Pupusaria Emili

It had been a five-day sail from Oaxaca, Mexico to get to this isolated estuary on the El Salvador coast. It wasn’t the wilderness, but it was so deeply rural that the only way to find goods and services was by rumor and luck. Buying groceries involved an hour and a half bus ride there and back; the bus only stopped twice a day.

Local sailors mentioned a restaurant “down the path to the road, take a right and go about half a mile.” My family and I took the dinghy to shore and wandered through a defunct resort, before taking a right at the gravel road. We passed coconut plantations on the seaward side and cashew orchards on the other.

By the time the sky was completely dark we still hadn’t seen a human made structure, let alone an eatery. There were no lights out in the plantations and the faint stars shed no light on the road. We walked on for another ten minutes and were just about ready to turn back when we saw a single light bulb through the trees ahead.

We passed a turn in the road to see a stick frame building with open sides, and a small sign, Pupusaria Emili. A single hanging light and two large, modern drink coolers lit the structure. In the back corner, a woman was cooking with a gas burner and a steel barrel lid. Chickens ran under and around the tables picking up bugs, crumbs and spills from the dirt floor. A center post supported a corrugated metal and black plastic roof.

Pupusas fall somewhere between a quesadilla and a tamale. They are made from cornflower dough stuffed with a filling of either refried beans or cheese with loroco flowers, pressed flat, and then fried until firm and brown. We topped our pupusas with a slaw of pickled cabbage and jalapeño chilies from a large plastic tub.

That meal has become the defining experience of El Salvador for me. A mention of pupusas or even ‘El Salvador’ will send me right back to that hot tropical night, the rich taste and smell of frying fat, and the fireflies that escorted us back up the gravel road.