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Food / Feature Articles

It is pleasant to know that foreign personalities attending to EU-LAC Summit, included in their busy work agenda, a generous space to taste the variety of dishes that the Peruvian gastronomy offers.

It is pleasant, besides, knowing that the food is our great gesture of hospitality and a national pride.
Isabel Alvarez Calderón, a flavor expert, as well as anthropology, said that the best Peruvian dish is the shrimp chowder. “It has been applauded, value by its flavor” she said from a corner of her prize restaurant, "El Señorío de Sulco" where the smells describe the ingredients and frame stories.

Isabel is researcher of the Peruvian cuisine and social communicator, and without doubt she is one of the more authorized voices to refer to our culinary.
She has written books and essays such as Huellas y sabores del Perú, in which shows the cuisine as a philosophy and a form to understand the live. She said, between the lines, that few cuisines as the Peruvian reflect so much a national soul.
     
Chupe is a Quechua word that means first food. Chupe was at the beginning the blend of salt with chili. Other ingredients as cheese, milk, split peas, yellow potato were added to this sauce … and it became a delicious traditional dish that mix Indigenous and Hispanic ingredients.

The Shrimp Chowder, widely popular among the Southern coastal region of Peru (originally from Arequipa), has a special flavor, not compared with those of other parts of the country, she explained.

From her restaurant, where she began 20 years ago the pionner job of recovery and revaluation of the Peruvian cuisine, she said that the Spanish cuisine that were brought by the conquerors was a cuisine created from Greek, Roman, Barabarian and of course Arab influencies.

Here, in Peru, other mixed races began, from our Indigenous culture and the groups that were arriving later to our territory, so that “our food is a mixture of Hispanic, Indigenous, African and Moorish, that is cooking slowly by centuries”.

As well as this Peruvian dish we have others like: Ají de gallina (chicken in a spicy sauce), carapulcra (dry potato stew), cau-cau, olluquito, beans, ocopa, lomo saltado (sauteed beef tenderloin), arroz con pollo (chicken with rice), causa, sangrecita, among others that show that who stand up for our gastronomy is the traditional cuisine.