The new Peruvian Cuisine

By Teófilo Altamirano Rua and Eric Altamirano Girao

The book is intended to be, not considered as a recipe list, neither as the development of regional cuisine history, as well as the discussion of food inputs. On the contrary, the main objective is to analyse the consolidation of the new Peruvian cuisine as a national and global brand, considering evolutive components such as internal migration, the hybridization of diverse internal and international sources to explain the Peruvian culinary "boom". The book blends together the Altamirano's efforts, father, and son, to analyse facts barely known of the national food industriy, like the palpable stagnation and decline of the so called "nueva cocina peruana". At the same time, the book highlights the book of la "nueva cocina peruana" around the world, namely in countries where reside most Peruvians such as USA, European Union, Japan, Chle and Argentina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CreaLibros
• Release date: May 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9786124869587

Book preview

The_new_Peruvian_cuisine_-_portada.jpg

Teofilo Altamirano Rua es PhD in Social Science, Master of Arts in Economics & Social Studies and Doctorate in Anthropology from Durham, Manchester, and Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos respectively.

Author of multiple articles written in English, Spanish and Quechua (native language) on internal & international migrations, migrants associations in Lima, EEUU and Spain; remittances and highly skilled migration and lately subjects related to climate change, environment and forced migration, Peruvian cuisine under the impact of climate change, environmental pollution, migrations, and masculinization.

Former project director on Climate Change, Environment and Migration for International Organization for Migration (IOM-UN) in; Tinker Professor at LLILAS Austin, Texas University; Full-time Professor Department of Social Science at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. In addition is Visiting Research Professor on American, Canadian, British, and Spanish universities.

Former senior consultant for international organizations such as United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Labour Organization (ILO), International Organization for Migration (IOM), World Bank (WB), United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Manhattan Mining Company.

Eric Altamirano Girao, patisserie and cuisine chef. British born Peruvian; with residency in the UK since 1995. Graduated Graphic Arts with a BTEC Graphic Design National Diploma at the Oxford City College (Oxford). Engaged more than 10 years within hotels and fine dining restaurants (London) with grasping interest to rediscover the Peruvian cuisine.

In 2012 opened his own personal project, Casa Sable Catering in Lima; Attended Peruvian cuisine institutions in several prestigious institutes across the capital. Obtained The Molecular cuisine Certificates at Le Cordon Bleu. In February 2019 was elected in a competition as Winner of the Merit category on Asian Cuisine, organized by the World Association of Chefs (Dublin, Ireland)

Between May 2016 and July 2017 carried out exhaustive research on the state of art of the so called La Nueva Cocina Peruana. At present the author has culminated NVQ level 3 studies in Oxford, England. As well as an Advanced Technical Diploma in Cookery & Certificate in Patisserie Confectionary (City & Guilds). His effort on this edition reflects the culinary trends related to the impact of climate change and environmental pollution on Peruvian cuisine.

Lately, published another book in collaboration with Teofilo Altamirano: La Nueva Cocina Peruana, Antes, Durante y Después de la Covid 19, in the year 2021.

Teófilo Altamirano Rúa

Eric A. Altamirano Girao

THE NEW PERUVIAN CUISINE:

IN THE ERA OF CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION, MIGRATIONS AND MASCULINIZATION

The new Peruvian cuisine: in the era of climate change, environmental pollution, migrations and masculinization

© Teofilo Altamirano Rua y Eric A. Altamirano Girao, 2022

Auspiciado por la Federación Mundial de Instituciones Peruanas

Diseño y diagramación: Roberto Torres M.

Primera edición digital: diciembre de 2021

Prohibida la reproducción de este libro por cualquier medio, total o parcialmente, sin permiso expreso de los editores.

