OCHO/ Nuevas Comidas (New Foods)

Each new food we taste adds two weeks to our lives.
—Japanese saying

Damascos. The biggest, most perfect damascos (apricots) I’ve ever seen or eaten, from the Mercado Central in Santiago. I ate them for breakfast three days straight along with smashed avocado on fresh bread and coffee—is there a better breakfast? And between meals, apricots with perfect English walnuts from the same fruit stall. At home, I’ve eaten as many fresh apricots as I can manage. Some years, we get small, local apricots here at the Ithaca farmer’s market. But I’ve never had enough. So, even though the apricots I ate in Santiago don’t qualify as a “new” food for me, each one added weeks of color and satisfaction to my life.

Inside the Mercado Central in Santiago.

Lúcuma. One day in Santiago, our favorite fruit lady at the mercado had a box of fat, dark-brown fruit, about tangerine size, sitting out front. So I asked her what they were: fresh lúcuma. My first encounter with lúcuma was in the form of lúcuma helado (ice cream), a large scoop filling the center of a half-cantaloupe, the stunning dessert Eduardo’s mother, Jenny Cavalieri, served each of us in Curicó on our first visit to Chile in 2004 when we met Eduardo’s family. The maple-y taste of the ice cream combines energetically with that of cantaloupe. Lúcuma ice cream is often made with walnuts as well: lúcuma y nueces. And lúcuma is used to flavor the cream layer in tortas and kuchens.

But I had never seen the actual fruit before; we must have missed the window of lúcuma season on previous trips. So, I asked the fruit lady what they taste like. Without speaking, she chose one, held it under my nose for a sniff—a faintly tropical smell—then pulled it apart to reveal the startling pale, golden-orange flesh. The texture looked dry, stringy almost, like the inside of a squash, but obviously much softer since it pulled right apart. She gestured for me to take a bite. The taste is not sweet but not tart either, almost neutral on the sweetness scale. I thought of mild squash, but that seemed odd, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. But then I took another bite, and hints of vanilla washed in, and other mysterious fragrances I can’t yet name. Now I liked it very much and ate the rest.


Ojos. The blackest cerezas (cherries) I’ve ever seen, from the Feria Fluvial (riverside fish-fruit-vegetable market) in Valdivia. Even the darkest bing cherries I’ve eaten before were actually dark purple with flecks of lighter red-purple. These ojos are really almost black, another significant notch darker than bings. Ojos means “eyes,” and most Chilean eyes are very dark, so the name makes sense. They taste like the cherriest bing cherries ever, a more concentrated cherry taste, like a food some great chef might come up with, although in this case the chef is nature and horticulture working together.

Nectarines, smashed avocado on bread, and coffee for breakfast.

Durazno-plátanos. The words mean, literally, “peach-bananas,” but these are pale-colored nectarines. Very juicy and fragrant, with an added tropical banana flavor. I had previously eaten “only” duraznos (yellow peaches), exquisite nectarines (Chileans don’t have a separate word for nectarine), and conserveros (paler canning peaches, what we would call white peaches). What a delicious array!

Peruvian food. On the eve of Lucy and Eduardo’s first wedding anniversary, the four of us walked to a highly recommended Peruvian restaurant, La Calesa, in an elegant, pumpkin-colored building on General Lagos near downtown Valdivia.

La Calesa serves an excellent pisco sour, the classic Chilean drink: fresh lemon juice, pisco (Chilean brandy), and powdered sugar topped with whipped egg white. If you click on the upper photo to enlarge it, you can see to the left of the lawn chair a stunning, several-years'-old rosemary plant. Smell that?

The restaurant is small and by-reservation-only, and it has two season-dependent seating locations: indoor winter rooms with 15-foot tall ceilings and Peruvian appliquéd wall hangings, and the summer terrace and garden overlooking the river at sunset.


Of course, we sat outside, despite the cooling evening air and eventual darkness. A two- or three-year-old boy and a cat (both belonging to the owners, I imagine) roamed the garden and terrace during dinner. By the time our food arrived, the sun had set, and I couldn’t make out all the different mariscos in my spicy mixed seafood over rice, but they were delicious. Unfortunately, none of us knew to order the classic Peruvian dish, Ají de Gallina. But we did get a first taste of delicious Peruvian spice mixtures, and it will not be the last. I have already ordered a Peruvian cookbook; so far, what I’ve learned is that the base for their spice mixtures is the Peruvian ají—a yellow-orange pepper.

Iranian food. Lucy, Eduardo, Michael, and I were invited for dinner by a Bahá’í Iranian family. Both parents are teachers who met in the United States before moving to Chile, and they speak fluent Farsi, English, and Spanish. The housing development in Valdivia where they live is clean but visually boring. The inside of their small house, though, is decorated with colorful, delicate Iranian art and fabrics. Their two sons study guitar and piano with Eduardo. We ate a multicultural meal together: pilaf—rice with saffron and, from the bottom of the rice pot, darkly browned slices of potato; a spicy lamb and tomato main dish (topped with French fries—an adaptation to make Iranian food attractive to teenagers?); the typical Chilean tomato salad (peeled and sliced tomatoes, slices of onion, lots of lemon juice, salt); pebre verde (green Chilean pepper salsa); and for dessert a tray piled with slices of sandía (watermelon).

Muchos tipos de pescados y mariscos en el Mercado Central, en Santiago.

Pescada. The “ordinary” fish (pescado) Kika cooked for us, her favorite. Poached with peppers, onion, garlic, and served with Chilean tomato salad (minus the onion), pebre verde, Chilean rice, jugo durazno, and sandía for dessert.

Merquén pizza. In Barrio Belles Artes in Santiago, we found a small Italian-style pizza café, Verace, that serves a Chilean/Italian pizza with a very thin, chewy crust, a thin layer of mild tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a sprinkling of merquén. Merquén (also merkén) has a slightly smoky taste, like chipotles, and I use it at home on anything with avocados, potatoes, or eggs. And I have now added pizza to that list.

I had assumed merquén was made from Chilean ají verde chiles, ripened to red, then dried, smoked, and crumbled. But in The Chilean Kitchen, Ruth Van Waerebeek-Gonzalez calls it a spice mixture from southern Chile made with ají cacho de cabra—maybe this is the larger, dark-red, dried chile I’ve seen in the mercados? Her recipe, adapted for what’s available in the United States: 4 T. dried oregano, 2 T. ground coriander, 1 T. cayenne pepper. I have doubts about so much oregano, though, since the Chilean merquén looks and smells essentially like smoked red pepper.

Wikipedia en español describes merquén as an ancient Mapuche spice (the word merquén comes from Mapudungun, “merken” with a flat-line accent over the n) made from dried and smoked ají cacho de cabra, semillas de cilantro (which we call coriander), sal (salt), y otros especias (unnamed additional flavors). Ha! And a site about the mercado in Temuco (northeast of Valdivia) shows a photo of the ají cacho de cabra chiles—they are the dark-red ones! “Cacho de cabra” means a little bit or horn of the goat. Ah!—why didn’t I bring some home? Next time.

—Jane