it seems to have migrated into the national cuisines everywhere Germans settled. Kuchen is the official state dessert of North Dakota; it’s popular in Brazil under the name cuca, where it usually refers to a banana cake with a streusel topping; and in Argentina as torta alemana or simply as kuchen.

While Kuchen can refer to a wide variety of cakes in German, in Chile kuchen is a pastry with a crust of firm cake or crisp tart dough topped with fruit and sometimes streusel (a crumb topping of flour, sugar and butter). The classic Chilean cookbook, La Gran Cocina Chilena includes 17 Kuchen recipes.[2] No onces, a light Chilean meal like tea taken in the early evening, is complete without a kuchen.

Kuchen de frutillas (strawberry kuchen, right),

Photo and recipe in English from Canela Kitchen

Kuchen de Quesillo (fresh cheese kuchen with blueberries, below)

Photo and recipe in Spanish from La Cocina de Latimer

For a recipe in ‘English see Rick Cooks

And for the most Chilean of all, there is the Chilean Flag kuchen, from Pasteleria Mozart in Santiago.

Pernil – pork hock

While kuchen is the most widely appreciated German-Chilean dish, pernil certainly has its advocates. Pernil means “leg” or “shoulder” (as in pork “picnic” shoulder) in traditional Spanish, but in Chile a pernil is a generous pork hock, usually served boiled with mashed potatoes or sauerkraut (chocrut). Peel away the thick layer of skin and fat and the meat below is succulent and meltingly tender.

Pernil with puré - photo: felipemarques' photostream

It is found in German-Chilean restaurants, but also where no other obviously German dishes appear on the menu. In this restaurant sign from Orsono, it is the “Suggestion of the Day”, served with sauerkraut, pebre (Chilean salsa) and Chilean spicy mashed potatoes

Roasted pernil (the German schweinshaxe) is also popular and is sold in some supermarkets, cooked on a rotisserie like chicken.

Photo logosorno's photostream

Chocrut – sauerkraut

Where there’s pernilI, there must be chocrut. The earliest ChileanSauerkraut recipes I’ve found come from La Negrita Doddi, the French influenced 1911cookbook. They are Ganso (goose) a la choucrute and Choucrute al la alemana (German stile). Both use the French spelling “choucrute” and neither actually uses sauerkraut (fermented cabbage), but cabbage blanched in boiling water and drained, then simmered with onion, sausage and bacon – and goose in the first recipe. A similar recipe occurs in the 1882 Nuevo manual de cocina where it is called simply “partridges with cabbage” (perdices con repollo, p.72). All (or none) may reflect the influence of German immigrants who began arriving in 1846. Today in Chile sauerkraut is most commonly found on a completo, a Chilean hotdog with tomatoes, sauerkraut, avocado and abundant mayonnaise; or on other sandwiches.

Asado Aleman (“German roast” AKA meatloaf)

Chilean asado aleman, like pernil, is found on the menus of Chilean restaurants with no other “German” dishes. It often includes hard boiled eggs and sometimes cooked carrots. The meat is usually ground beef combined with milk-soaked bread and eggs, sautéed onions and perhaps garlic, paprika or oregano.

Photo and recipe in Spanish: Corazón de Alcachofa

Similar recipes are found all over Latin America under the names “albondigon” (big meatball), or molde de carne (mold of meat), although characteristically the Chilean version tends to be among the simplest and least highly seasoned.

Escalopa Kaiser – beef cordon bleu

Milinesas or escalopas, thin cutlets of meat, coated in bread crumbs and fried, are popular throughout Latin America as well as in Europe. They seem to have been in Chile before there was much German influence, appearing in the 1882 Chilean cookbook, Nuevo manual de cocina as biftek rebozado (breaded steak). But today’s version, the Escalopa Kaiser, certainly owes its origin (or at least its name) to German immigration. It is two slices of beef with sliced ham and cheese sandwiched between, the whole breaded and fried. They are popular and served widely, as the one below (which appears to be chicken) at the Oktober Fest 2008, Malloco, Chile.

“Daniel, happy with his Escalopa Kaiser”

Alvaro Farfan's photostream

Crudos – steak tartare (literally “raws”)

While Chile’s most famous crudos are served at the Café Haussmann in Valdivia, they are also popular in Santiago and other cities, especially as bar food. Everyone in Valdivia seems to have a version of the “authentic” Café Haussmann recipe, each one a little different.

Crudos served at Café Haussmann, Valdivia Photo Wkipedia

Crudos, Café Haussmann, Valdivia

1 Kg. (2 ¼ lb) beef rump roast, finely ground
6 eggs
Mix the beef and eggs and serve over toast with chopped onions. You may add lemon juice, minced green Chilean chilies in olive oil and Haussamnn’s sauce: equal parts of mayonnaise and cream (some say yogurt), salt and cilantro. (To prevent the beef from discoloring add lemon juice with eggs.)

Here’s another version, from Ana María Springer Hitschfeld of Frutillar, a German-Chilean town in the south.

Crudos, Cabañas El Tirol

800 gm. (1 ¾ lb.) beef rump roast, finely ground
Chopped chives, 2 bunches
2 tablespoons capers
3 grated dill pickles
1 egg yolk
Lemon juice
Salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Variety of breads

Mix meat, chopped chives, capers, pickle, egg yolk (optional), lemon juice, salt and pepper. Serve molded on a plate with variety of breads.

Other German-Chilean foods

Other classic German foods, purple cabbage, smoked pork chops, rye bread, German style sausages (bratwurst, weisswurst, etc.) are occasionally (some regularly) available in Chilean supermarkets (Jumbo for example), but are not really integrated into Chilean cuisine. And of course hot dogs and hamburgers are ubiquitous; although they seem to be only indirectly German – via the USA.

[1] German Genealogy: Chile. On line at http://www.genealogy.net/reg/WELT/chile.html

[2] Alfaro, Mónica T. 2000. La Gran Cocina Chilena, 8th Edition. Santiago: Ediciones Occidente S.A. p. 416

Chilean Chicha

2011-09-18T19:12:00.001-03:00

We sat down by the fire and they immediately placed before us two good looking pitchers of chicha. My portion was clear, sweet and spicy, and the chief toasted me with it, saying that I should eat and drink… Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán. 1673 (all translations mine)

This drink is highly appreciated in Chile and rich families as well as the poor consume great quantities while it retains its sweetness. Claudio Gay, 1841

The Independence Day fiestas are coming soon and there will be no Chilean tables that don’t include a good meat empanada and a glass of chicha. ElPeriodico.cl September, 2011[1]

From before the Spanish conquest to today chicha has been the most Chilean of drinks. Whether the sweet strawberry chicha that the young soldier Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán enjoyed, the stronger muday or corn chicha the Mapuche warriors drank, the apple chicha of Chiloé, or the grape chicha of central Chile, it has brought refreshment and cheer to Chileans for centuries, perhaps for millennia.

Chicha came to the attention of the European voyagers early. On the fifth of August, 1498, Columbus came ashore in Venezuela and, according to the letter he wrote to the King, the Indians “…brought …. wine of many kinds white and red, but not of grapes. It must be of several kinds, one of one fruit and one of another and likewise one must be of maize, which is a seed which makes a spike like a cob…”

To the Spanish, all were “chicha,” a term which seems to have been part of several indigenous American languages. It was first documented in written Spanish in 1521, when a visitor to Panama noted that it was short for “chichah co-pah”, where “chichah” meant maize and “co-pah” drink.[2] It came to be used generically for the fermented drinks of the Indians, replacing the native terms like the azúa of the Incas and the muday of the Mapuche of Chile.

Mapuche Chicha

Among the Mapuche, indigenous people of south central Chile, chicha made from grains or fruits was an integral part of social life. Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán writes about a gathering he attended in the 1620s:

To the chiefs they gave splendid food, various dishes of fish, shellfish, fowl, partridges, bacon, sausages, pastries, buñuelos, tomatoes, rolls of beans and maize, and other things, providing for each band according to the people it contained, one hundred or two hundred measures of chicha, because more commonly only twenty or thirty bands came together for ordinary drinking parties and feasts, but in this one there were more than fifty, with a daily consumption of more than four thousand jugs of chicha. And that was not a lot, because there were twelve or fourteen thousand souls at that feast, Indian men and women, girls [chinas] and boys.[3]

Jesuit Diego de Rosales, who was a missionary among the Mapuche in the 17^th century explains:

Chicha, which is like beer or our wine, is the joy of all get-togethers or parties and is the usual drink, because there are Indians who never drink water, but only chicha in their houses, and if it is lacking it there is an argument with the women that often ends in blows. …They make chicha of all kinds, from grains like maize, wheat, barley, and from fruit like apples, pears, quince, strawberries, piñones [seeds of Araucaria araucana] murtilla [Chilean Guava, Ugni molinae) and other native fruit: they grind the grain, add yeast, heat it and when it is just right it is finished.

Mapuches making apple chicha - Edmond Reuel Smith 1855[4]

When they have to make a lot of [maize] chicha for a large party, the women get together at night and in a circle with their milling stones they spend the whole night singing a funny song in which they keep time with the movements of their milling. The old women and the little girls who don’t have the strength to mill (which takes a lot of strength) work in making yeast, which they do with the flour they are making, chewing it and putting it into some pitchers, and there is an old woman who grinds the yeast. This yeast and the ground flour they put in large pans of water that are on the fire, and this is the chicha at its beginning, which if kept for many days becomes sour and is strong like strong spicy vinegar. [5]

This method of making maize chicha, which Rosales describes above, was common throughout maize growing areas of central and South America. It involves masticating ground coked maize, drying it, and then mixing it with more ground maize and water. This was then brought to a boil and allowed to ferment. By masticating the maize, enzymes in the saliva convert some of the starch into sugar, which is then available to yeasts for fermentation into alcohol. It is not “yeast” as Rosales thought, but is an alternative to malting (sprouting) grain, which accomplishes the same purpose. (No mastication was required for fruit chichas.)

