Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 18 - Latin America

Another long gap. Long story short - chronic fatigue was more compatible with these kinds of projects during lockdown! Once again things really ramped up in May, but again in August and December, so I’ve been rather busy. In any case I did actually finish these cooking projects back in the day, I’d like to finish writing them up eventually, so let’s have another tilt at it!

I also made a minor design change to the website, Squarespace (the current hoster) has a few bits of web design I’m not a fan of. Hopefully I’ve sanded them off a bit. Earthshaking stuff.

Intro

In our journey across the world we’ve finally crossed the Pacific, and just like in real life it’s just a hop, skip and jump away. And we’re now in the Americas. We won’t be here for long as:

• I hadn’t many cookbooks about the Americas’ food when I actually cooked these recipes. This is also why Africa is heavily underrepresented. Also, to be honest, Asia and Europe just had more I wanted to cook.

• Sometimes cookbooks lump together a bunch of related cuisines. Sometimes that’s even the only kind of cookbook I have from a region.

On that note our first stop is the very notable and very real nation of Latin America. The cookbook covers an area (far) larger than Bolivar’s Gran Colombia so I can’t even make a lame historical joke and claim I’m covering that (ex-)country.

So, yes, this is lumping in a lot, and whatever Latin America even is is, as always for these things, nebulous. In any case its history is heterogeneous, so is its the culture, its demography and, of course, its food. I think while most people who’ve tried them would say Argentinian, Mexican and Peruvian food are all good I don’t think most people could mistake them for each other. So this will all be a bit of a grab-bag.

With this said the book I used is well aware of this diversity and acknowledges it, it’s not attempting to claim a commonality that isn’t there. Which shouldn’t be notable but I suppose maybe it is?

As a forewarning I personally think my photography is pretty slap-dash and I think I made some pretty bad unforced errors, just from being tired when shopping or cooking. So this is probably the post I’m least proud of.

The book

This time we’ve another from Elisabeth Luard, The Latin American Kitchen.

I already wrote about Luard in a previous post, but a point I likely did not cover is that her stepfather was a diplomat, posted to Uruguay. This time is recalled in the introduction to this text and involves a childhood (outside of term time at least) in Uruguay and a young adulthood in Mexico City, travelling with the Society for Indigenous Peoples.

I would normally see the same author attempting to cover all of Europe and now all of Latin America as an alarm bell, but I think there’s enough background here to expect a decent, if broad. coverage.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

For a starter type dish I’d intended to make chile poblano en nogado - stuffed poblano chillies with pork and almond, with a creamy walnut sauce (Mexico). Let’s pretend that’s what I did.

I accidentally picked up padron peppers instead, which, at the risk of spoiling the ending, mucked up the stuffing process somewhat. At least flavour-wise I could have made worse pepper substitutions.

Beyond that I only made my standard garlic substitution. In addition the recipe involved fruit - papaya or peach, and I chose to use the latter.

For a side-dish I decided to be restrained and cook Peruvian papas a la huancaina - potatoes with a cheesy sauce and chillies. You know, health food.

I made no actual substitutions - though the recipe suggested criolla potatoes, which I could not obtain. In my experience specific potato varieties are either trivially easy to get, very hard to get unless you want to grow them yourself or both pay over the odds and in bulk, or outright impossible. I can’t recall whether this kind was in the second or third grouping!

I doubt the chillies or cheese I used are at all similar to what’s available actually in Peru either - growing my own chillies is perhaps less of an ask than my own potatoes, but unfortunately I lack that level of dedication!

The main course was the Brazilian galinha assado com abacaxi - chicken/guinea fowl (I was apparently feeling posh so used the latter) with pineapple. Basically a roast. It also uses malagueta pepper sauce, which I could not find, though I used some preserved chillies from the Brazilian shop for a little kick.

As a snack I also made quesadillas. I don’t think I need to italicise or elaborate! These ones had peppers in ‘em.

Judging by the tabs in my cookbook I evidently planned to cook frijoles pintos con masa mora - a Mexican bean and corn stew. Evidently I downscaled these plans at some point, as I don’t remember eating it or cooking it, and there are no photos.

I mention this because the final item I did cook was postre de tapioca con caco - a tapioca and coconut pudding. It sounds good but was a disaster. The tapioca was too fine-grained and the coconut milk of too poor quality, giving everything a horrible metallic taste. It was neither tasty, nor visually interesting - so I’ll mostly ignore it. Should’ve done the beans instead.

Cooking

The peppers were actually the most involved individual part of this meal, so that seems a good a place as any to start.