Hecho el Depósito Legal en la Biblioteca Nacional del Perú Nº 2022-

e-ISBN: 978-612-48695-8-7

Índice

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The topic on debate

Chapter I. Global warming and local impacts

The era of the Anthropocene

Consequences

Water stress

Environmental pollution

Limits to agricultural growth

Population growth and food demand

Deglaciation in the Andes

Chapter II. Internal migration: Expansion sources of the new Peruvian cuisine

From the production of self-consumption to the domestic market

Contributions from Andean cuisine to contemporary urban cuisine

The fusion of Andean cuisine in the city

The consolidation of Andean cuisine in the city

Cultural patterns associated with Andean-urban cuisine

Chapter III. Immigration and its contributions to Peruvian cuisine

Spanish immigration

African immigration

Asian immigration

European immigration

New immigrants

Chapter IV. The emigration and globalization of Peruvian cuisine

Traditional destinations

Western European countries

Japan

Argentina

Chile

Chapter V. The new developing agents for Peruvian cuisine

Economic growth and food consumption

External tourism

The remittances of Peruvian and Peruvian migrants

Fast food chains

The media publishers

Chapter VI. The new Peruvian cuisine

La nueva cocina as merchandise

Circles of power and specific Clientele

Socioeconomic differences and access to new Peruvian cuisine

The masculinization process

Chapter VII. Is the beginning of the end of the boom of the new Peruvian cuisine?

Climate change, environmental degradation, and its effects on biodiversity

Change in consumption habits

The case of Plaza San Miguel Mall

The saturation of the culinary offer or the overproduction syndrome of tubers

The labour market

Chapter VIII. Lessons and future of the new Peruvian cuisine worldwide

Lessons to learn

The new boom of Peruvian cuisine in the world

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

First, we would like to thank Peruvian businessman Julio Salazar, president of the World Federation of Peruvian Institutions (FEMIP), a great diffuser of Peru’s culture —and, especially, Peruvian gastronomy— abroad and several times president of the Association of Peruvian Institutions in the United States and Canada (AIPEUC), who generously financed some of the money necessary for the book’s publication.

We also want to thank Adriana de Altamirano Girao, my wife, who collaborated with her practical experience, creativity and gave us access to her culinary library and knowledge, many of them learned from her mother. My daughter Pamela Atamirano Girao deserves separate thanks as the person in charge of elaborating the daily agenda, managing the working relationships inside and outside my office, keeping up to date with our responsibilities. All my gratitude also goes for my son Frank Altamirano Girao, who advised us as a geographer and environmentalist on some issues related to his specialty. It is therefore our great gratitude to the whole nuclear family, Altamirano Girao, for their constant enthusiasm, even in moments of physical and mental fatigue.

At a time when we wrote this book, Anthony Bourdain unfortunately passed away. Its human quality and above all, its visits to places less potential thanks to its television show ¹parts Unknown, left us several legacies, like the respect and recognition of the culinary culture of the invisible by our society and Culture. As a good globetrotter and gourmet icon, he dedicated to travel, drink and enjoy from the simplest to the most sophisticated meals, interviewing some of the world cooks who are not listed as the most famous chefs, in specialized magazines or in the annual rankings of the best chefs and restaurants worldwide. He said that a good meal does not necessarily have to be very expensive and he knew how to use the anthropological method of interviewing and the participant observation without thinking that one culture is superior to the other. A fond friend of Peru and Gastón Acurio — considered the pioneer of the new Peruv Anthony, not only admired our cuisine and culture but visited the most violent places on the planet to experience food shortages and share meals with refugees, war victims and those hardly affected by disasters. In recognition of his humility, curiosity, and solidarity spirit, we thank you for allowing us to travel virtually to unknown places and to learn other culinary traditions.²

Finally, we express all our gratitude to the chefs and Peruvian cooks who expand every day, either within the borders of Peru or worldwide, the cultural heritage of our country and our culture through that humble and human laboratory known as the Kitchen.

Teofilo Altamirano Rua

---

¹ Anthony Bourdain, cook, traveller, diffuser, drinker and consumer of meals from all over the world. He was a non-conventional American who through his television program Parts Unknown took viewers of the hand on their travels to places that did not appear on the map. Taught about the food and drink that is on the tables of the rich and famous. He underwent ancient healing practices, including one with a Peruvian jungle shaman. Enjoyed without prejudices of indigenous and peasant meals; travelled to places affected. Was aware that climate change were threatening many useful inputs in the kitchen. A friend of Peru, admirer of his cuisine and his ancestral traditions, Bourdain was an anthropologist without degrees and a born to be an investigator of the kitchen.