Colonial Chilean chicha

Soon after the Spanish arrived in Chile, planting grapes was a high priority as wine was essential for religious observances and was an integral part of Spanish diet. Vines arrived in Mexico as early as 1520, in Peru by 1540, and Chile the first vineyard was plated by Juan Jufré, first alcalde (mayor) of Santiago, probably around 1550 and wine production began shortly afterward.[6]

But chicha isn’t exactly wine, it’s wine in the process of fermentation, and the origins of grape chicha, as distinct from wine, are unclear. Chilean historian Eugenio Pereira Salas sees it as a “new drink” which, in the 18^th century was replacing wine, as the drink of the common people. It is first mentioned in 1760, when seen as responsible for death and disgraceful behavior caused by the “the boundless appetite of the common people who make it and who have given it the name chichita.”[7]

Pereria Salas sees chicha as a descendant of Mapuche muday, which is quite reasonable, but he notes that in Spain it would be known as “sagardúa,” from the Basque word for cider. In fact similar partially fermented wines are produced throughout Europe, under names that translate as “feather wine,” “new wine,” “young wine,” and in southern Spain as “mosto,” though none seem to be cooked before fermentation and it do not keep as long as chicha.

Claudio Gay, writing in the 1840s, explains how it Chilean chicha, now called (chicha cocida or chicha baya) was made:

It is preferably prepared from the juice of the sweetest grapes. This juice is given a light coking, frequently not reaching a boil, and after cooling, it is placed in sealed barrels. Form that point fermentation proceeds, producing a great deal of carbon dioxide which puts the barrel in risk if a pinhole is not carefully opened for the gas to escape. This pinhole is closed with a plug that is removed every two hours during the fermentation. The chicha thus produced is decanted into barrels for consumption. After six to eight days it can be drunk, and many people prefer it as it is then foamy and spicy, but it causes many burps and for this reason it is usually drunk only a month or two later. It doesn’t last long and by October it begins to oxidize and is used for distillation [into aguardiente].[8]

Chicha cruda, uncooked chicha, or chacolí was (and still is) also be made by simply allowing grape juice to ferment, but it must be drunk within a few days before it begins to turn to vinegar.

By the time Englishwoman Maria Grahm was in Chile, in the 1840s…

The liquor commonly drank by the lower classes is chicha, the regular descendant of that intoxicating chicha which the Spaniards found the South American savages possessed of the art of making, by chewing various berries and grains, spitting them into a large vessel, and allowing them to ferment. But the great and increasing demand for chicha has introduced a cleanlier way of making it ; and it is now in fact little other than harsh cider, the greater part being produced from apples, and flavored with the various berries which formerly supplied the whole of the Indian chicha.[9]

The chicha deliveryman[10]

Chilean chicha today

While there is bottled chicha in the supermarkets around the time of Chilean Independence day, September 18, most Chilean chicha is sold from barrels in fondas (booths) at independence day celebrations, picadas (cafes/bars), or at the rural chicharias where it is made. This year we bought ours from the Valladares, artisanal producers in the town of Curacaví, 50 km or so from Santiago.

Their production techniques are virtually the same as those reported by Gay in the 1840s. The grape juice is heated for several hours at a low temperature and when cool, sealed into tinajas, large earthenware jars, for fermentation. They didn’t mention allowing the carbon dioxide to escape—perhaps the seal on the tinajas isn’t so tight as to build up destructive pressure. Then when the chicha has reached the point they wish, sweet but with good acidity and a bit of alcohol, it is decanted into barrels.

Tinajas of chicha

Two strengths were available when we went, one quite sweet and the other less so and a bit more piquant. We bought some of each, the piquant to drink then (they said that it wouldn’t last until the 18^th), and the sweet to save for the 18^th, about 10 days later. It was about 1,500 pesos ($3.15) a liter. They have chicha available year round.

Chicha de Curacaví

Chicha de Curacaví, chicha balla y curaora

Chicha de Curacaví. Que ponis los pasos lentos

Chicha de Curacaví a mi no me los ponis

Cicha de Curacaví por que te pasó pa' entro

Chicha de Curacaví chicha valla y curaora

Se acabó la chichita alla va, lla va, tambien la

Se curó la cantora alla va, lla va, todos pa' fuera

Se acabó la chichita alla va, lla va, tambien la vela.

Todos pa' fuera ay si alla va, lla va, chicha en botella
A la mujer celosa alla va, lla va, palos con ella.[11]

Which is, more or less, the following:

Chicha de Curacaví, cream colored and intoxicating

Chicha de Curacaví, that makes you step slowly

Chicha de Curacaví, but that doesn’t happen to me

Cicha de Curacaví because I put it inside me

Chicha de Curacaví, cream colored and intoxicating.

The chicha is all gone, there it goes, the candle is out too

The singer got drunk, there it goes, everyone goes out side

Everyone goes outside, there they go, chicha in a bottle

The jealous woman, there she goes, give her a whack.

And here’s a video with the music.

[1] Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Francisco, 1608-1680. 2001. El cautiverio feliz, Tomo dos; edición crítica de Mario Ferreccio Podestá y Raïssa Kordić Riquelme. Santiago de Chile: Seminario de Filología Hispánica, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile, p. 86. on line at http://books.google.cl/books?id=VOrKaGk48twC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q=&f=false; Gay, Claudia 1862 Agricultura Vol 2, p. 193. Chile: Museo de Historia Natural de Santiago online at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0002687; and Fierro, Verónica. En fiestas patrias: ministerio de agricultura elegirá las mejores empanadas y chicha de todo chile. ElPeriodico.cl Sept. 11, 2011.

[2] Pardo, O. 2004. Las chichas en el chile precolombino. (basado en una trabajo presentado en el xii congreso ítalo-latinoamericano de etnomedicina "nuno álvares pereira" (Río de Janeiro, Brasil, 8-12 de Septiembre 2003). Chloris Chilensis año 7 nº 2. Url: http://www.chlorischile.cl.

[3] Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Op Cit. p. 207.

[4] Smith, Edmund Reuel. 1855. The Araucanians; or, Notes of a Tour among the Indian tribes of Southern Chile. New York: Harper & brothers. p. 278 On line at http://books.google.cl

[5] Rosales, Diego de. 1877 (1674) Historia general de el Reyno de Chile: Flandes Indiano. Valpariso: Imprenta del Mercurio. Vol. I p. 155. on line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0005271

[6] Pozo, José del. 1998. Historia del vino chileno desde 1850 hasta hoy. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. P. 28. On line at http://books.google.com

[7] Pereira Salas, Eugenio. 1977. Apuntes para la historia de la cocina chilena. Santiago : Universitaria. p. 65 On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0006512

[8] Gay, Caludio. Op. cit. p.

[9] Graham, Maria. 1824. Journal of a Residence in

Chile

, During the Year 1822. London: Longman, Hurst, etc. p. 127. On line at http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Journal%20of%20a%20residence%20in%20Chile%20AND%20mediatype:texts

[10] Drawing by unknown author from Álbud de tioso chilenos de mediados del siglo diecinueve, Sociedad de Bibliófilo Chilenos, Santiago, 1987 as reproduced in Pozo, Jose, Op. cit. p. 39

[11] Anonymous Chilean folk song, on line at http://rescatemoselfolklore.blogspot.com/2011/01/chicha-de-curacavi.html

Loco over locos, Chilean “abalone”

2011-09-06T13:35:00.003-03:00

Photo: Hugo Carrillo

Locos, Chilean “abalone” (Concholepas concholepas),[1] are among Chile’s, and my wife’s, favorite shellfish. And of course the name, from the Mapuche language, makes for some interesting translations since “loco” is Spanish for “crazy:” “crazies with mayonnaise,” etc., frequently adorn the English versions of Chilean menus.

While similar in appearance, taste and texture to abalone – which exist in Chile only as an introduced aquaculture species – locos are smaller and are carnivorous, feeding mainly on mussels. They inhabit rocky coastal shallows down to about 40 m. along the coast of South America from northern Peru to the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego. They grow slowly, taking 4 to 5 years to reach the minimum harvestable size of 10 cm. (about 4 inches) in diameter and, based on evidence from archaeological sites, have been part of Chilean diet for over 8,500 years.[2] And they were abundant; one 6,000 year old shell midden near Los Vilos contained an estimated 4,185,000 shells. [3]

Upon their arrival, the Spanish also developed a taste for locos. The earliest mention seems to be from Padre Diego Rosales, in his General History of the Kingdom of Chile (1640):

The Chileans call the donkey foot* loco. It seems a vulgar food, but if it is macerated by pounding it looses its hardness and is tasty.[4]

*pie de burro – name for loco in Peru

Pedro Gonzales de Agueros (1768-1793) mentions them in 1791, saying:

The locos resemble donkey’s foot or hoof and are so tough that to stew them it is necessary to beat them first with sticks or stones and in this manner tenderize them and afterwards they come out very tasty.[5]

Photo: Luis Muñoz

Photo: Paul Monfils

Writing a few years later, Jesuit naturalist, Juan Ignacio Molina (1740-1829) gives then a scientific name (which was later changed to Concholepas concholepas) and describes them as follows:

The Loco, Murex loco - oval, with a very short tail, knobby above, toothless opening, almost round. This muricid [sea snail] is held in high esteem for the taste of its flesh, which is white, but a little bitter, however cooks have found ways to make it perfectly tender, by beating it with a stick before cooking. It is three to four inches thick and contains two or three drops of a royal purple liquor within a little bladder near the neck.[6]

Molina’s observation that locos contain a few drops of “royal purple liquor,” is a testament to his observation. No other Colonial source seems to notice, although the Inca used locos or a related rock snail (Thais chocolate) to produce dyes similar to the Royal Purple from Mediterranean sea snails.[7]

The locos fishery

Unsurprisingly, after the accounts of the early natural historians, locos disappeared from history, if not from the tables of Chileans. We know that they remained abundant through the end of the 19^th century when they could be purchased on the beach for 60 centavos per hundred, or about 4 times that much in Santiago.[8] (For comparison beef and lamb sold for from 70 to 90 centavos a kilo.) And there is sporadic data from the early 20^th century: in 1926, 67 metric tons of locos were landed; during the 1940s loco landings were between 1,000 and 2,000 tons per year; and by the 1950s, when data becomes regularly available, landings averaged around 4,000 tons per year and remained at this level until 1975.