I prepared all the necessary ingredients - for the picadillo (stuffing) minced pork, onions, asfoetida (as a garlic substitute), tomatoes, black raisins, peaches, an orange and a lemon for juicing, almonds and cinnamon. Not pictured is olive oil and my bag of almonds is hiding out behind the cinnamon. Hi, little fella!

Naturally if I’m making a stuffing I need something to stuff. And as we all know poblano peppers are definitely the same thing as padron peppers, so that big bag of padrons right in the centre of the frame definitely isn’t embarrassing.

The third component of this dish is the sauce, for which I had sour cream, cream cheese, walnuts, sugar and (again) cinnamon.

I started off with some relatively easy tasks - toasting almonds and grilling the peppers. Here’s the receipts. I’ve often apologised for how bad looking my kitchen was when I was doing these, but one more couldn’t hurt. Sorry for how the kitchen looks in these photos.

The peppers were meant to char, have their skins removed and be slit down the middle to receive their filling. In practice it was hard to get them to char without overdoing them, and a few were beyond saving, but I did my best and still got a fair few tasty peppers out of it. I expect with poblanos this would have been easier.

Next, the picadillo. Choppy fruit.

Also choppy onion, blanchy and choppy tomato, crushy walnut and … er … juicy citrus and soak raisins in juice? This verbal affectation may have run its course.

The walnut was for the sauce - which, as it happens, was prepared and served cold. Usually I like to leave these recipes a bit vague, seeing as how they’re copyrighted, but besides not giving exact measurements I don’t have much leeway this time. The ingredients are just all combined together.

Now would be a good time to re-assert my philosophy that taste matters more than presentation. No relation to the next picture, I’m sure.

Back to the picadillo. As one might imagine the next step was a process of frying the meat, onion, asfoetida; then adding tomato; reducing a bit then adding fruit, nuts and finally cinnamon and general seasoning. I expect the cinnamon would have been fine put in earlier, but it’s at the end of the recipe, so I did it that way.

As the relative sizes of the peppers and the bulk of the filling may have indicated, this was far too much filling for the peppers. Nevertheless I stuff what I can.

So … overall? Obviously a lot went wrong. And the overall result was … okay. The mistake in pepper choice really knocked the ratio of filling to pepper and everything was a little overstuffed, in turn affecting the presentation. Even then there was a lot of loose stuffing to eat after. However the flavour profile in itself wasn’t badly affected, or if it was it still worked.

I wouldn’t say it was at all bad, but I definitely had higher hopes for this than what was realised. I think much of this was execution, the sauce was a little too thick and the peppers a bit too overstuffed, but I think some of this is also just the recipe popping a bit less than I expected.

Now, potatoes. As these are essentially boiled potatoes in sauce I got some more waxy potatoes than the usual starchy ones favoured in England. The sauce ingredients are double cream, cheese (I chose gruyére and emmental), chillies and corn flour for thickening. More or less what you’d expect!

I think the picture says it all for the next step, and I needn’t elaborate:

And the end result followed. You also get the only glimpse of the tapioca in this shot.

And how were the potatoes? Well, much as you’d expect really. They were good quality boiled potatoes covered by a fairly gloopy cheese sauce. The chilli didn’t really register taste-wise. They were fine, luxuriant but still a bit basic, if that makes sense. Another mild letdown.

Brazillian roast time. Pineapple, brazillian chillies, onion, allspice. And of course the bird, a guinea-fowl - the moderately more expensive but slightly nicer version of chicken.

This recipe involved a kind of double-stuffing - onion and pineapple within the cavity (from memory the chillies went in there too), with butter under the skin and spices and seasoning on the skin. All sensible enough.

The next stage was simply roasting, with basting. Aside from a two heat roasting process (first at a higher temperature) this was more or less how you’d normally roast poultry. At the end the cavity was emptied and the fruit and onion mix served as a kind of side.

And … it’s good. Not remarkable, but good. It holds up on its own terms but I think suffers from comparison - Caribbean-style roasts are, in my view, a better shout if wanting a fun spin on a roast. Guinea-fowl did suit the recipe more than chicken though, I think that little extra flavour was necessary to get the most out of this.

Finally, quesadillas. Tortilla, feta, gruyére, coriander leaf, oil, a pepper, chilli flakes.

Again, assembly should be pretty self-explanatory.

At this point they were folded up (as a dyspraxic this isn’t too messy by my standards!), oiled and sprinkled with chilli flakes.

Baked, served.

