Jugo in Translation

The kitchen lady, who is wearing a light blue dress with a white apron and head wrap and must be in her early 70s, plunks two glasses of green liquid on the table in front of us. “Jugo de tomatillo verde” she announces. This has been happening every morning since we arrived in Cartagena at our tiny 6-room hotel. Given our limited Spanish, we are not always sure what we are drinking, but it is always fresh (we can hear the blender whirring in the kitchen from our table) and different from anything we’ve tasted before. Sometimes we get a pantomime, or she will bring the whole fruits to the table for us to inspect while she gives a rundown of her recipe in rapid Spanish. We Google the Spanish names on our iphone and are amazed to find just how many kinds of unusual fruits and vegetables grow in Colombia – lulo, tamarillo, granadilla, uchuva, guanabana, carambola, zapotes, christophene, cherimoya, mamoncillo,and pitahaya – things we have never heard of or even dreamed of.

My favourite was the lulo, which apart from having the cutest name ever, looks like a hairless reddish- orange kiwi and tastes like a combination of dandelion and citrus. A close second was the tomate del arbol (“tree tomato”) which is sweet and tart at the same time – it tastes tomato-y going down, but has a lingering aftertaste of berries. Bronze place went to the cherimoya fruit which Mark Twain called “the most delicious fruit known to men” and I call Fruit Fireworks – an explosion of banana, pineapple, papaya, peach, and strawberry.

I imagine our kitchen lady learned to make these juice blends from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and we were tasting recipes which have their roots far back in Colombia’s past.

If you visit Colombia and are not lucky enough to have an elderly dona at your hotel who makes amazing daily juices, don’t despair! There are other ways to sample Colombia’s variety of produce: street vendors make fresh juices on the spot, handed to you in a plastic bag with a straw for about 50 cents. Most restaurants also have at least one jugo del dia on the menu and gelato shops offer flavors made from local fresh fruit. Or, most simply, you can visit a market or check out one of the wandering street carts, which look a bit like huge wheelbarrows and sell all manner of fantastic-smelling, colourful and unrecognisable fruits. Ask the vendor for his best Colombian fruit recommendation and you may find a new favourite too!