During this period they were harvested mainly by ‘hookah” divers operating from open wooden boats with outboard motors.

The fishing lasted one day, depending on weather conditions, in the sub-tidal areas, seldom exceeding the 5-mile offshore limit. There were three crew members: the patron or boatman, an auxiliary and the diver. The auxiliary, called a “telegrapher”, takes care of the air compressor, the life rope and the hoses. The air compressor has one air exit for the diver. He lifts and sinks the bag, helped by the patron. The diver harvests Locos using a rubber suit. Diving is between 2 to 6 hours each trip, and although the result varies, between 200 and 400 Locos are taken in one day. The diver pulls out Locos one by one with a kind of short pike (chope), and gathers between 40 and 100 Locos in his waist bag. When the bag is full, he gives a signal to the “telegrapher” by drawing the rope. The "telegrapher" lifts the bag and sends a replacement to the diver.[9]

Hookah dive boats. Chiloé, 2010 Photo: Germán Henriquez

In 1976, with encouragement from the military dictatorship’s unregulated free market ideology, exportation of frozen locos to Japan began. That first shipment of 48 tons of “Chilean abalone” sold for $1.38 US a kilo. The following year exports increased to 2,368 tons at around $2.50 a kilo and generated $6 million, and by 1980 the total catch had grown to 24,856 tons; about 6 times the total annual production 10 years earlier—and very little of it was being eaten by Chileans. The catch began to drop off after 1980, but increased price brought the year’s income for exported locos to about $26 million in 1982. And by 1987, as the supply decreased, the price for frozen export quality locos increased to $10 US a kg. so that slightly under 4,000 tons brought Chile an income of $42.6 million.

As you can imagine, the increasing demand and price for locos brought chaos to the coast and overexploitation to the fishery. Registered locos fishermen increased from 17,000 in 1975 to 57,000 in 2005. And they migrated to new areas creating conflicts with local fishermen, called ”locos fever” or “the locos wars” by the newspapers: “National media covered the frenzy, propagating the image of rowdy and drunken migrant fishermen fighting and also cavorting with prostitutes on the beaches.”[10]

It even inspired a movie, La Fiebre del Loco:

The film is about infighting between visiting prostitutes and their husbands' wives in a small fishing village in rural Southern Chile that has become greedy and crazy for Abalone. The film's tagline was "Amor y avaricia en un mundo de buzos y moluscos" (Spanish for: Love and greed in a world of scuba and mollusks).

This chaos and the dramatic fall in the catch led to steps to control the fishery, often ineptly organized and plagued by illegal fishing. First were seasonal closures, from 1981 to 1984, followed by national quotas and closure of all but the southern areas from 1985 to 1989, and then by a total closure of the fishery from 1990 to 1992. Starting in 1993 a system of management areas was established in which only registered fishermen from a particular caleta or cove could collect locos in their area and no locos could be taken from outside of the management areas; a system designed to give fishermen ownership of the fishery and incentives to promote sustainability. That system has now been applied, the harvest has returned to levels similar to those of the early 1970, which are presumably sustainable -- in spite of an ethos among fishermen applauding illegal fishing by locals.

Eating locos

Locos are widely available in Chile today. They are on the menu of many up-scale restaurants, and fresh locos in the shell and frozen cleaned locos sell for around 1000 to 1,200 pesos each ($2.15 – 2.65) while fresh cleaned locos sell for around 20,000 pesos a dozen in Santiago ($43). Prices are lower at fish markets and still lower on the coast.

If you wish to become a “locovore” and prepare fresh locos from scratch, this is what the New Kitchen Manual of 1882 suggests:

Put them in a thick bag and beat them [se apalea] forcefully until they are good and soft, but without breaking them; wash them in warm water and then put them in more warm water and bring them to boil over a strong flame; when they are cooked take a little of their soup to melt flour and make a thick gravy [una mazamorra] and season it with a little color [chili or paprika cooked in grease].[11]

By the 20^th century, the advice was more detailed and relied on chemistry as well as force. In a chapter called “useful advice and little secrets…” in her 1935 cookbook The Good Table, Olga Budge de Edwars recommends three ways to tenderize locos:

First: With ashes. Leave them for an hour covered with ashes and then beat each one separately covered with ashes with a thin stick.

Second: With flour and baking soda. ½ kilo of flour, 2 tablespoons of baking soda. [and proceed as above?].

Third: With coarse kitchen salt. ½ kilo of salt.

In truth, the secret is in killing them, which is almost imperceptible by simple looking, and to accomplish this objective, the best system is to put them in a sack or canvas and beat them against something hard. No loco can resist the combination of coarse salt with a bit of baking soda and flour.[12]

Frozen locos

Photo: Empresa Pesquera Valparaiso SA

If all this seems to require bit more effort than you want to expend, you can use frozen locos (which seem to be pre-pounded and require only cleaning and cooking according to this video recipe for Korean abalone porridge).

Or use canned locos,

Locos - Whole Abalone from Chile

Chile's Seafood treasure!
All Natural

$31.70 L-SE-05

SHIPS FOR FLAT RATE

Three or four whole abalone per tin
Gourmet quality
Harvested from the pure coastal waters off Chile
Size - 13.4 ounces

From the cool, fresh waters off the coast of southern Chile come these delicious 'Locos', also known as Chilean Abalone. They share the rich flavor and signature texture of their northern cousin, the Pacific Abalone.

The pure southern Pacific Ocean ensures a fresh clean flavor to these shellfish. They have a full flavor and a firm bite that make them perfect chopped in an onion and tomato salad, or sautéed and added to pasta or a cream sauce.

Or simply heat them slowly in warm water, then serve them with melted butter for an unusual delicacy sure to please all who try it.

Recipes

After pounding fresh locos are boiled or cooked in a pressure cooker until tender. Sources differ on how long this takes, from 15 minutes (plus cool down time) to 45 minutes in a pressure cooker or from 45 minutes to 2 hours boiling in an open pan. All suggest you save the broth.

The most popular preparation seems to be:

Locos con mayo / Locos with mayonnaise.

Cool the locos to room temperature and serve with a mixed salad, mayo and Chilean salsa verde (parsley, minced onion and lemon juice); two for a first course, 4 to 6 for a main course.

Another popular dish is:

Chupe de locos / Stewed locos

Photo: Nestle.cl

6 large locos, cooked and cut into rounds

1 tablespoon tomato sauce

1 minced onion

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

½ tablespoon paprika (ají de color)

1/2 cup of the locos cooking liquid

1/2 cup fresh crumbs from French style bread (marraqueta)

1/2 cup milk

2 hard boiled eggs cut in to rounds

1/2 cup grated cheese (queso mantecoso or Munster)

Soak the bread crumbs in the milk for 10 minutes, then squeeze to remove the excess milk. Sauté the onion and paprika in the oil, then add the tomato sauce, the bread crumbs and the locos broth. Put the locos and eggs in an oven proof dish, cover with abundant grated cheese and bake for 30 minutes.

And finally, for the ultimate in empanadas:

Empanadas de locos -- Cocinarte Chile

Cook the locos until very tender, cut into small pieces, soften the onion in a little oil cooked with paprika (color), add the locos, salt, chili, hard boiled egg and a little of the broth the locos were cooked in. Form small empanadas and fry.

Locos are good for you too: 100 grams provide 120 calories, 21 grams of protein and only .5 grams of fat. (Tabla de composición química de alimentos chilenos) I found no data on their cholesterol content, but similar species like abalone and conch have 70 - 90 mg/100 gm., about 30 - 40% of the cholesterol in one large egg.

And for other Chilean seafood, see these links:

Fish

Salmon

Mussels

Jibia, Humbolt Squid

Machas, Surf Clams

Erizos, Sea Urchins

[1] Also called pata de burro (donkey foot) and chanque in Peruvian Spanish. Wikipedia: Concholepas concholepas

[2] Jerardino, Antonieta, Juan C. Castilla, José Miguel Ramírez and Nuriluz Hermosilla. 1992 Early Coastal Subsistence Patterns in Central Chile: A Systematic Study of the Marine-Invertebrate Fauna from the Site of Curaumilla-1 Latin American Antiquity, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 43-62

[3] Couyoumdjian, Juan Ricardo. 2009 El mar y el paladar. el consumo de pescados y mariscos en chile desde la independencia hasta 1930 Historia, Vol. 42, Núm. 1, enero-junio, pp. 57-107

[4] As quoted in Reyes E. 1986. ¿Que paso con el loco?. Crónica de un colapso anunciado. Revista Chile Pesquero, N 36 Junio, pp. 143–145.

