Isn’t it strange that in Spanish a sentence that ends with an exclamation point starts with an upside-down exclamation point? The same is true for the question mark. ¿Did any of you know that already?
Peru was a pretty incredible experience. Yes, I’m home now, but not for long! And I made you a promise that I’d talk a little about the food. Who knows where potatoes are originally from? Any ideas? Many of us read about the potato blight in Ireland in the 1800’s and about “french fries”, but potatoes are actually from South America. The Spanish arrived in Peru in the 1520’s and found this strange thing growing high up in the Andes mountains that looked like nothing they’d ever seen. In fact, French explorers called it a “pomme de terre”—that means ground apple—and still do today. Anyway, you might guess that the feature vegetable in a lot of our traditional meals was the potato. Perhaps my favorite food that I ate in all my time in Peru was called puka picante. The name is actually a mix of two languages: “puka” is a quechua (what the Incas speak) word that means red; and “picante” means spicy in Spanish. The dish is made of a red spicy sauce served over potatoes and seared pork. ¡Delicioso! If you’re eating at a restaurant, puka picante, like all meals, is served with a ruby red juice that looks and tastes kinda like Kool-Aid with a little bit of cinnamon in it, called chicha morada. It’s actually made with the juice of boiled corn; later they add cinnamon and sugar to sweeten it up a bit. Corn is really popular down here, and it’s eaten in many different ways. The corn kernels are huge, a lot bigger than the stuff we drive by every day in Indiana.
Were there any words in the last paragraph you didn’t understand? How about Inca? See if you can do a little research with your teacher on the Inca people, and we’ll talk a little about it in the next entry. It’s an exciting one, I promise.
OK, back to food. Let’s talk about some of the other traditional foods in Peru. One food used in a lot of different ways is called quinua. It’s actually a cereal, but not in the way like you guys know. Usually we ate it on a cold morning, like a porridge. I know, the word “porridge” sounds disgusting, but it was actually pretty tasty—warms you right up. A cereal is a grain, just like rice. And although rice isn’t originally from South America, it sure is used a lot with food. Most of the time we would eat some type of meat, usually chicken, with a vegetable sauce, all served over white rice. Some other meats that were used were “trucha” (trout), “cerdo” (pork), “pavo” (turkey), and “alpaca” (alpaca).
…wait a minute…¿alpaca? Yeah, there’s no English translation for alpaca. In English, “alpaca” is alpaca. Know why there’s no translation? Take a guess, then scroll down, past the picture.
There’s no English word for alpaca because it’s not an animal from Europe that people had known about for a long time. So since it was this new animal that the local people were already calling alpaca we, just decided to start using their word for it. As you already know by now, we don’t have many alpaca in
America, so let me explain a little about them. They’re actually a lot like sheep here in the U.S. Clothes were very important to the Inca, so they used a lot of wool. And because they didn’t have sheep in Peru, they used alpaca wool to make beautiful textiles. Psst, “textiles” is just a fancy word for cloth. We adults sometimes say fancy words to sound civilized. Psst, “civilized” is just a fancy word for fancy. Anyway, because Peruvians didn’t know about chickens or pigs until the Spanish arrived, they often used alpaca for their steak meat as well as wool. Here's a photo of a man dressed in traditional Inca clothing weaving a textile from wool yarn.
Oh jeez, now I’ve done it…all this food talk has got me eyeing the fridge in the other room. I’ll sign off here and let you guys get back to the books. But don’t forget your homework! Next time we’re going to talk a little more about the Inca.
Hasta entonces, Kevin
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