List of 5 sources

-Food inc. (movie): this movie will help me in improving and further explaining where the meats, such as the chicken & pork that are used to make my dish, come from.

-Fast food nation (book): the book fast food nation will helo me by informing me more about the way the animals we eat are raised and how that is diffrent to how their natural habitat was.

-cook book: the cook book explains in Detail how the dish  is prepared and cooked

-Family members: my family will help me by giving me more information and how difrent it was then and now

-Internet sites: alot of information provided in variety

Peruvian Pachamanca

JuLio Martinez

3/21/2011

Composition Essay

“Peruvian Pachamanca”

In the early nineteen hundreds Peruvian food wasn’t very presentable. In today’s life the majority of the Peruvian culture not only make sure the food tastes good but that it looks good as well. One dish in Particular I’ll speak about is a traditional dish “Pachamanca”. Pachamanca a food that came from the “sierra”. The word pachamanca comes from Qetchua roots, “Pacha” meaning pot and “Manca” meaning different meats. It’s a very famous dish that we cook . I’ll be sharing how’d we acquire the meat we used, such as lamb, pork, chicken or Guinea pig, how long it took them, where they cooked it, also how much it cost them , and compare how both my ancestors and my parents cook it and how they differ.

Pachamanca contains many different meats. Most today are very easy to acquire, but others are a little more difficult or a bit more expensive than others. For example chicken can be found in a supermarket or any regular store that sells meat. Lamb isn’t as easy to find as chicken, but it shouldn’t be too difficult since it can also be found in some supermarkets. also pork. Back in the 1900’s, these different types of meats wouldn’t be as easy to get, you would have to hunt the animal down, clean them up and go through a whole process. The point is it wasn’t as easy to obtain the meats. However I believe that, although today it is much easier to get the meat, they are also not as healthy as they were back then for the reason that now we decide what these animals eat, we also give them hormones so they can produce more milk for a longer time period, or grow larger or faster, and we give them anti-biotics so the milk won’t make people sick. In the 1900 the animals would feed on grass and on their natural eating habits. Most of these animals weren’t found in the same area, you would have to travel a little or go a distance and take time to get them all. The ingredients used by my ancestors were fresh, unlike the ones we use in this current time where they are either shipped from far away or processed and completely changed and not usually for better as thought.

            The techniques they used to cook in the 1900 were almost completely different to how we cook it now. For instance they use to dig big holes and use heating rocks to cook this dish which took a Long time not only to cook but to gather the rocks, dig the whole and to hunt the animals. In this century we just get the ingredients at the store put them in the pot and cook them much faster the only problem with that is that a flavor is Lost which is a big differences . The original flavor is lost, because all these natural ingredients make a huge difference in the smell and taste of the dish, the smoke from the banana plants and the heating of these special rocks can never be compared to the kitchen of now where we just use gas to start a fire and warm up the either frozen or processed ingredients.

Chicha made of a white corn called jora, which looks like the normal yellow corn but it’s not, yellow corn is soft and this corn is hard we boil this corn and all the juice it releases gives a flavor which we put in a container made of mud, we put brown sugar, some chancaca and panela which makes it really sweat we cover it with a “tela” and leave it there for about 2-3 days the mud makes it get fertilize it doesn’t have the same flavor as when this process began it turns into some type of alcohol, if it remains in there for 2-3 weeks you can even get drunk with it when it’s very fertilized, they used it just to rose the pachamanca with it, so it can give it a different flavor. Besides using this chicha on the pachamanca we also drink it to accompany the pachamanca.

Pachamanca is an expensive dish, for 6 people it would now cost about $80-100 of course this is now. My ancestors wouldn’t have to pay as much but they would take longer just to get the ingredients and do all the preparations.

In conclusion, in my opinion although it took longer, and a lot of patience at the end the way my ancestors cooked and prepared the food was better. The presentation of the food is important but not nearly as important as the taste, because the fact that something looks better doesn’t always mean that it is better for our health or in flavor.