[5] Gonzalez de Agueros, Pedro. 1791. Descripción historial de la provincia y archipiélago de Chiloé, en el Reyno de Chile y Obispado de la Concepción. Dedicada a nuestro católico monarca Don Carlos IV (que Dios guarde). Madrid: Impr. de Don Benito Cano. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0008627

[6] Molina, Juan Ignacio. 1967. Ensayo sobre la historia natural de Chile : Bolonia 1810 Santiago : Eds. Maule. pp. 212. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0002868

[7] Michel, Rudolph H. 1992. Indigoid Dyes in Peruvian and Coptic Textiles of The University Museum of. Archaeology and Anthropology. Archeomaterials 6:69-83.

[8] Couyoumdjian, op. cit.

[9] The major sources for the history and management of the locos fishery come from Reyes, Eduardo F. 1986. ¿Qué pasó con el loco? Crónica de un colapso anunciado.

Revista Chile Pesquero N° 36, junio de 1986. On line at http://200.75.6.169/RAD/1986/2_Reyes.pdf and Gallardo, op. cit.; Gallardo Fernández, Gloria L. 2008. From Seascapes of Extinction to Seascapes of Confidence. Chapter 5. On line at http://journals.sfu.ca/coactionbks/index.php/Gallardo/article/view/38 and Meltzoff S. K., Lichtensztajn Y G & Stotz W. 2002. Competing visions for marine tenure and co-management: Genesis of a marine management area system in Chile. Journal of Coastal Management 30: 85-99, 2002.

[10] Meltzoff, 2002. op cit. p. 88

[11] Anonymous. 1882. Nuevo manual de cocina: conteniendo 377 recetas de guisos escojidos de las cocinas francesas, española, chilena, inglesa e italiana: arregladas para el uso de las familias del país.. Valparaíso : Libr. del Mercurio de Orestes L. Tornero p. 34 On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0003181

[12] Budge de Edwars, Olga. 1935 “Consejos útiles y pequeños secretos para obtener mejor resultado en la confección de estas recetas” p. 32-36 La buena mesa. 2a. ed. revisada y aumentada. Santiago : Imp. Universitaria

Chilean Lamb

2011-07-29T12:46:00.002-04:00

Per capita consumption of lamb in Chile is

exceedingly low. It’s around a half a kilo per

person per year, even less than horse meat.

Hardy Avilés, “Cordero todo el Año”

I wonder why. It’s not the geography or climate; Chile produced around 3.4 million sheep in 2005, roughly the same number as pigs. But Chileans ate around 22.5 kg of pork, and less than a half kilo of lamb. Chile produces sheep, but exports them. Somebody else eats them.[1]

Chilean huasos in wool ponchos with sheep, by Claudio Gay

Maybe history can tell us why.

The Spaniards who colonized Chile came from a nation of sheep. From the 12th to the 16th century wool from Merino sheep was a major source of Spanish wealth, and lamb (or mutton[2]) was the major meat in the diet. Only Christians ate pork, and oxen were work animals, slaughtered mainly when old or sick. (Beef consumption remained low until the mid 20th century and Spaniards eat less beef than anyone else in Europe.[3]) But everyone, Christians, Jews and Muslims, ate lamb.

So it is unsurprising that the sheep, a sturdy breed called churras, came to the Americas early, brought by Columbus in 1493. From their arrival in the Antilles sheep were introduced into the other Spanish colonies, reaching Mexico by 1518, Peru by about 1530[4] and Chile in 1540 with Pedro de Valdivia.[5] They prospered. In 1614 a remarkable 623,825 sheep (along with 323,956 goats, 39,000 cattle, and 4,278 horses) were reported to be in the district of Santiago.[6]

As in Spain, their meat was central to the diet; sometimes in great quantities: Pereira Salas notes that one Captain Martín de Ibarra “ate at one sitting a leg of roast leg of lamb, a boiled hen, two one-pound loaves of bread, and for dessert a large plate of fruit.” [7] Sheep, and lamb consumption, continued to prosper in the 18th century. Writing in the 1780s, Juan Ignacio Molino found that:

Sheep transported from Spain have lost nothing in respect to size or wool, which remains long, fine and of a singular whiteness. Each sheep annually produces from ten to fifteen pounds. The meat of castrated lambs is of exquisite flavor and is often preferred to that of calves. [8]

But that view was not universal. Writing of his experiences in the 1820s, British botanist and engineer, John Miers was less enthusiastic[9]:

As usual with topics of 19th century Chilean agriculture, the most complete discussion is from Claudio Gay, the French botanist, naturalist and illustrator who wrote prolifically and authoritatively based on his research in the mid 19th century. He found Chilean sheep to have diverged significantly from their Spanish ancestors, due to harsh conditions and lack of selective breeding,

….but nevertheless as a whole they exhibit characteristics that are extremely favorable. Of medium size, closer to small than large, the are lively, nervous, with a slightly long head and a more or less cylindrical body, covered with short wool, curly, white and sometimes black. (p. 451)

Claudio Gay

Gay’s discussion and data suggest that lamb was the major meat in rural Chile, and that it was even the original filling for pastel de choclo, (p.162), but that lamb consumption declined through time.

Lamb consumption in Chile is quite large, but less than in earlier times when mid way through the 18th century the department of Maule with its scarce population slaughtered no less than 150,000 lambs a year. This consumption was and continues to be the basic animal food for the peasants, but especially for hacienda owners, who eat lamb alternately with jerked beef and poultry. (p. 462)

In general the peasants and even the families of medium fortune in the small cities eat little more than beans, peas, etc. and rarely meat, only one day a week at most. The author of the estadistica de Maule [ca. 1830] calculates that each individual eats 51 lbs of meat a year: 5 lbs of beef, 30 ¼ of mutton and 15 ¾ of pork. (p. 374).

Urban Chileans ate more meat than their rural counterparts, but here too lamb became less important through time. Based on slaughterhouse data, Santiago consumed approximately 40,000 sheep in 1773; 70,000 in 1842; 90,000 in 1859; and 105,000 in 1876. In 1773 Santígüenos consumed about equal quantities of lamb and beef, while in 1842 and 1859 they ate approximately three times more beef than lamb; and in 1876 about 3.4 times more beef than lamb. Gay estimates that in 1858 Santiago’s annual meat consumption was about 49 kg (108 lbs.) per person, presumably including about 12 kg. (26 lbs.) of lamb.[10]

Southern Lamb

From the Rio Bio Bio River, some 300 miles south of Santiago, to Chiloé Island, lamb was more important than beef. On the mainland, controlled by the Mapuche until the 1880s, abundant anecdotal evidence suggests that lamb was the major meat eaten. German visitor Paul Truetler, who traveled among the Mapuche in the 1850s, speaks of the ”inevitable sheep” killed upon the arrival of visitors [11] and Edmund Reuel Smith, of the US Naval Astronomical Expedition, who visited Mapuche-controlled southern Chile in 1853 spoke very favorably of the mutton he ate there, usually boiled with a rich broth. [12]

Sheep arrived in Chiloé in 1568, but the wet forested landscape was far from ideal for their propagation. Never the less, by 1783, 86,683 sheep and 2,160 rams, along with 17,307 goats, 3,780 cows, 1024 bulls and 8,426 pigs were reported in the statistical survey (although in the text the author said pigs were the most abundant animal.) [13] Beef was clearly a distant third.

Further south sheep production became a major industry in the late 19th century, but it had little influence on the meat on Chilean tables. Starting in the 1890s with importation of sheep from the Falkland Islands, the Magallanes, Chile’s far southern province, became one of the world’s major centers of sheep production and by 1930 was exporting 600 to 800,000 head, canned and frozen. But little if any of this Patagonian lamb came north to central Chile where local production and consumption was a half million head per year[14] in a population of 4.3 million—under 10 lbs. per person.

Tierra del Fuego Sheep, 1908

Eating Chilean lamb

Most Chilean lamb seems to have been boiled in soups and stews: carbonada, pucheros and cazuelas, as was the case with the 1903 “working class family” whose diet was reported to consist largely of cazuelas of beef on weekdays (5 kg beef a week at 70 centavos a kg.) and of lamb on Sundays (.8 kg of lamb a week at 80 centavos a kg.).[15] Middle and upper class diet was probably more varied; the 1887 New Kitchen Manual included 30 recipes for lamb along with 73 for beef, 46 for poultry and 18 for pork. Lamb recipes included mainly braised or stewed dishes, but also breaded and grilled lamb chops and numerous recipes for organ meats.

This interesting recipe for muton stew with piñones is among them:

Carnero Guisado

Fry a little bacon cut into cubes with a little minced onion; cut the meat, which should be from the leg, into pieces and place all in a pot with salt and pepper; fry lightly over a low fire and then add warm water; and when it is cooked add parsley, a leaf of mint [yerba buena], a heart of lettuce, soaked piñones [seeds of Araucaria araucana] and spices, all cut into small pieces, and when served, a little sour lemon [agrio de lemon].[16]

The late 19th and early 20th century increasingly brought foreign fashions to Chile, and French influence came to dominate the kitchens of the elite while heavily spiced Chilean Creole dishes fell from favor (see Do Chileans eat Chili?”). It is tempting to believe that the spreading fashion for French food was accompanied by rejection Chilean dishes; especially those related to rural life—like lamb. But I found no evidence to support this, and in fact the classic 1911 Chilean French influenced cookbook, La Negrita Doddy, includes numerous lamb recipes, both French (lamb chops a la Soubise; lamb chops a la Schiltilgheim) and Creole (lamb tomatican a la Chilena; lamb arvejado a la Clarita). There are even instructions for roasting a 5 lb. leg of lamb for only 45 minutes, which would result in a decidedly rare roast in the French fashion. And the very French Famous Recipes from the Hotel Crillón published in Santiago in 1951 continues to have lamb recipes: Gigot de sept heures (Seven hour leg of lamb), Saddle of lamb a la francesa, etc. It looks like lamb continued to be popular among the elite, at last enough be served in their restaurants.

