Christmas before turkey and panettone: What did Peruvians eat more than 100 years ago?

Let it be our task today to imagine those delicacies and viands. To do this, we review the examples offered by the narrative, the chronicle and the local tradition about what Peruvians ate and drank, centuries ago, on the clear and serene Christmas night. Evoking colonial times, Don Ricardo Palma in his tradition “December in Old Lima” describes the table served after the Midnight Mass, after the sound of whistles, canaries, piccolos, panpipes, bandurrias, rattles and zambombas. “For dinner the tamale was a mandatory dish”, he points out. “As it was not hygienic to lie in the arms of Morpheus after a well-chewed meal and better moistened with good red wine from Catalonia, energetic Sherry, delicious Málaga and rowdy “quitapesares” (our Pisco), a little dance was improvised as a family, to which the first rays “They put the finishing touch on the sun,” adds the traditionalist.

For his part, in his text “La Navidad Limeña”, part of the book “Una Lima que se va” (1921), Don José Gálvez describes the celebration and pageantry of the festivals of yesteryear. Reviewing colonial archives, he points out that in the first years of the founding of Lima, the tables must have been especially modest. “Those tasty foods, those wines, spirits, horchatas and liqueurs that gave so much fame to Lima’s sybaritism, could not be offered from the first days,” warns Gálvez, who dates the first bottle of wine produced in the country only in 1560, produced at the Marcahuasi ranch, near Cusco. . “A certain Don Pedro Cacalla won the two silver bars of 300 ducats each, which Emperor Charles V offered to the first person to obtain the comforting juice in Peru,” the writer points out. At that time, Gálvez points out, wine was so expensive that in the mid-16th century you could not get an arroba without paying around 500 ducats for it. The same shortage happened with another precious ingredient, sugar. The modernist poet reports that, at that time, it was prohibited by the Viceroy’s ordinance to make jams, with a penalty of 50 pesos fine and confiscation of the production. The coveted sweetener, then imported from the metropolis, was reserved only for the treatment of diseases.

They were times of temperance and prohibition: “The first Christmas holidays must have been very sad since wine was a sacred gift, jam cost an exile, and la chicha that later received the name “Urine of the child”“It couldn’t be done either,” writes Gálvez. However, a few years later, local production allowed wine to be produced in abundance, liquor to be invented, and chicha to be produced in all kinds and colors. Dinner was served on the table with tamales, empanadas, convent sweets, chicha morada and pisco. “Lima, with its profession of orchards and farms, in which the rich shoots of the fruits that came from Spain caught fire, could provide schools for the palate,” notes the poet.

For his part, Abraham Valdelomar, in his epistolary essay “Easter Letter” (1916), remembers with nostalgia the banquets of his childhood, in his native Pisco, at the end of the 19th century: “On the white tablecloth there was a gifted but humble dinner. . A piglet oven toasted, with almonds and peppers, loosely packed with green lettuce leaves, bananas; clusters of painted grapes, sour to the eye; a corn empanada gilded in the fire like a goldsmith’s jewel, and warm bread. From the kitchen came the scandalous smell of chicharronesthey smoked Tamales in a fountain between the withered banana leaves and the punch of agras, smelling of cinnamon and nutmeg, looked in a transparent jar. Also, roses, carnations, jasmine, aromas and basil,” she details.

Likewise, in his story “Christmas Carol” (1948), the modernist writer Enrique A. Carrillo tells the moving story of a provincial businessman who, drowned in debt, is forced to stay in Lima away from his family, the night before Christmas. The sad protagonist tries to escape the hubbub of the holidays in the cruel capital, but his neighbor encourages him to go down to the porch to share the Easter dinner with the neighbors: “The dining room is beautiful! They have lit it up with colorful light bulbs.” says the woman. The man will remain in the room, but at his window comes the smell of noodlesof the fried fishfrom turkey and asparagus to parmesan and lucuma ice cream: a dinner portrayed in a story dated 1948. Flavors change, faith transforms, but the tradition of gathering at the table, with those we consider our family, remains.