² It should not be forgotten that Bourdain not only enjoyed Peruvian food, but also experienced traditional medicine as a patient passing through a limpia guinea pig at the hands of a healer. Native medicinal herbs were also administered under the indications of a local yerbero.

Introduction

This book was not written as a conventional recipe book or as a description volume and stories of ingredients about Peruvian cuisine and its culinary products, but as an extensive essay that incorporates new descriptive and analytical categories debated on Peruvian cuisine, such as climate change, environmental pollution, different types of migration and the masculinization of the kitchen. These four conceptual categories have contributed to the material and immaterial emergence of the new Peruvian Cuisine, which has achieved national and international recognition in recent years.

For this commitment, the sociological, psychological, anthropological, economic, demographic and gender analysis will be used to understand in all its complexity the emergence of a new style, form and presentation in the Peruvian cuisine, a topic on which there are already hundreds of books, articles and journalistic notes as a direct consequence of their international success. All of them indicate, in one way or another, the culinary recipes, description and history of ingredients, or the homemade (local), regional and national cuisine.

This recent book parts from this background, to deepen into human dimensions of the kitchen, with special emphasis on the female contribution that preceded to the emergence of this new stage in the history of Peruvian cuisine. Consequently, traditional practices will be analysed and combined with modern ones to understand the complex process of hybridization, crossbreeding, symbiosis, and fusion that Peruvian cuisine implies at this level of knowledge, flavours. Traditional spread by both gender cooks. However, this whole process began with the housewife, the main precursor of our culinary tradition, extending to the small, medium and large icons of Peruvian cuisine, mostly male as we know today giving assemble to what we understand The masculinization of the new Peruvian cuisine.

The central thesis our book contents is that the qualitative and quantitative evolution of Peruvian cuisine in its three stages —its beginning or foundation, its expansion and its consolidation— has reached its climax or summit (see chapter Seven), which leads us to question ourselves: Is it the beginning of the end of the new Peruvian cuisine? Or is there still room to move forward, but already within a context other than one in which it was forged, developed and consolidated? Also, this volume concludes by trying to answer what lessons the developing activity is leaving on our society and the Peruvian culture, at the same time analysing the present and future reality of the new Peruvian cuisine worldwide.

The contents of the book, towards the final chapter, emerges a new theme, which is the rise of Peruvian cuisine abroad, in countries where more Peruvian citizens reside. Since more information is required for the analysis of this new stage, this will be the subject of another book, which will allow us to have a global and overall vision of the new Peruvian cuisine.

Each of the four variables quoted at the beginning (climate change, environmental pollution, migration, and masculinization of the kitchen) will be independently analysed, because apparently, they are not related. However, the study will define the existence of a transversal line crossing those three variables, as we will demonstrate along the book.

Climate change, one of the main consequences of the Anthropocene, is a fact that we coexist every day and that we adapt in a planned and unplanned manner. Although this book will not analyse its problems extensively but will explain the effects on food and the Peruvian cuisine evolution.

Migrations, both internal and international, will not be considered as a demographic subject, but as veins and arteries through which the knowledge, flavours, tastes, and entrepreneurship of Peruvian cuisine circulates. Migration as an explanatory and analytical variable allows us to understand through, in part thanks to it, the new Peruvian cuisine has reached the privileged position that currently holds as a brand, or an icon well located on the global culinary map.

The migrant, thanks to his different displacements, carries on him desires, expectations, emotions and even nostalgia; And of course, also tastes-flavours, colours, textures, and presentation of our gastronomy, both in the domestic and the public spheres. Through restaurants, for example, or everyday life, this tradition is confronted and mixed with other culinary manifestations of diverse provenance, including those cultivated by the culinary icons of the countries where both gender Peruvian migrants arrives.

It is undeniable that one of the most frequent memories for Peruvians outside the country is national gastronomy. Related to it, it immediately arises the image of the mother supplying the daily food, while it is —with the grandmother— who ensures the food, even rationalizing the scarce inputs which is sometimes calculated, as it happens within the poor peasant family.