So if it was not a change in fashion or taste that took lamb off the tables of Chile’s middle and working class, what was it?

The Chilean ministry of agriculture places the blame on:

…the myth that this meat has a high concentration of fat and is bad for the health because of its high level of cholesterol. This idea may have been reinforced by a lack of education and information for consumers, and by the lack of transparency in the supply of lamb; in many cases what is actually being offered is the meat of sheep or rams which is more frivolous, tougher, and fatter. [17]

But I suspect that this perception came after the fact: the decline in lamb consumption began long before health concerns about fat and cholesterol. Stories of experiences with strong mutton and unfounded fat and cholesterol concerns may be keeping lamb of the table of potential new buyers, but can hardly explain 150 years of decline.

It was price.

And I blush, materialist anthropologist that I am, not to have considered this first. The first hint came from the Sunday lamb dinners of the Famila Obrero above, at 80 centavos a pound in contrast to the daily beef at 70 centavos. From this 15% premium in 1903, lamb increased in relation to beef by from 23 to 36% in Santiago and from 4 to 41% in Valparaiso in 1948-50.[18] And since Chilean beef is almost always sold off the bone while cuts of lamb include bone, the difference per pound of eatable portion was even greater.

Perhaps this is why my wife’s middle class parents, with seven mouths to feed (10+ with nana and family) in the 1950s and 60s didn’t eat lamb, and why her children hadn’t tried it until her recently acquired Gringo husband served it to them. (They ate it, but haven’t added it to their household menus.) By mid century lamb became expensive, a luxury food for those who knew it and could afford it. But for the majority of Santígüenos, buying it simply didn’t and doesn’t occur to them.

Today Chilean lamb consumption is at its lowest point in history at only 200 grams per person per year—equivalent to about one good lamb chop—while production has fallen and exportation has increased.[19]

But there is lamb in Chile, even in Santiago. And now it is often less expensive than beef. Butchers in Santiago’s public market La Vega have lamb, as do specialty store GourMeat, and Jumbo supermarkets (occasionally). Lider supermarkets seem to have it all the time, with the best selection in stores in working class neighborhoods, and I understand that Unimarc also has lamb. I buy my lamb at Lider, where it comes in packages of mixed cuts, usually frozen, currently at 3,500 CLP a Kg., $3.50 US a lb. It’s usually possible to select packages composed mainly of leg, shoulder or rib chops, but you have to do a bit of trimming. The legs are sawed through the bone and can easily be cut into leg steaks about ¾ ” thick, and the racks are cut through the back bone and can be cooked whole or cut into chops. Shoulder chops are also usually cut through the bone, but other pieces are simply “chunks,” good for the stew pot.

Lider’s lambs are small, as the photo of rib chops with a pork chop shows, but are tasty and appropriately tender; rib chops and leg steaks are good grilled while shoulders are a bit tougher and are better braised.

A lamb leg steak

Rib chops surrounding a pork chop

Assorted shoulder chops.

GourMeat has better or at least more expensive lamb, and lamb is also available from local growers. “Allegro” posted this comment to Chile Forum where a discussion of lamb was in progress:

I am a bit late to this discussion but I have to chime in because my husband and I have a sheep farm here. For one, if you do need lamb and have the capacity to store a whole one or can share it, you can buy lambs at almost any sheep farm in the central region. They won't advertise that they sell them but if you ask, they will sell them. In regards to the quality in the grocery stores, though... most, if not all, of the processed prime meat produced here gets exported. Our farm, for instance, sells to a particular prime meat broker (who does sell prime meats in Chile) and they export ours because we meet certain health standards required of the international market (my understanding is that most of the meat gets sent to Europe, not the US). None of our meat goes to market here in Chile. The meat that does go to market is that of the farms who do not meet the health standards (and I should add here that this doesn't meat it's *unsafe*, just not as desirable) or the farms in the south, which tend to produce less superior meat because they have lower grade grasses there because of the very short growing season. Ours and any of the lambs in the central region are entirely grass-fed and free-range and absolutely divine, in my opinion. It's better than anything I've had in the US. I've had lamb from other farms besides ours and they are just as good--no gamey flavor at all, lots of meat, absolutely incredible cooked over an open espino fire. If you do decide to venture out into the country a buy a lamb for yourself, keep in mind that Merinos have a milder flavor but Suffolk have more fat. I personally prefer Merino...

Lamb is also available at some restaurants. I have had good braised lamb shanks at La Copa Feliz and at Casa Bosque, rib chops at Las Vacas Gordas and the Chilean classic, lamb criadillas (AKA lamb fries or testicles) at La Petit France. Restaurants specializing in Patagonian food are sure to have lamb, and you may find it at parilladas, where the emphasis is on grilled meats.

Chilean Lamb recipes

There are lots, and the older cookbooks include many recipes for innards and less popular cuts, useful if you happen to have a whole lamb. Here are some of classic Creole/Mapuche lamb dishes.

Spit Roasted lamb / Cordero al Palo

1 lamb

1 branch of maqui (Chilean wineberry)

(or an iron bar of about 1 inch/ 3 Cm. in diameter)

10 Kg. charcoal

Salt

Cut the lamb into sections, season only with salt and skewer. The legs should be in the middle, the shoulders on either side, and the ribs on the sides. Roast with very little charcoal so that the lamb cooks slowly. It should roast for about three hours. Add additional charcoal during the last half hour for browning.

Lamb with peas / Arvejada de Cordero

2 lbs. leg of lamb, in cubes
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cups peas
2 carrots, in half rounds
4 potatoes
3 cloves of garlic
½ cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon of thyme
Salt and pepper

Fry the whole garlic cloves in oil until very brown and remove. Brown the lamb in the oil, then add the carrots and the onion. Fry until the onion is transparent then add a cup of water and boil slowly until the lamb is tender. Then add the potatoes and cook for an additional 15 minutes. Add the peas and cook until tender. Add additional water if necessary, and adjust the salt and pepper and add thyme if the lamb is “of advanced age.” (also see the Arvejada de Cordero in “Mapuche Food: Ethno Tourism/Ethno Gastronomy.” Here’s a photo.)

The next is a Mapuche dish that includes the luche, seaweed very similar to nori, (Japanese alga used for wrapping sushi) and locro, toasted wheat meal. If you aren’t in Chile use nori for the luche and make your own locro: toast wheat berries and grind them coarsely in a blender, spice grinder or sturdy mortar and pestle. For a more sophisticated version from Chilean Chef Miriam Andrea Yunge Rojas, see “Eating Chilean Seaweed: Cochayuyo and Luche”

Pot-au-fue of Luche and Lamb / Cazuela de luche y cordero[20]

Photo: Municipalidad De Puerto Natales

2 lbs potatoes
½ lb. zapallo (winter squash)

1 carrot

3 cloves garlic

1 cup locro (wheat kernels toasted and ground)

¼ loaf of luche (or nori, 5 – 10 sheets crumbled)

2 - 3 shallotsCilantro

1 lb. peas
1 lb. lamb shoulder or backbone

Salt, water and chili (fresh green chili or merken)

Sauté the garlic, shallots, carrots and chili, then add the meat. When slightly browned add water to cover and boil until nearly tender. Then add the peas, potatoes and squash. When these are almost done, add the locro and boil 2 or 3 minutes more. Then add the cilantro and the luche, remove from heat and serve.

And the cridallas? Your local Jumbo or specialty meat market should be able to supply them for this interesting Chilean recipe:

Fricassee of lamb fries / Fricasé de Criadillas de Cordero

6 large or 12 small lamb fries – criadillas

1 medium onion, chopped

2 two cups of fresh bread cubes

3 cups potatoes, peeled & cubed

½ cup carrots, cubed
1 cup peas

1 glass white wine

2 tablespoons of minced parsley

2 cups broth from the criadillas

3 eggs

2 hard boiled eggs, chopped

1/2 cup vegetable oil

3 tablespoons butter
salt and pepper

Photo: Oroyo

Boil 6 large or 12 small criadillas in salted water for 15 minutes and reserve the broth. Peel the criadillas and cut into small cubes, and sprinkle with pepper. Fry the cubes in the oil mixed with the butter until lightly browned, and reserve. In the same skillet, fry the onion and carrots in a tablespoon of butter. Add the reserved criadillas, the parsley and the peas, a cup of the broth and the white wine. Boil covered for 5 minutes, adjust the seasoning and keep warm. Fry the potatoes abundant oil and when slightly brown, add the bread cubes and continue frying until the bread is well browned. Drain on paper towels and reserve. Beat the eggs, and off the heat, add to the pan with the criadillas so that they form a creamy sauce with the liquid. To serve pour the criadillas and sauce into a large platter, surround with the potatoes and sprinkle the hard boiled eggs and bread cubes on top, taking care that the bread cubes don’t mix with the sauce and loose their crispness.

[1] Avilés, Hardy. 2002 Cordero todo el año. Campo Sureño, on line at http://www.australtemuco.cl/site/apg/campo/pags/20031213233217.html; and What Chileans Eat: The Chilean National Diet, Eating Chilean. Chilean lamb consumption is probably a bit higher than this, since much Chilean lamb is eaten locally and does not enter national statistics. See Riquelme Osses, below.

[2] There is no generic English term, equivalent to pork or beef, for the meat of sheep, Mutton is the meat of sheep over 2 years old, yearling lamb is meat of animals between 1 and two years old. But US usage refers to all sheep meat as lamb, so that’s what I do here unless mutton is referred to specifically.

