Market Sights

In Lima!

We arrived in Lima late last night, and pretty much just settled in for the night without even unpacking, as it was well after midnight by the time we got home.

Today, we had a lazy Sunday with the family.  Willy picked us up in the morning and we headed to the San Jose Market in the "downtown" part of Jesus Maria, where we picked up the ingredients for a North Coast-style lamb stew (seco de cordero a la nortena).

The lamb and mutton butcher's stall. Note the tuft of wool left on the carcass'
tail in order to show that it is indeed lamb, and not goat.

We then went to Jacho's apartment in Los Eucaliptos to fix the lunch, where we were joined by Mito, Pali, Jose, Carlita, and Tono.

Liz and I took the opportunity between Wordl Cup games and before everyone arrived to head to the Metro supermarket here in San Felipe to get some necessities, some wine for lunch, and to get SIM cards for our phones.

After lunch Liz and I adjourned to our apartment to take care of stuff -unpacking, taking stock of the pantry, and so on- and to watch the USA-Portugal game.

Iquitos: Belén market

On the west side of Iquitos is the slum of Belén which is notable in large part because a large part of it is built on stilts in order to deal with the periodi rises in the river level, and another significant part is actually floats on the Itaya river.  

Belén's market abutt's Iquito's central districts and is an easily accessible venue in which visitors can see a traditional market in operation and see jungle produce and forest products, including natural and traditional medicines, on display and available for purchase.

 On our last morning in Iquitos we walked the few blocks from our hotel to the market, as I was curious to see the floating part of it and Jacho was keen to show me immense variety the traditional medicines sold by the market's hierberos - herb sellers.

Medicinal barks and roots.

Traditional medicinal elixirs.

The variety of medicines and the breadth of ailments that they were intended to cure and the situations they were meant to help or ward off were indeed quite amazing -everything from coughs to infidelity, kidney stones to the evil eye.

Black boa head, said to protect the home and ensure business success.

Unfortunately, there were also a couple of illegal jaguar pelts on sale as well.

Unlike other markets I've been to, Belén's did not show any evidence of internal regulation.  In most cases market stall operators will work to ensure some order and as much cleanliness as they can manage around their stalls.  Not so in Belén, as far as we could tell.

There were stinking puddles of black, garbage-ladden, muck everywhere, and people were serving and eating food literally elbow-to-elbow with dismembered chicken carcasses.

Belén's was the sketchiest, most insalubrious market I've ever experienced.

The rest of the area was not much better, as we found out when we strolled down the steps and into Belén's slum area proper.

We quickly deduced that we had made a serious error in walking down there, removed our watches and pocketed them, and as soon as we got to an intersection with a vehicular thoroughfare, we caught a pair of mototaxis and got out of there.

Black clam cebiche in Jesus Maria

Conchas negras - black clams- are one of the most prized ingredients for cebiche in Peru.   Native to the warmer waters nearer the equator, where they grow amidst the mangrove roots, black clams are harvested and shipped daily to Lima, which makes them a bit more expensive than other ingredients - at the market one pays for them by the unit.  However, as their flavor is dominant, other blander fishes can be mixed in without significantly reducing the clam flavor in the dish.

However, the best way to have them is alone in a cebiche.  They have an almost effervescent quality to them which seems to increase alertness -no wonder they are reputed to have aphrodisiac qualities. They also are the only shellfish in Peru that is used entire, with no part other than the shell being discarded.    

Aside from the clams themselves, the cebiche included lime juice, chopped aji limo, salt, aji-no-moto (monosodium glutamate), and chopped onion, with some beans, boiled corn, and toasted corn (cancha) added on top.

Market Days

On Saturday, between the soccer matches, Diego and I headed to the market in the disctrict of Magdalena.   Magdalena is a busy, more working class neighborhood just to the west of Jesus Maria.  It's streets are a bit more chaotic, what with the mototaxis that are permitted on its streets but banned in the surrounding districts of Jesus Maria, San Isidro, and Pueblo Libre.  The chaos is somewhat reflected in its market, which is a warren of narrow alleyways often barely widenough for two to walk abreast, and at times not even that.

At one time Magdalena mut have been home to Italian immigrants as it had a n umber of bakeries and pasta makers, which my mom liked to shop at.    Today, it is home to immigrants from all over Peru, and this is also reflected in the market, which offers a wide selection of products from all over the country.  Thus, it is where Diego and I head to when we wish to purchase foodstuff from the jungle.

The last time I went there, last year, we managed to get a haunch of agouti, but had no similar luck this time.  Instead whe bought some sausage, smoked peccary meat (called cecina), banana leaves, hot peppers, and a jungle herb called sachaculantro, which tastes and is used just like cilantro.

Clockwise from upper left:
cecina, green plantains, hot peppers, sachaculantro

Our plan evolved into our cooking  juanes, a classic dish from the northern jungle regions, specially Tarapoto, Loreto, and Ucayali, for the Sunday meal.   Juanes - or "fanes", as jungledwellers pronounce it- are bundles of turmeric and garlic scented rice with meat (usually chicken or hen), hardboiled egg, sachaculantro, and sometimes other accompaniments, wrapped in banana, bijao, or achira leaves.

That plan necessitated a second trip today, Sunday, to procure chicken pieces for the juanes, and fish for a soup.    While we were at the Jesus Maria market, Jacho called to say that his mom was cooking lunch, so we decided to put the juanes off and have them in the evening, omitting the soup.

We had my cousins, and several aunts and uncles over for dinner, which we washed down with wine and conversation.    The juanes were a hit, even though -making them for the first time, and under time pressure to finish them before heading over to lunch at aunt Betty's- we forgot to bind the rice with beaten egg before assembling and steaming the bundles.