Concurrent, climate change and the environment transformation are processes not immediately alerted, as if it was an asymptomatic disease. However, it should be emphasized although they are still not very noticeable, their effects are slowly increasing, so only when one of its impacts becomes palpable is considered by the international community. For this reason, in the immediate and mediated future, its consequences will be more frequently and powerful if not implemented as political and social, as well as investments in prevention and development of early warning models that can prevent and reduce the risks, maintaining the generation approach of agricultural products for the sustainability and food sovereignty.

The new urban gastronomy, apparently, has been developing without considering that the impacts of climate change and environmental pollution have direct effects on the production of inputs. In this sense, it remains to be imagined that the ingredients of the kitchen are almost infinite, and the great diffusers of the new gastronomy still do not warn the need to consider climate change and environmental pollution. In this boundary, new ingredients are still being introduced without notifying that their quality and quantity are likely to vary while some are vulnerable to changes in climate and natural disasters becoming more increasingly common.

One of the contributions of the new Peruvian cuisine is to deeply acknowledge the origins of the traditional Peruvian ingredients, proclaiming information on what ecological floor they are produced, their production technologies and storage methods, their nutritional and curative qualities, etcetera. This contribution has allowed to visualize that fact food items do not come straight from the market, but from the fields, where they are produced by peasants of both genders in small or medium plots, with a certain organization of the work and technologies appropriate to the characteristics of the territory, appealing to the mobilization of family and market networks, and also to the management of information within production prices. However, this production chain becomes primarily home-produced.

To start analysing the evolution and development of the new Peruvian cuisine, we will mention only three characters that have significantly influenced the development of our new kitchen. The first considered for is Mr Mauro Cárdenas, an Ayacuchano peasant who represents the exemplary case within millions of small and medium-sized farmers, dedicated to the cultivation of native potatoes (tubers) and other products used in contemporary culinary art. Our long conversations in Quechua Ayacuchano, our native language, reminded me of my child and adulthood in the town of Ocobamba (Apurimac), and allowed me to appreciate their dedication to maintaining, preserving and disseminating native agricultural products.³

Another key character for this research was Mr Mariano Valderrama, colleague and sociologist friend who since the seventies from last century was making known the diversity of the food plants and their properties throughout a radial program called ⁴Earth Fruitful. He was also a great cook and one of the inspirations of the initiative that later would end up crystallizing Bernardo Roca-Rey (President of APEGA) and many other key representatives in the Mistura Market.

Gastón Acurio is the third known key character to understand the Peruvian gastronomic boom for its vision of the future and to place Peruvian cuisine on the global scale and map of gastronomy. He was also the main responsible for starting to allow recognition to the peasants and parcels, producers of most of the inputs for the new Peruvian cuisine.⁵

Thanks to the apogee of national cuisine, Peru and the world are rediscovering also revaluating what for peasant farmers of both genders is a fact inherent from their Andean culture as a result of daily practices: The Millennial knowledge about Agricultural production and the use of multiple local inputs. Transmitted from generation to generation throughout oral tradition —which expresses the continuity and validity of the Andean culture in a context of external food competitiveness that sometimes subordinates it— this knowledge is extremely valuable for the development of the Peruvian kitchen in the new global context and climate change. It should be clarified that, with this statement, it is not intended to invisibly the importance and influence of other culinary traditions equally crucial to national cuisine, such as the jungle and the coastal —especially in northern Peru— but this research will focus on analysing and developing the cases of urban and Andean kitchens in the whole country.

The new diffusers of Peruvian gastronomy show their progress and have managed to enrich our culinary further, teaching how to prepare their new creations through the media, publications, and their businesses. As a result, this renovation of culinary activities has entered homes of the average Peruvians, transforming consumer habits and preferences. Simultaneously, the diffusers of our culinary heritage (male and female cooks, chefs, researchers, etc.) are learning from peasant farmers, thus becoming their lifetime students. This was unthinkable twenty years ago because peasants were considered as vestiges of Peruvian backwardness and underdevelopment; As a matter of fact, as inhabitants supposedly isolated from urban civilization and with almost obsolete practices. At the same time, the peasants are discovering that their contributions into the new urban kitchen are substantial parts of their success, significant achievements they have accomplished while protecting the environment and taking advantage of the resilience to climate change allowing applications of ancestral knowledge.

Finally, it should be noted that this book is a family product and that the authors assume responsibility for the contents, its omissions, and