[3] Spanish Cows and Beef. Iberia Nature: A guide to the natural history of Spain. On line at http://www.iberianature.com/material/cows.html

[4] Rodero A, Delgado JV, Rodero E 1992. Primitive Andalusian livestock and their implications in the discovery of America. Arch Zootec 41: 383–400; and Wikipedia Merino

[5] Riquelme Osses, Jose Carlos. 2005. Medición de características productivas de ovinos raza texel del sector de Pillanlelbún en la IX región. Tesis de grado presentada como parte de los requisitos para optar al grado de: Licenciado en Medicina Veterinaria. Temuco, Chile. On line at http://biblioteca.uct.cl/tesis/jose-riquelme/tesis.pdf

[6] Villalobos, R. Sergio, et. al. 1974 Historia de Chile, Tomo 2 Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile. p. 174 (Google Books)

[7] Pereira Salas, Eugenio. 1977. Apuntes para la historia de la cocina chilena. Santiago: Universitaria. p. 30 On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0006512

[8] Molina, Juan Ignacio. 1987. Ensayo sobre la historia natural de Chile : Bolonia 1810 Santiago : Eds. Maule. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0002868

[9] Miers, John. 1826. Travels in Chile and La Plata, Including Accounts Respecting the Geography, Geology, Statistics, Government, Finances, Agriculture, Manners and Customs, and the Mining Operations in Chile. Collected During a Residence of Several Years in these Countries. Vol. 2 London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy. p. 312 (Google Books)

[10] Gay, Claudio. 1862-1865. Agricultura, Tomo I. París: En casa del autor; Chile: Museo de Historia Natural de Santiago, p. 376, 451 & 462. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0002688 ; and Vicuna Mackenna, B. 1877. De Valparaiso a Santiago: datos, impresiones, noticias, episodios de viaje. Santiago: Imprenta de la librería de El Mecurio. P. 25 On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentos.asp?id_ut=elferrocarrildevalparaisoasantiago(1849-1863)

Gay explains that sheep average about 100 lbs live weight and dress out to about 65 lbs. of meat, and since there are corresponding figures for beeves slaughtered and their weights. Here (for the arithmetically inclined) are my calculations:

	1773	1842	1859	1876
Beeves	6,925	33,373	41,500	57,658
lbs. meat	2,770,000	13,349,200	16,600,000	23,063,200

Sheep	39,904	70,691	91,250	105,653
lbs. meat	2,593,760	4,594,915	5,931,250	6,867,445

Ratio beef/ lamb	1.1	2.9	2.8	3.4

Note that this data is for fresh meat and does not include beef jerky or lambs slaughtered informally.

[11] Treutler, Paul. Andanzas de un alemán en Chile, 1851-1863. Santiago: Editorial del Pacifico.

[12] Smith, Edmund Reuel. 1855. The Araucanians; or, Notes of a Tour among the Indian tribes of Southern Chile. New York: Harper & brothers. p. 269 On line at http://books.google.cl

[13] Beranger, Carlos de. 1893 Relación jeográfica de la provincia de Chiloé. Santiago de Chile : Impr. Cervantes. p. 41 On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0014220

[14] Correa Vergara, Luis. 1938. Agricultura Chilena, tomo II. Santiago: Imprenta Nascimenta. P.197

[15] Eyzaguirre Rouse, Guillermo. 1903. Monografía de una familia obrera de Santiago. Santiago, Chile : Imprenta Barcelona. On line athttp://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0001500

[16]Anonymous. 1882. Nuevo manual de cocina: conteniendo 377 recetas de guisos escojidos de las cocinas francesas, española, chilena, inglesa e italiana: arregladas para el uso de las familias del país. Valparaíso: Libr. del Mercurio de Orestes L. Tornero. p. 50. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0003181.

[17] Fundación para la innovación agraria. 2003. Calidad en producción de carne de ovina. Boletín de Ovinos. Ministerio de Agricultura. On line at http://www.fia.gob.cl/difus/boletin/bovinos/bovabril2003.pdf

[18] Almonacid Zapata, Fabián. La agricultura Chilena discriminada (1910-1960): una mirad de las políticas estatales y el desarrollo sectorial desde el Sur. Madrid:

S.A. de Fotocomposición. p.347 On line at http://books.google.com

[19] Producción y consumo de carne, 2010. Enfoque estadístico. Abril 2011. On line at http://www.ine.cl/filenews/files/2011/abril/pdf/enfoque_carnes_web.pdf and production and export chart is from www.odepa.gob.cl

[20] Recipe adapted from Alcafuz, Antonio. 2003 Kumiyal. Comida mapuche huilliche. Programa Nacional de Salud para Pueblos Indígenenas, Servico de Salud de Osorno. Osorno, Imprentas America, as quoted in Montecino Aguirre, Sonia. 2006. Identidades, mestizajes y diferencias sociales en Osorno, Chile. Lecturas desde la Antropología de la Alimentación”. Tesis Doctoral,

Plateada – Chilean pot roast

2011-05-11T10:17:00.005-04:00

With the changing seasons—Santiago does have seasons, you know--my wife puts away my shorts and tee-shirts and brings out the corduroy jeans, long sleeved shirts and sweaters. And wants winter food; this time it was plateada a la caserola with puré de porotos, Chilean pot roast with bean puree.

Roberto Marín’s plateada - La Cocina de Lolo’s version

Plateada is among the 10 most popular home cooked dishes in Chile [1] and appears of the menu of every restaurant serving traditional Chilean Creole cuisine. It is usually served as pictured, sliced with a little “of its own juice.”

Plateada, literally “silver plated,” is a cut of beef, uncommon in English speaking countries where it is called “rib cap.” It is a flat muscle (the Spinalis dorsi if you really want to know) that is above the rib eye. The “silver” refers to the silvery skin on the rib side of the cut; on the other side is a thick layer of fat.

The rib cap is labeled “2” and shown in cross section in the rib-eye steak photo below. Of course most Chilean meat cuts are boneless following the lines of the muscles instead of being cut across the grain, so it comes as a flat, irregularly shaped piece of meat weighing a kg. or so.

Photos: plateada or rib cap in cross section ….and whole, trimmed square.

Cooking plateada a la cacerola

“A tremendous national dish of great substance and marked meaty taste,” says Chef Roberto Marín Vivado in Chileans Cooking Chilean Style, plateada a la cacerola is “very tender and flavorful when prepared according to the rules. It’s offered in all corners of the country with the announcement "Here's the best dish of Chile," ……which in vast majority of the time is a fallacy”. He continues:

The errors that they always make in preparing plateada are:

1. Removing all the covering of fat, leaving it thin and naked;

2. Not marinating it long enough;

3. Not browning it well enough;

4. Not browning the onion and carrot with witch it is cooked;

5. Adding water which gives the plateada the appearance, consistency and flavor of boiled meat and makes it watery besides.

His instructions are to get a “big thick and fat” plateada and if necessary remove some of the fat yourself, “don’t let the butcher do it.” Rub it with four cloves of pureed garlic, salt and abundant freshly ground pepper—“at least two of three teaspoons.” Put it in a sealable plastic bag with three tablespoons each of olive oil and red wine vinegar, expel the air, and put it in the vegetable section of the refrigerator for one or two days.

Heat three tablespoons of oil until almost smoking in a shallow wide pot with a lid. Remove the meat from the bag, drain thoroughly, reserving the marinade, and put in the hot oil, fat side down. Brown over high heat to a deep brown color, “I insist, an intense brown color.” If the meat is too big for the pan, cut it and brown in two batches, then remove.

In the abundant fat in the pan, brown four big onions, cut into eighths, and two big carrots cut into thick rounds until they are a nice golden color. Add the meat, any meat juices that have collected, and the remaining marinade. Cover the pan tightly and simmer for an hour, turning the meat from time to time. “Remember, don’t add water!”

Transfer the contents of the pan to a pressure cooker and cook for 30 minutes. Then check for tenderness and if necessary, cook longer. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, continue to simmer in the original coverer pan for another two hours. In this case, add a little water if necessary to replace the liquid lost in cooking—but in small quantities “to avoid producing boiled meat.”

When the meat is tender, remove from the pan and cut into ¾ inch thick slices across the grain of the meat. Return the slices to the pan and simmer again until you take it to the table in a deep serving plate with all its juices.

My plateada a la cacerola with spicy bean purée

In winter serve with the traditional Chilean stewed beans, or spicy bean purée; the rest of the year with rice and mashed potatoes and in summer, with porotos granados (shell beans) or salads.

*********

For once I followed the recipe religiously (more or less---I sieved the juices and left the sad brown veggies behind) and the photo above is what I got. No pressure cooker, but I didn’t have to add water since the vegetables created plenty of liquid and my pan has a tightly sealing lid. The meat was tender but not falling apart with a very meaty flavor and the juices were rich and slightly sweet from the onions and carrots. And in classic Chilean style, there was just enough ‘juice’ to moisten the meat… abundant gravy is not Chilean and does not go over the mashed potatoes.

Or in this case, over the puré picante de porotos, the spicy bean puree, which in Chile is made from “peeled beans.” They need only 30 to 40 minutes cooking (the package says 20) before being pureed with an emersion blender or food mill. To season the puré, sauté abundant minced bacon with merkén (Chilean ground smoked chili) and paprika for heat and color. When rendered, add minced onion to brown in the fat, and then garlic. Mix with the bean puré and, to make it muy chileno, add Chilean aliño completo to taste. It’s Chile’s own masala (complete seasoning) composed of cumin, paprika, oregano, garlic, chili, and pepper).

It’s a good pot roast, and of course can be made with other braising cuts: chuck/sobrecostilla, brisket/tapapecho, eye of round/pollo ganso, etc.

