Hey Cow

“Juanita! Fry the bananas!”

This was my introduction to Peru. Sitting round the kitchen table with an extended family in Urubamba, a small town in the Sacred Valley about an hour from the Andean city of Cusco. When asked what Peruvian food we’d enjoyed, the one thing my friend and I could muster up in our broken Spanish was platanos fritos – fried bananas.

And suddenly the matron of the family leans back in her chair and yells to the maid in the kitchen, “Juanita! Fry the bananas!” Despite our protestations, the fried bananas were served up, and served up time and time again.

This is the one example that exemplifies the hospitality of Peruvians – the willingness to go beyond and further to please guests and proudly display their culture.

But it didn’t stop there. Mountain sized plates of food were served for dinner and lunch, with an extra large plate of the lunch time entrée and main kept in a cupboard for their nephew – a hardworking lawyer who wasn’t able to make it home for the family lunches. Hence, come dinnertime, two meals were provided for him in compensation. Two mountain sized meals of potatoes, rice and meat.

And yes, I did say the meals were stored in the cupboard. Every family seemed to have a fridge, but it was for storage space only. Canned and other non-perishable goods were stored in the fridge, leftover meals in the cupboard, pots and pans in the oven. It seemed to make sense at the time.

The generosity of food and communal affairs extends beyond the home. Any excuse for a fiesta brings with it an array of food and drinks, from traditional ceviche to ‘delicacies’ of llama and guinea pig. The guinea pig comes out whole – chilli in mouth – eyes upwards and claws outwards. And yes, in case anyone’s wondering, guinea pig does taste kind of like chicken, but I think I preferred Juanita’s fried bananas…