Peruvian cook traveled for five years Latin America to collect 600 recipes; was in Ecuador

Five years has it taken Peruvian chef Virgilio Martínez in touring Latin America for collect 600 recipes that show the liveliness of your street kitchen, a pantry that also supplies the rest of the world and, above all, a gastronomy that “looks at nature” and its “ancestral roots”.

It extended to the entire region Mater Initiative, its research center for Andean ingredients, to create a detailed photograph of Latin American gastronomy from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, an “immense, diverse and complex” territory of glaciers, wetlands, forests, deserts, savannas, and reefs coral that “gather half of the world’s biodiversity.”

Convinced that “Food talks”, in this case of a hodgepodge of indigenous cultures, Spanish, African, Indian, Chinese and Japanese, it has given him a voice in the voluminous Latin America. Gastronomy that the Phaidon publishing house will publish in Spanish and English in December.

“Latin American cuisine is still not well represented outside its borders, its diversity was not yet understood and the most entertaining and commercial part has come out, but sometimes too superficial. It is good for you, but it can be done better by showing the origin of food, ancestral knowledge, ”says Martínez in an interview with Eph.

He took advantage of the fact that in Central -a regular in the lists of the best restaurants in the world-, Kjolle, Mil y Mayo (places that he has started with his wife, Pía León, named Best Cook in the World 2021) work people of 17 nationalities for get in touch with producers, cooks, journalists and prescribers from 22 countries and carry out a project that does not contemplate the region as a whole “because it is not.”

This work reflects the importance of street food -Her face lights up when he talks about the anticuchos and offal on skewers in Bolivia- and that “Wherever you are, you are eating Latin America every day even if you are not aware.”

Not only tomato, potatoes, corn, peppers or cocoa – imagine the world without chocolate! He exclaims – but more recent ones for the rest of the planet such as quinoa, amaranth or maca and some of the so-called super foods for their properties nutritious, “now so fashionable because people want to eat healthy since it is true that you are what you eat.”

If the Spanish introduced wheat, rice and barley to the region at the cost of burning indigenous quinoa and amaranth fields, remember, today the rest of the world has adopted, planted and incorporated them into their cookbooks. For this reason, in front of the defenders of kilometer 0 products, he argues that “things travel, you don’t have to be so inquisitive.”

Another of his motivations, both in his restaurants and in this book, is “To value the work of our producers” and opening new markets to that “vast pantry” through recipes that encourage creativity to get down to business. “If you can’t find an ingredient, look for another. The watchword is to use the seasonal ones available ”, he points out.

AND dare to bake some knees of Christ from Cuenca (Ecuador), a type of bread with cheese dyed with achiote to simulate blood; a cake drowned in hot sauce from Jalisco (Mexico), some potatoes a la huancaína from Peru, a Causa from Lima, a Brazilian moqueca or an ajiaco from Colombia.

The importance of corn -only in Mexico there are 59 autochthonous varieties- is reflected both in drinks such as chicha (a kind of low-alcohol beer typical of the Andes) and in the Argentine humitas, the choreadas of Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela, the corn cake from Chile, the Mexican tamales, the arepas whose authorship is disputed by Colombia and Venezuela or the pupusas from El Salvador.

Talking about gastronomy in Latin America means listing its multiple varieties of chili peppers, fresh and dried, protagonists of sauces that combine “sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami” and are not always spicy. Mendoza (Argentina) or discover dishes with disturbing names such as the stuffed boy from Colombia or the wrapped children from the Southern Cone.

Also about how the arrival of pigs, cows, goats and chickens transformed indigenous cuisines, although the consumption of native meats such as guinea pig and insects such as culona ants from Colombia or chinicuiles from Mexico continues.

The sugar cane plantations worked mostly by African slaves to satisfy the demand of the Old Continent, the influence of conventual pastries or drinks such as mate, tequical, mezcal, pisco or rum also serve to review history gastronomic cuisine from continents that fused their flavors forever.

“Latin America has incredible power, a lot of diversity and a lot to contribute,” Martínez defends. (I)