*********

But why is Chile’s favorite pot roast the plateada, a cut most of us have never heard of?

Prior to the 20^th century (and during a good portion of it) most Chilean beef came from free ranging Criollo cattle, descendants of stock brought by the Spanish in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Four hundred years of natural selection to life in the Chilean central valley produced a strong, vigorous and tough (in all senses of the word) breed of cattle. The 1882 New Kitchen Manual recommends this:

Method for tenderizing meat before preparing it – Before putting on to roast or stew, beat or pound very forcefully for a minute with a wooden rolling pin; this simple operation is the secret for tender and delicate meat. [2]

And although I found no discussion of plateada in any historic Chilean cookbook explaining its popularity, I think it's because it turns out to be among the tenderest cuts of beef, ranking 3^rd in tenderness after the tenderloin and the flat iron steak.[3] In the USA it appears occasionally as “rib cap steak” or rolled, as:

Midwestern Rib Cap

“Buckle your seat belts Ladies and Gents; this one is going to knock your socks off. A little known cut that will amaze you in taste and texture. The flavor is so intense that almost any description will fall short. A very rich cut so 8 ozs would be a safe serving size. This is a very unique piece of meat, and equally difficult to find, so remember where you saw it.” Bryans Fine Foods

And here’s a report on rib cap steak from Chowhond, a North American food site:

"Okay, then -- you wanna know how it tasted. Let me tell you, folks, it did not disappoint. It was every bit as tender as a filet mignon, but with all the beefy flavor a filet never has. Ridiculously juicy, magnificently meaty. The best of all possible words."

Hummm…. Maybe I’ll grill the next one.

[1] Terra, Blog Gouyr.net. El Terremoto se quedó con el premio Bicentenario. 2010-03-26. On line athttp://www.terra.cl/gournet/index.cfm?

[2] Anonymous. 1882. Nuevo manual de cocina: conteniendo 377 recetas de guisos escojidos de las cocinas francesas, española, chilena, inglesa e italiana: arregladas para el uso de las familias del país. p. 40. Valparaíso : Libr. del Mercurio de Orestes L. Tornero On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0003181

[3] Calkins, Chris R. and Gary Sullivan. n.d. Ranking of Beef Muscles for Tenderness. Calkins, Chris R. and Gary Sullivan.. BEEF FACTS Product Enhancement. On line at http://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Ranking%20of%20Beef%20Muscles%20for%20Tenderness.pdf

Vegetarian Chile

2011-04-30T13:59:00.005-03:00

If you arrived here in search of that North American favorite, vegetarian chili, you have misgoogled; this is about vegetarian food in Chile. But it might be worth reading further;

Chile

has an extensive repertory of meatless dishes that fed the upper classes on meatless Fridays and the poor all year round.

The food of the country people is very simple…. most of the time eating vegetables and above all potatoes, beans, peas, wheat and corn boiled like rice or as toasted flour, and on rare cases meat, preferring to sell the animals they raise and never lack. When it is the hacienda owner who feeds them, they seem to still be in the middle ages for the great uniformity of their food, because it is made up of only a single plate of beans in the north and peas in the south, simply cooked in water or seasoned with a little fat or pork cracklings. This is the diet of all year round, which they prefer and request, feeling that it makes them strong and long suffering for their work, which the results seem to confirm.[1]

Whether the Chilean peasantry’s diet was largely meatless by choice, as Claudio Gay’s 1860s work suggests, or through poverty, as is more likely (note that food for festivals and weddings was not meatless) they developed a large variety of meatless dishes, some now classics of

Chile

’s Creole cuisine.

The food of the indigenous Mapuche, which blended with colonial Spanish cooking to produce Creole cuisine, was based on maize, potatoes, common and lima beans, squash, and quinoa, along with the meat of domesticated llamas and wild game, fish and shellfish. Some of today’s popular meatless dishes are direct descendants of Mapuche foods:

Humitas, Chilean tamales (and incidentally the subject of the first post in “Eating Chilean”) continue to be among the 10 most popular Chilean home cooked foods.[2] The original Mapuche humitas were made solely of maize (corn) picked while still in the milky stage, but today’s humitas also include lard, onion and basil, though a vegetarian or vegan version is a simple modification of the recipe in the link above.

Porotos Granados, shell beans cooked with corn and squash, are also among Chileans’ top ten home cooked meals. Cranberry beans are boiled with a bit of onion. When within 30 minutes or so of being done, winter squash (zapallo) is added, and when it has cooked soft, corn cut from the cob is added and cooked for an additional 10 minutes until the stew is thick. For a more detailed and illustrated recipe, take a look at this one by Chilean Gringa blogger Eileen Smith. And for a winter version using dry beans and spagetti, there is Porotos con riendas (beans with reins).

Tomatican, another Chilean Creole dish with indigenous origins, is a stew of tomatoes, corn, and onions, which may include meat, lima beans or cochayuyo, eatable kelp. Vegetarian versions are common and have entered the international repertory of meatless dishes. Here is a recipe from Mooswood Restaurant Cooks at Home. The version with cochauyo seems not to be available elsewhere in English, so here’s one adapted from Recetas de Cocina.

Bundled... and packaged cochayuyo

Incidentally cochayuyo is an excelent addition to meatless cooking of all kinds. types. In

Chile

it replaces meat in dishes ranging from stews and soups to pastas to empanadas. There are several more recipies in English at Seaweed: Cochayuyo and Luche. It is occasionally available by mail in the US at Amigo Foods or Tu Chile Aquí and in Europe at Cresta Ecologia.

Vegetarianism as a movement, which began in

England

in 1847[3], seems to have arrived in

Chile

in the late 19^th century, along with many other European influences. Der Vegetarier for June 15, 1891: “Herr Rudolf Franck describes the progress of Vegetarianism in Chili. Though the Valparaiso Society numbers only 12 members, it possesses a library and reading room, but, as yet, no restaurant. The chief reason for this want is the difficulty in finding a manager.” Three years later “the Valparaiso Vegetarian Society, which was founded in 1889, now counts 25 members, mostly Germans...” [4]

By the 1930s, there were evidently enough Chilean vegetarians to support publication of a cook book, the 1931 Manual of Chilean Vegetarian Cuisine, [5] which, along with many French, Spanish and Italian recipes (pastas, tortillas, vegetable pies and puddings) includes a variety of clearly Chilean dishes: pancurtas (dumplings or noodles for soup), maize chupe (chupes are milk based stews), humitas, stewed hominy, cochayuyo “meatballs,” cochayuyo pudding, fried cochayuyo, stuffed cochayuyo, etc.

Her recipe for Stewed Hominy (mote de maiz guisado) is as follows:

First pass the maize kernels through clear lye, and when the husks are loose, remove them and boil until cooked, then grind in the machine [food mill], fry in vegetable shortening with a little minced onion and parsley and lighten with milk. To serve, top with two egg yokes, grated cheese and cream, and surround with fried potatoes.

Among those Chilean vegetarians of the 1930s the most famous today is Manuel Lezaeta Acharán, author of La Medicina Natural al Alcance de Todos [6] (Natural Medicine in Reach of Everyone), which by 1989 had been published in 148 editions around the world and was the most-read book of natural medicine in Latin America.

Born in 1881, he entered the University of Chile medical school in 1899, but was forced to drop out because of syphilis and gonorrhea, then incurable. After unsuccessful treatment by numerous conventional physicians, he met German priest and practitioner of hydrotherapy and diet therapy Tadeo de Wiesent, who returned him to health in a few months. Thereafter, completely disillusioned with conventional medicine, he devoted his life to study and practice of natural medicine. He became an attorney and Professor of Spanish and History at the Santiago Institute of Humanities, and traveled through out the Americas promoting his Thermal Doctrine of the Science of Health. [7]

His ten rules for health are:

Breathe pure air. Eat exclusively natural products. Be sober constantly. Only drink plain water. Be very clean in every way. Dominate the passions, seeking greater chastity. Never be idle. Rest and sleep only as necessary. Dress simply and with ease, and Cultivate all the virtues, trying to always be happy.

Lezaeta Acharán’s dietary philosophy is based on what he considers to be natural law:

The natural order establishes that the mineral kingdom sustains the vegetal and the vegetal sustains he animal, from which results that ingestion of mineral substances, as are almost all pharmaceutical products, is to introduce extraneous materials into the organism that should not be assimilated and thus need to be eliminated. (p. 7)

Knowledgeable persons… have demonstrated without a doubt, that man is fructivorous that is, that his organism is constituted to feed itself on fruits. Darwin, Lamark, Haecke, etc. have confirmed that the physiological analog of the man is the fructivorous ape. (p. 8)

The meat of animals has not been destined to feed man and, more than food, it is a stimulant owing to the toxins that it possesses, among which are creatine, creatinine, cadaverin, etc., which injected into a rabbit in small quantities cause its sudden death. (p. 8)

Many think that a fruit diet is insufficient because shortly after having eaten they feel the need to eat again. On the other hand a plate of meat or beans or “satisfies” the person for several hours. This is explained because fruits and seeds are digested and assimilated easily without leaving unhealthy residues. In contrast a piece of meat or a plate of beans require an extended effort that makes the individual feel full for the four hours or more required for digestion, or better said, for “indigestion.” (p. 98)

The diet he recommends is based on fruits, seeds, leaves and roots, and includes limited amounts of whole grain bread, soft cheeses, hard cooked eggs, honey, milk, olives and even wine, but meats, fish and legumes (beans, lentils, etc.) are to be avoided:

Breakfast: Only raw fruits in season or dry if fresh are not available. Lacking this, a plate of raw oatmeal soaked in water for 20 minutes or more, and sweetened with honey or raisins, figs or bananas.