These were pretty nice, again, Once again I found them good but a bit on the blander end of what I was expecting. Fine but I think it could have been better.

Here’s the end result, with the customary dog tray and bad lighting in my lounge. Not the most aestheticaly pleasing, but hey ho. I’m like the Chinese dish ants-climbing-a-tree so I’ve had the ultimate lesson in knowing that good looking and good tasting can be two different things.

What I’d do differently

Firstly the peppers. I got the wrong ones, and a lot of the problems I had would simply have not been an issue had I not made that mistake. This said I think the recipe was reasonably solid - besides the obvious change of getting the correct ingredient I would probably slightly adjust the frying stages (from memory the pork was a little dry) and perhaps increase the amount of sour cream in the sauce so it’s more a liquid and less of a lump. Otherwise there’s no obvious change to the recipe I actually attempted that I’d make.

However on re-reading I note that when this recipe is served at weddings that the finished article is dipped in batter, fried and served with pomegranate seeds. I could see the battered version without the seeds being a bit heavy but the combination of the battered version with the fruit sounds fantastic, so I think I would increase my ambition somewhat a second time around!

The potatoes, frankly, just needed stronger chilli in the mix. Perhaps there’s a more interesting variation on this recipe out there, or perhaps just a hotter pepper would suffice?

The guinea-fowl was fine as is, but I do feel as though there would be a way to improve it. As the additional flavours mostly come from solid food (i.e. pineapple and onion) the obvious route of marinading overnight is out, and as the pineapple chunks function as a side-dish blending them to make a marinade is probably also out. I feel there’s a variant on the recipe that would greatly improve it, though I can’t quite grasp one that doesn’t change it fairly substantially.

With the quesadillas I would simply use better quality tortilla, if easily obtainable, ramp up the amount of feta a bit, maybe up the chilli and have something more interesting than red pepper as the filling (though I probably should have pre-roasted it even doing what I did). Also I could probably just assemble them a bit better. These were fine for what they were but I’ve definitely had better. Again, I expect there’s some more interesting recipe variant available somewhere.

Finally the tapioca. The terrible tapioca. It needn’t have been bad, bigger tapioca balls and better coconut milk could have saved it. However I’m not sure I’d expect wonders - if I’m going down that road I would probably just make a rice pudding and go to town on the spices.

My view on the book

So I think I need to lead with the negatives. One is relative to her other books, one is absolute.

Personally I’m a little disappointed at the limited range of recipes. As absurd as it sounds to say about a pretty long book covering more than a continent, her earlier pan-European books seemed almost encyclopedic on the areas they touched. Obviously they weren’t exhaustive, you could write whole books on individual regions of most countries, but it felt like a pretty good broad overview for most of Europe (north-eastern Europe not so much). To go from that to two or three recipes per double-page spread, without even having a clear idea on what country some of these dishes come from in some cases, is a bit disappointing. Obviously this is only a comparative negative, sometimes recipes cross borders and perhaps the comparison isn’t entirely fair, but in my view it still needed to be said.

The more damning criticism is that everything did just come out a little bland for my tastes, it’s all still decent, but it could be a lot better. I realise some of that could be my exectuion of the recipe, some of that could be the difficulty in sourcing the best ingredients, but I do think some blame must land on the book itself.

Nevertheless, the recipes do work. They’re certainly not without merit - I think they just need a bit of pizzazz added by the cook. And the range is still good on its own terms, the book skims from Chile to Mexico to Cuba to Uruguay, and the ingredient-focused double-page spreads ensure a wide variety of foodstuffs get touched on. From staples like tomatoes, potatoes or corn to niche or exotic ingredients like angostura, soursop or amaranth. The presentation of the recipes means that all of these topics get covered all too briefly, but they do all get covered. I’d prefer a design with more information density but I can’t deny the layout looks pleasing, and the photography is impeccable.

Now, as always, I need to address the introduction. At the most logical place, the very end of my post. Honestly, I’ve not that much to say, and that is a good thing. The introduction covers a lot of the history and culture of the region, there’s a good balance of text and images and it goes on long enough without overstaying its welcome. Though, and this is a sentence I never expected to be writing in my life, I could actually have used a little more on the author’s personal story, which seemed genuinely interesting. I’ve little else to nit-pick.

Overall, I would be hesistant either to recommend this or to recommend not getting it. It’s a good, if shallow, overview of the food (so far as I, someone who’s never been, can tell) that needs a bit of boldness on the part of the cook to go off-script and jazz it up. It’s got a small, strange niche, but at least it has one. Just don’t be afraid to colour outside the lines a bit.