Rosita Ríos: the story you should know about the queen of Creole cuisine

The stove was lit in Malambo, once on the way to the northern valleys. A family villa, at number 155 of General Vidal street, which connects De los Próceres and Francisco Pizarro avenues, in Rímac. María Rosa Ríos Portales, already married with children, cooked her famous stew right there. Woman with dark skin and light eyes; curly hair, always tied up in a bun; small size, no more than 1.50 meters; to speak slowly and pleasantly. Don Roberto Mejía Alarcón remembers her like this. He was just a child when he met her, because he was born in the Rímac de Abajo el Puente. Connoisseur of her subject (the Creole traditions of that Lima that left), the veteran journalist from El Comercio was the one who interviewed her for the last time: she was in her eighties; he was in his early thirties.

If Rosita was born in 1879, in 81 or 83 (we are not precise about the year), we could speculate on this: that, around 1921 (she was in her forties), the celebrations for the first centenary of the independence of Peru surely they found many Limeños of yesteryear around this cook, tasting her anticuchos, her picarones or some other food that she began to sell on the way to the hills of Amancaes, where every June 24 a fair brought together hundreds. Because those hands and that heart from Rima, who since she was a child learned the secrets of cooking by watching her mother from Chiclayo, Rosa María Portales, would already add up in those years a great culinary expertise.

During her lifetime, Doña Rosita fed three husbands, 10 children (three men and seven women) and more than 30 grandchildren with her Creole seasoning, but she delighted tens of thousands of diners with her stews. He was born in Barrios Altos, but lived in Malambo from 1914, and from there he began to bring food to the firing range of the Army Barracks in Rímac. This is how his seasoning reaches the high command. “They ask you to receive them at home, and their families. She, who lived in a large corralón, begins to receive them at a table with benches for 12 people, ”says Milagros Calmet, Graciela’s granddaughter, who was the youngest daughter of the stewardess.

“María Escobar was her competitor and neighbor. Both were highly sought after”, journalist Mejía Alarcón also recalls. Those were the times of street vendors, who had the habit of displaying their food from 4 or 5 in the afternoon, when at the end of the working day many people from Lima like him would cross the stone bridge to fulfill the traditional lunch hour.

A garden for the queen

“General Vidal is the extension of Tarapacá; if you go up that avenue and then continue along Amancaes, El Altillo is on the right”. There, where today there is a park and even a condominium with the name of the Creole cook, was the restaurant where Rosita Ríos became even more famous. Her heiresses say that it was the lawyer Claudio Fernández Concha who helped her with a loan to buy the land in Ciudad y Campo, which was both kitchen and family home, Creole dining room and epicenter of the revelry, which received hundreds between noon and six.

Ceviche, tamales, sangresita, corn, potato a la huancaína, causa and other starters alternated with patita con maní, olluquito with charqui, carapulcra, picarones, chica morada and de jora. Piqueo criollo was what people were most excited about, because it meant trying a little of everything at an affordable price. And it was she who invented it: a kind of buffet was set up on a long table for people to serve themselves, snacking on everything, as a prelude to the main course. Guitar and cajon animated the atmosphere.

“His client was President Manuel Odría. I have seen Manolete, Armillita, Elsa Aguirre eat in that place.” And missing from the list recalled by Mejía Alarcón are the famous María Félix and Olga Guillot; also the gourmets Federico More and Adán Felipe Mejía ‘El Corregidor’, in addition to Luis Bedoya Reyes and Fernando Belaunde, among many other figures. “Due to her exceptional cooking skills and the gentle sympathy that her deliberation and decency aroused, Rosita Ríos won general esteem,” recognized an article in El Comercio at the time.

Honors and Farewell

On Monday, July 4, 1966, Doña Rosita Ríos was in bed. An image of the Lord of Miracles presided over the room of the Archbishop Loayza Hospital -which then only attended to women-, the chronicler recalls that he only obtained three comments from his convalescent interviewee:

– Doña Rosita, it seems that you are already leaving the hospital?

– Yes, son, but to meet Saint Martin de Porres in heaven.

– Her guests, her friends, the neighbors, they all miss her.

– Yes, but this blessed disease doesn’t even let me breathe. Oh, there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, nor a body that resists it.

– And to think that there is no longer an Amancaes Festival…?

– Matter of time, boy. Anyway, the tradition is gone.

The proclaimed queen of Creole cuisine in the mid-20th century died two days after that meeting, on Wednesday, July 6, 1966. El Comercio reported the news by publishing an image of the funeral attended by “several hundred people”, among which were the Aide-de-camp to the President of the Republic, Commander AP Jorge Dubois, and the mayor of Rímac. Rosita Ríos rests since then in the El Ángel cemetery.

Clarification: With the title “Rosita Ríos and the memory of centennial restaurants”, this article was originally published on July 25, 2021. We republished it on January 18, 2022 on the occasion of Lima’s anniversary.