A Taste of Chile

For lunch on our first day, I tried an Empanada Pino. Pino is not pine nuts, nor is it pineapple. It is a mixture of spicy ground beef with stuff thrown in there such as hard-boiled eggs, olives (pits included), raisins and corn.

The dough was very floury, in a good way,  and it was baked; for those of you with Eastern European and South African provenance, it was sort of like bobotie in a baked pierogi.

I tasted two others while in Chile,  empanaditos and a fried empanada, and neither was as good as the bobotie pierogi. Jason had a salad – sometimes, I don’t understand him at all. I recently learned the empanadas don’t have a tilde on the n. The verb empanar is to bread something while the verb empañar is to fog up.

But Chile is more than empanadas. First, the fruit is wonderful-you probably have some Chilean raspberries in your fridge. A nationally loved fruit that you may not know is the cherimoya. If you google it, you will be sure to find people quoting Mark Twain, who supposedly thought it was the best thing ever. Since I never found a direct quote or source, I suspect that someone put the quote on Wikipedia once and everyone copied it. For any US readers, Melissa’s in California  will ship some to you. Or, come to Chile and try Cherimoya juice or Cherimoya Alegre, half cherimoya juice, half Orange Juice. The juice was like nectar and tasted like a combination of the best of pineapple and mango to me. We visited the …. market in Santiago and the fruits and vegetables looked amazing. Piles of strawberries, baby spotted potatoes (looked better than it sounds) and giant stalks of celery were everywhere. Speaking of potatoes, I read that scientists believe that the potato originated in Chile 13,000 years ago.

Another popular vegetable is corn, known as choclo. I am sorry to say that I never tried the supposed national dish, pastel de choclo, a minced-meat mixture with mashed corn on top. I wonder if guidebooks to the USA mention Tuna Casserole as a must try dish as well. I did have cazuelo, a hearty beef soup, with vegetables as well as some scrambled egg. It was excellent but could have benefited from some hot sauce. We have discovered that Chileans and Argentineans aren’t the biggest fans of spicy food. What is called spicy food here is pretty mild, most likely because Chile, unlike Peru, is lacking in any Asian or African influence . We didn’t try is the Chilean hot dog. Looks like a regular hot dog but is seved with avocado and mayonnaise.

We also never tried Chorrillana-a plate of French Fries, topped with beef, eggs and fried onions.

Clearly we need to return to Chile.  I did try the national drink, the pisco sour. Both Peru and Chile claim the pisco sour as their national drink but only Peru has a holiday for it.

Chile, being a long country with lots of ocean exposure, is famous for its seafood. A traditional dish is Congrio (Conger eel soup), which is a white fish cooked with… Very tasty. It is so loved that Pablo Neruda, Chile’s nobel-prize poet, wrote an ode to it. (Click here to read it). Actually, it is not really an eel but is a fish, known as kingclip in some parts of the world. Since we were in Chile during National Week, there were lots of parties going on throughout the night. What is the Chilean hangover recovery food? Ceviche. If you don’t quite see that, you might agree with Jason that when it comes to hangover food, you need to stick with your own country’s traditions.

In the grain category, I enjoyed the circular morning biscuit which I can’t remember the name of, bread dipped in chancho en piedra (Chilean salsa),  Sopapilla (pumpkin fritter) dipped in theoretically hot sauce, and, of course, quinoa. But what was my favorite meal? If you know me, you shouldn’t have to ask – the raspberry-mint ice cream at Emporio La Rosa in Valparaiso. Full of raspberry flavor with a hint of real mint, I could have one right now.