Flavours of Peru

every dish has a tale to tell

- by Mitasha Chatterjee

In the sixteenth century, the Spanish colonists brought enslaved African people from different parts of Africa to Peru. In the Andes, they worked in the mines; on the coast, they worked in vineyards or sugarcane and cotton plantations. The slave owners tossed the lesser cuts of meat, like cow lungs or hearts, as food to these people. To make these chewy beef heart palatable, the enslaved African people marinated those meats in available wine vinegar and other native spices like Andean hot peppers, Aji Panca, skewered them with sugarcane reeds and grilled them over wood fire. This gave birth to a cuisine which their descendants preserved for centuries, 'Comida criolla' - the Peruvian creole cuisine, a unique blend of traditional native Andean ingredients with flavours from Africa and Spanish cuisines. In today's world, these skewered and grilled beef hearts, known as Anticuchos, are one of the most iconic street foods of Peru.

With traditional street foods, Lima's high-ranking gourmet restaurants and influential Peruvian chefs experimenting with diverse ingredients and techniques, Peruvian culinary art has become one of the most celebrated cuisines in this contemporary world and a major culinary destination for food lovers. Every year, millions of tourists land in Peru to eat.