Polvos Azules

A day or so into Liz and the kids' trip - on the way, in fact, to the Centro- we stopped for an almost obligatory shopping excursion in Polvos Azules.

Polvos Azules owes its name, which means blue powders, to Colonial-era merchants who plied their trade on a street along the Rimac River next to where the Presidential Palaca now stands. After Independence the place name stuck though the blue powders market was long gone.

In time the area was made into a parking lot, which in turn was by the 1980s taken over by street merchants, encouraged in part by the mayor who wanted them off the streets. Thus, Polvos Azules became a warren of informal merchant stalls and peddlers, a magnet for petty criminals, and one of the busiest markets in all of Lima. The very same economic economic and social crises which had pushed so many into street sales pushed an even larger number to seek the bargains to be had in Polvos Azules, where almost anything could be found, from Chinese tweezers or ponytail holders, to sportswear, car parts, and stereos. Some of it was name-brand, some of it fake, some legitimate, some contraband, some stolen, some a mixture of all of the above, but all of it at dirt floor prices and handed over with a big dose of caveat emptor.

Eventually, however, City Hall decided that it wanted the merchants out of Polvos Azules as well. People had tired of years of mismanagement of the city and unkept promises to "reclaim" downtown. Moreover, Lima's historic downtown had been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and the presence of Polvos Azules and the pressure its tide of humanity put on the city centre were a bit of an embarrassment.

Faced with the threat of eviction, and after a number of fights with the police and a still-unsolved New Years Day fire, the merchants of Polvos Azules offered to buy the ground they were squatting on. The City declined and the merchants were obliged to look elsewhere, eventually finding an unused warehouse along the Paseo de la Republica.

In 1997, sixteen years after its founding, the street market of Polvos Azules moved indoors, its remaining 1500 merchants moving their shops with all their goods and the name Polvos Azules. The purchase went foul and years later they are still in court battling embezzlement, but together the merchants had resisted forcible eviction from the Centro, had raised the US$ 5 million to buy the property, had saved their market, and had reason to be proud. They celebrated the event with a parade and painted the building blue.

Today, Polvos Azules has a web site and a public relations department, but it is still a warren of small shops, spread over three floors and though not as wild and woolly as before it still has a slight air of wildness about it. It is a cacophony of sounds -reggaeton, cumbia, salsa, huayno, videogame sound effects, human voices- all competing for one's attention. A million smells -leather (real and fake), electronics, sweat- assault your senses, only to get worse at lunchtime.

Most importantly, it continues to offer bargains, and whether they like to admit it or not, people of every class pass through Polvos Azules at one time or another. There you can find shoes, clothes, Chinese MP3 players or TVs for a fraction of the price of a departments store, have the voltage changed on foreign appliances or your stereo repaired, you can buy cell phones, music CDs, game systems, even DVDs of films not yet released into theaters for a dollar apiece.

It is an experience, to be sure, and one we never miss out on during our visits to the city and this time was no exception. We came out with a repaired CD player, several pairs of new shoes, shoulder bags, and several counterfeit CDs which were so good that I thought they were legitimate but used ones until I found that the label had a different one printed on the reverse and the tracks are mislabeled when played on Windows Media Player. What did I say about about caveat emptor...?

Jungle food

Today, to welcome Carla back to Peru, it was decided that Diego and I would cook lunch at my cousin Juancho's apartment. Diego was hankering for cecina, smoked peccary meat from the jungle, so we headed to the municipal market in Magdalena del Mar where there are several stands specializing in Amazonian products.

We bought a pound or so of cecina, and some pork chorizo from Tarapoto. On a whim we also grabbed about a 1/3 of a majaz (agôuti) carcass.

We prepared papa a la huancaína (potatoes with a spicy cheese sauce) as a starter because Carla had been craving it, but the rest of the meal was straight Amazonian.

The agôuti went into a pot to be cooked into a stew, to be served with rice, cecina, and chorizo, with fried yuca on the side.

We had also purchased some of those tiny but killer ajies that they have in the jungle. Those I made into a sauce with onion and lime juice, leaving some peppers whole. When I blended the rest to give the sauce some background kick, everyone -even the dogs, I kid you not!- started coughing and sneezing from the pungency of the little buggers.

The meal turned out very nicely. Carla S. and her family came over as well, and we all had a nice time eating, drinking wine, and chatting for several hours.

"One Day" in Lima

Stuart at ...en Peru has posted about this amazing video on his blog. It is Huk Punchaw ("one day" in Quechua), by Oswaldo Villavicencio and Eva Machado, the 2006 winner of the Instituto Superior Toulouse Lautrec's Imagen prize for Best Documentary.

Huk Punchaw shows one day in the life of Lima, from dawn to dusk:

Minka seafood

As promised, I returned to Minka, this time to visit the amazing seafood pavillion. Here are some shots from that visit:

A large corvina blanca, flanked by squid and octopus on one side and,
I think, chitas on the other

Mantles from a species of large squid called pota

Seafood mix

Fish roe sacs

Bonitos

Huaráz Market

On Saturday and Sunday mornings we headed to Huaráz's Central Market for some shopping. Needless to say, Peruvian markets, particularly in the mountains, are a riot of colors, sights, sounds, and smells, and one is always guaranteed to find something worthwhile.

Heading toward the market, the yellow building on the left.

The boys playing fussball outside the market,
where tables are available for 50 centimos a game.

Shopping for some of the region's famed ham.

Hams, blood sausages, pork leg, cheeses, and honey at a market stall.

Pig heads.

Guinea pigs.

Buying corn.

Ocas (Oxalis tuberosa)

Ollucos (Ullucus tuberosus)

Ajíes and rocotos. Diego was very glad to find these as, he maintains, the ones produced by small farmers taste better and are hotter than commercially-grown ones.

Diego, in the meat and poultry section of the market