CEVICHE

If you’d overheard a British restaurant-goer talking about ceviche when it first started appearing on UK menus less than a decade ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a brand-new creation. We knew — or thought we knew — it was a Peruvian dish of cubed raw fish, quickly cured in lime juice, but most of us had no inkling of its millennia-long history.

In fact, the concept of ceviche is so old we’ve no recipes for its earliest incarnations, which were probably made in or near Huanchaco, a town on the northern Pacific coast of Peru. There’s good evidence to suggest that 3,000 years ago, fishermen ate their catch straight from the sea, says Maricel Presilla, author of Chef and food historian