Living in Peru : your everyday companion

(By Patricia Unterman, San Francisco Examiner -link-)

Practically every first-time visitor to Peru makes the pilgrimage to Machu Picchu, the haunting, architecturally sophisticated ruins of a royal Incan retreat on a mountain top.

What a food-focused traveler like me learns along the way is that the success of this pre-Columbian civilization was based on a brilliant and inventive system of subsistence agriculture.

Ancient Incan stone terraces still crawl up the steep sides of the Urubamba Valley below Machu Picchu, planted, as always, with corn, potatoes, beans and indigenous grains like quinoa. Meter by meter, the microclimates of the terraces change with the angle of the sun, altitude and season. The Incans knew which of thousands of cultivated varieties thrived in each microzone.

Peru has three distinct geographic areas running north to south down the length of the country: a long coastal desert in the west rising to rainy, snow-topped mountains in the center and descending to the jungles of the Amazon basin in the east.

The country possesses extraordinary biodiversity, and its cuisine showcases this bounty of ingredients in exciting dishes inspired by Spanish, native Indian, African, Chinese and Japanese kitchens. For a food traveler, Peru is paradise.

The feast begins in Lima, the sprawling, Los Angeles-like capital of 8 million people on the coast. No underground public transport, lots of traffic, no city planning — but fantastic eating.

A visit to the immaculate Surquillo market will show you the main players on Lima’s menus — fabulous local shrimp, octopus, tiny scallops and fish; beef hearts and intestines; jungle fruits; colorful fat-kerneled native corn; a rainbow of potatoes; the Key lime-like limon; fresh herbs; lemongrass; and chiles — specifically bright yellow ones and apple-shaped chiles called rocoto.

Then head to a popular anticucheria such as Pepe’s for a skewer of the most popular Peruvian bite, beef heart, cut into chunks, rubbed in spices, grilled over a wood fire and served with a stout ear of corn. The cost: $2.

The iconic dish of Lima is ceviche, raw fish and seafood marinated in “tiger milk,” a mixture of Peru’s distinctive lime-like lemons, salt and chiles. The Pacific current off Lima’s coast is cold and the pristine corvina and sole caught there have firm, sweet flesh.

New evidence found by biologists shows that people living in the spicier regions of the world were eating chili peppers as early as 4000 BCE. What's more, they were using them in very much the same ways and the same regions as they are today.

Some regions of South America today have a largely maize-based diet often spiced with chili peppers. New research shows similar food was being eaten 6000 years ago.

Researchers, including a paleoethnobotanist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, recently found fossil evidence in seven archaeological sites ranging from the Bahamas to present-day Peru that showed people were eating domesticated chili peppers as long as 6,000 years ago. This makes chili peppers one of the oldest domesticated food sources in the Americas. The study will be published in the Feb. 15 edition of the journal Science.

by C.J. Schexnayder, klephblog (www.kleph.com)

Gaston Acurio is the leading light of Peruvian cuisine. The 38-year-old is a bona fide celebrity in Peru where his cooking show is a hit and his cookbooks are in high demand. But his reputation is cemented by the continuing popularity of his ever-expanding number of restaurants in Lima – particularly his flagship Astrid y Gaston in Miraflores.

His reputation beyond Perus borders is growing as well. He was named Latin American Entrepreneur of 2005 by American Economia magazine was a guest speaker at Gastronomia Madrid Fusion conference in Spain this year.