Latin Connection

By: The Local Palate

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Sandra Gutierrez Respects Both Food and Farmer

While cooking her decadent tacos al pastor for a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, class full of eager students, cookbook author and food writer Sandra Gutierrez grabs a block of rust-colored achiote paste and raises it above her head. As the students observe, she pronounces, “You’ve been eating this since you were a kid.”

This fact comes as a surprise to a roomful of people who may not even know how to pronounce achiote, let alone know what it tastes like. “This is annatto seed ground into a paste, which is what makes cheddar cheese orange. If you’re a macaroni and cheese addict, I bet you’ve been eating this since you were two!” Gutierrez teaches regular classes at Southern Season’s cooking school centering around Latin American food. She describes today’s menu of Mexican street food classics as “elegant when you serve them at home.” Like her approachable food, Gutierrez builds an easy camaraderie with her students. It is this style of friendly teaching that has made her latest cookbook, Latin American Street Food, so successful. The book regales the reader with a detailed history of Latin America—through conquests and resurgence—and how food, and street food, shaped twenty-one distinct Latin American cuisines.

We spoke with Gutierrez at her kitchen table over a homemade dinner of ropa vieja and plantains, recipes you can find in her book. The evening was, as you might surmise, both elegant and approachable.

TLP: Can you explain how home-style recipes came to be on the street?

Sandra Gutierrez (SG): The tradition of street food began in the colonial times in Latin America, in the 1600s. And there’s a beautiful poem by Ricardo de Palma from Peru called “Los Pregoneros,” which means “street food vendors.” In it, he describes by the hour what they are selling. In most Latin American countries, only the very wealthy had clocks to keep time. The rest of the people knew exactly what time of day it was depending on what the pregoneros were selling in the streets. So that’s a tradition that already came from the food they were selling to homes. But in the 1970s, the entire world was hit by a gas shortage and very harsh economic times. It used to be a tradition to go back home and eat lunch every day. That was the big family meal. Or la comida as it was known. I grew up in Guatemala and everything would shut down during the lunch hour. Doctors would go home, hospitals would close, schools would close. If you lived very far away from home, you usually found a family member who lived nearby. The point was to all eat together as a family. Everything was cooked from scratch. When no one could go home because people couldn’t afford the gas, people started staying at work for lunch. The restaurant scene in Latin America was very sparse. Even those who could afford to eat at restaurants were few. Street food vendors saw a need; they filled it by setting up stands at schools and universities, in front of churches, businesses, government offices, et cetera. At the beginning, many of the meals they served were similar to what people were eating at home.

TLP: What is one of your street food memories?

SG: A particular market burnt down this year in Guatemala City. Vendors lost their livelihoods. I remember being six years old and my school would take us on a field trip to that mercado. I remember my mother gave me a dollar—un quetzal equaled a dollar back then. With that quetzal I remember exactly what I bought, like it was yesterday. I bought one avocado, one bunch of daisies, which I took back home to my mother, and one little Styrofoam cup of soup with noodles and sofrito in it. I ate my soup on my bus ride back to school. That is an indelible memory. The fact that I could go barter for my food because I only had a dollar. I felt so proud. This was such a dear book for me to write. I dedicate it to the street vendors because they really do go out and feed the world.

TLP: You have said before that it’s easier for people to appreciate Latin American food when they realize the similarities.

SG: People think that Latin American cuisines are very exotic. I still don’t understand why Americans went to the Far East first and they went to the Middle East before they came to their backyard to see what kinds of foods were being made! Because of the way that Latin American countries and cultures were shaped, we have a fusion of culinary cultures coming together.

TLP: How does that cultural fusion make Latin American food more accessible to us here in North America?

SG: I am of the belief that in order to remove the fear from people trying dishes or culinary cuisines that they’re not familiar with, the best place to do it is from a point of similarity. Nicaragua, for instance. People love slaw here in the South. You can find all sorts of curtidos, or cabbage slaws, in Nicaragua. You’ll find your fried dough in every country, from a doughnut to a churro. In Peru, you have causa, which is just like a version of potato salad.

TLP: When I traveled in Peru, I was struck by the importance of the potato, that history there and how tied to the land the indigenous people are because of the potato harvest.

SG: I don’t know if it’s because it’s a culture of strife born from need, but we try not to waste. We really have a love and reverence for ingredients.

TLP: How do you see that parallel in the South now in how we treat our food?

SG: Southern food also comes from strife and need and the history of famine and of a connection with the Earth, with the land. I actually believe that Southern food is probably the truest of all regional cuisines in this country. I see a great similarity between the food of the South and the food of Latin America because we share the same cultures that conglomerated at the base of cuisines. Before the modern immigration came to the United States, at the base of our cuisine, the Native Americans, the Europeans that conquered us, and then the Africans that came along. That is something the rest of the country doesn’t have as the base of their cuisine. Southerners and Latin Americans do. They share that. We are finally returning as a culture in the South back to the land. The farmers have always done it. But now, as a society, we are reconnecting to nature. We are starting to see the importance of salvaging our heirloom ingredients, and we are starting to support our farmers again. It’s that reverence for ingredients again. It’s respecting our food. I think that’s going to bring us together.