Dinner at mid day: Freely if hungry, preferring salads with olives or chopped hard cooked egg, vegetables in season with nuts, omelets of vegetables mixed with egg, fresh cheese [quesillo] or raw sugar; a little bread is possible if it is whole grain or toasted. Avoid lunch meats, fried foods, and condiments such as pepper or mustard.

Supper: If hungry one may eat as in mid day, but in smaller quantities. Generally a salad or a bit of raw fruit will be sufficient. Eat slowly and deliberately to generate abundant saliva. Avoid sweets, conserves, milk, aged cheese, soft cooked eggs, and meat broths. Don’t smoke. (p. 181)

Lezaeta Acharán’s teachings continue to be followed in Latin America and Santiago’s Villa de Vida Natural [8] includes a spa, hotel and restaurant with reasonable prices for meals and stays of one to 10 days. Other Villas exist in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and perhaps elsewhere.

In spite of Lezaeta Acharán’s fame, vegetarians remain a distinct minority in Chile, where annual per capita meat consumption is now over 81 kg. (just under ½ lb. per day), but meatless meals continue to be a regular part of many households’ diets. Recipes in the most recent (April, 2011) edition of

Chile

’s major food magazine, Paula Cocina are almost all meatless (presumably for Lent), and my wife’s family has always had occasional meatless dinners; usually once a week or more.

Our most popular meatless dishes are tortillas, Spanish style omelets, and vegetable tarts or pies; both of which I learned from my wife.

Tortilla Española

Tortillas are literally “little cakes” a term the Spanish applied to the Mexican maize bread, the Aztecs called taxcal, and to little breads or cakes most everywhere. But this tortilla is a mixture of eggs and vegetables (sometimes meats are added) eaten as a main course or cut into small pieces as appetizers or tapas. Serve hot or at room temperature.

The classic Spanish tortilla contains potatoes and onions, but an infinity of tortilla varieties are popular in Spain and in here in

Chile

as well.

The basic procedure is to precook the vegetables, season with salt and pepper, mix with beaten eggs and allow to soak for a few minutes. The mixture is then poured into a hot, well-oiled skilled and cooked slowly until about ¾ set. The tortilla is then turned over (here’s how) and cooked a few minutes more, until the center is set but still moist.

Tortilla de porotos verdes (green beans)

The classic Spanish tortilla of potatoes and onions calls for the vegetables to be simmered in olive oil until cooked, but not brown, then drained and added to the eggs. For a slightly less caloric version parboil the thinly sliced potatoes for a few minutes instead of frying. Green beans, another family favorite, are also best parboiled, as are broccoli, cauliflower, etc., but spinach, zucchini, chard, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes, eggplant, etc. are best sautéed in olive oil along with a few sliced onions. Very wet vegetables like spinach, chard, tomatoes and zucchini should be drained or squeezed to remove most of their liquids. A tablespoon or two of flour added to the eggs is also a good idea with many fillings to prevent watery tortillas. And while not traditional, cheese also makes a good addition.

Some of our favorites are spinach and onion, French cut green beans with mushrooms, sliced zucchini with red bell peppers, potatoes with bell peppers, caramelized onions, and so on. And of course a tortilla is a great way to use leftovers. Do you have leftover rice, Brussels sprouts and winter squash? Make a tortilla.

Another favorite is a vegetable pie, a pastel de verduras, like my wife’s green bean, onion and mushroom tart below.

The procedure is to make a pie crust, then parboil the beans and sauté the mushrooms and onions. Mix with blanched green beans and moisten with cream (½ cup or so), fill the crust and top with a lattice of pie dough. Bake in a moderate oven until the crust is brown. Spinach or chard also makes a good filling.

Vegetarian restaurants and products

Santiago is not Portland (said be the

’s most veggie friendly city), but there are a few vegetarian restaurants; tofu, quinoa, textured soy protein, and a wide variety of grains and legumes are available if you know were to look; and there are fresh fruits and vegetables in great variety and low cost in ferias, “farmer’s markets." On the other hand, non-vegetarian restaurants (except Chinese restaurants) seldom have main dishes without meat or seafood, and most shortening and margarines contain fish or animal fats, so breads and pastries are suspect.

Links:

“The Vegetarian Endeavor in Santiago” in Revolver Magazine has restaurant reviews.

Reinaldo’s blog: Tiendas de comidas vegetarianas (Stores with vegetarian foods)

Cocina del mercado A blog on vegetarian cooking and recipes by the chef/owner of one of Santiago’s best known Vegetarian restaurants—in Spanish.

Chile Forum: Food in Chile. An English language forum with a search function where you can search for (and find!) where to buy tofu, soy milk, etc.

[1] Gay, Claudio. 1862-1865. Agricultura, Tomo 2. París: En casa del autor; Chile: Museo de Historia Natural de Santiago, p. 161. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0002688

[2] Terra, Blog Gouyr.net. El Terremoto se quedó con el premio Bicentenario. 2010-03-26. On line at http://www.terra.cl/gournet/index.cfm?pagina=blog_comentario&idpost=16733&idblog=16&titulo_url=El_Terremoto_se_quedo_con_el_premio_Bicentenario

[3] The Modern Vegetarian Movement. How Vegetarians Work. On line at http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/vegetarian2.htm

[4] History of Chile Vegetarian Societies, international Vegetarian Union on line at http://www.ivu.org/history/societies/chile.html

[5] Vergara Díaz, Lucía. 1 931. Manual de cocina vegetariana chilena. Santiago: Impr. Gutenberg, selected chapters on line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/dest.asp?id=manualdecocinavegetarianachilena

[6] Lezaeta Acharan, Manuel. 1997. Medicina natural al alcance de todos, 2nd Edition. Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Pax. On line at Google books

[7] Manuel Lezaeta Acharán. Wikipedia Español. On line at http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Lezaeta_Achar%C3%A1n

[8] Villa De Vida Natural “Manuel Lezaeta Acharan”, Tomas Moro 261, Las Condes. Telefonos 716 3250

Eating Caribbean - Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

2011-03-24T18:44:00.007-03:00

If you read this blog regularly you know that I occasionally drift off subject to report on vacation food. This time it’s for the cuisine of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, where we spent a week this March.

Cartagena de Indias, so named to avoid confusion with its Spanish namesake, is on the Caribbean coast of Colombia where its tropical climate, Afro-Latino population and cuisine are similar to those of other Caribbean societies—but with some distinct local touches.

Where to begin? With the characteristic dish of Cartagena, of course: fried fish, coconut rice, patacones and salad. Every Cartagena Creole restaurant serves it, sometimes under the name Plato Costeño (Coastal Plate) or Bandeja Tipica Caribeña (Typical Caribbean Tray), and at lunch time throughout the old city street vendors are eating the same dish out of Styrofoam boxes.

Pargo (red snapper) with Creole sauce, coconut rice and patacone

Trentis Restaurante, Calle Sargento Mayor

The fish, usually plate size or smaller, is slashed on each side, then deep fried with no breading or batter. Preferred fish are pargo (red snapper), robalo (snook) and mojarra, but any small white-flesh fish or filet of a larger fish seems acceptable. We even had one (forgettable) Bandeja Tipica on a tour where the fish was frozen merluza, hake.

Mojarra frita, D’Alex Restaurante,

Plaza Fernando de Madrid

And its a great spot for an evening beer.

Coconut rice, arroz con coco, is rice cooked in coconut milk; not the liquid from inside green coconuts, but the “milk” made by adding hot water to grated coconut meat and squeezing out the creamy liquid. Canned unsweetened coconut milk can also be used.

Recipes from The Cuisine of Cartagena de Indias[1]

And patacones? Fried rounds of green plantains, called tostones in other parts of the Caribbean.

Shrimp, locally called langostinos or camarones, are also a favorite menu item. At left are fried langostinos over a mound of mashed plantain (similar to Puerto Rican mofongo) with a sauce of sweet corzo, a palm fruit. Left

Langostinos from Cafe Krioyo

Sweet sauces are also prominent in Cartagena’s meat cuisine. Posta Negra Cartagenera (Cartagena pot roast) is a classic: rump roast braised in a dark sweet sauce which may (or may not) include tomatoes, red wine, Seville orange juice, red soda pop and/or soy sauce. A Google search finds a dozen or so recipes, all in colloquial Colombian Spanish… and all different. I’ve translated a simple one below from Colombia en la mesa. (Note that tropical beef needs the moist intense heat of a pressure cooker, but you can also braise it for 3 ½ hours or so, or use a slow cooker.)

Posta Negra Cartagenera, Café Krioyo

Pork is also served with sweet fruit based sauces. One evening I had pork ribs braised in beer and tamarind sauce, the headline dish on the menu of La Cocina de Carmela, a neighborhood one-waitress-one-cook, chalkboard-menu restaurant with an interesting blend of Caribbean and international dishes. It’s not self service, in spite of the sign, and the food makes up for the décor.

La Cocina de Carmela, Calle de Badillo

And, of course, Cartegana fruit is always available from street vendors, with tomatoes, peppers, pineapples, mangos, papayas, plums, passion fruit and even marañón or cashew apple, the yellow fruit at left with the cashew on the end.

But for the real Cartagena fruit experience, have a fruit salad from one of the handsome Palenqueras, among the most photographed women in the world.

Doña Angeilna

For more about Cartagena, see my travel blog.

[1] Román de Zurek, Teresita and Estella Arango de Morales Angel De M. 2001 The Cuisine of Cartagena de Indias: Legacy of the Spanish Cooking in Colombia. p.100 & 130. Ediciones Gama, S.A. on line at http://books.google.com