Peruvian cuisine around the world

There's a lot to consider when defining Peruvian food. In Lima, tourists bite into cow’s heart skewers unaware they’re a street food born from African slavery. Local families visit restaurants on weekends specifically for Chinese fried rice. In the early 1900s, the Japanese blurred the line between ceviche and sashimi. All of these are traditional Peruvian dishes, but this is not fusion – it’s evolution.

Tracing the origins of Peruvian food is a culinary Robinson Crusoe adventure with only slightly less colonialism and far fewer religious references. Perhaps the best place to start is with potatoes. They were domesticated thousands of years ago in modern-day Peru, which now has an International Potato Centre that’s documented 4,000 varieties of edible ‘taters. Along with corn and chillies, potatoes are the cornerstones of the cuisine. When the Spanish took over from the Inca Empire in 1533, Peru’s ingredient repertoire broadened, and then continued to do so with the arrival of Chinese workers in the 1800s and Japanese immigrants at the turn of the following century.

Defining Peruvian Food

Today Peru’s capital, Lima, is renowned for blending indigenous ingredients and recipes with modern techniques to create quintessential Peruvian dishes. Virgilio Martínez's Central Restaurante is perhaps best known for this, repeatedly appearing at the pointy end of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. With so many cultures intermingling over time, is it possible to define Peruvian cuisine? If you ask the pros, it comes down to the ingredients and the people who cook with them.


In Australia, native Peruvian ingredients are costly, which is why Alejandro imports three 40-foot shipping containers every year, each filled with the pride of Peru: chillies, pisco and wine.

“Here in Australia, a lot of key Asian ingredients are available in the market, so restaurants can source them with more cost-effective pricing and recreate the cuisine in an authentic way,” he says. “When I see restaurants that are claiming to do Peruvian food and not utilising Peruvian ingredients, I don’t think it’s fair.”

Luciano is more poetic about Peruvian food. “If you want to do something traditional, you need traditional people,” he says. “You don’t have that taste in your mouth, what your mum or your grandma use to cook, you don’t have the last thing that makes a dish amazing.”

But even if you can access the ingredients, befriend a Peruvian chef or order from a Peruvian restaurant, Luciano says that conquering the cuisine is impossible.

“You have this mix from all over the world. There are a lot of flavours you have never had in your life. In one life, you can not try all the dishes Peru has to offer.”

How Peruvian food impacts in the world ?

Peruvian food impact in the world because of our exotic flavors and variety of products that are originally peruvian. For example we have exotic fruits in the amazon as camu- camu, cocona, aguaje and aguaymanto . In the Andes, we have tubers as many potato varieties, oca,olluco and mashua. In the coast, we can find lucuma und custard - apple.  All these products were consumed since the Pre-Columbian period as Huaman Poma De Ayala said. 

By another hand, foregein people like peruvian food because is different than any other country in the planet people do not have these incredible products as important gastronomic symbols. These gastronomic elements when the spaniards conquered Peru  changed the local recipes because of the introduction of new products as oil,olives, rice and beef. Then, when the africans came to our country as slaves of the spanish crown they invent many dishes as tacu tacu, anticuchos and picarones.

These, information of our gastronomy and history make us to be a diverse society where people of different parts of the world immigrated and introduce new traditions to become and develop our delicious cuisine that all love and praise around the world winning many prices. In addition, many peruvian immigrants set up restaurants in many places of the world as the US, Spain, Italy, Canada and Japan. The restaurants succed because of  peruvian determination and amazing food that we have impacting palades around the world.

References:

Levin,S .Season Traveller: Don’t call it Fusion: the Fascinating Migrant History of Peruvian Food

https://seasonedtraveller.com/stories/peruvian-food-fascinating-migrant-history