BIZARRE FOODS FROM NICARAGUA
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| Grilled armadillho |
Running all over the world, hunting bats in Samoa, fishing with a Sicilian family, cooking donkey in a restaurant in Beijing—trying to experience food and share culture can lead you into some lonely territory. I often find myself spending time with folks living on the verge of cultural extinction, which can get downright depressing. However, the great thing about traveling is that for every sad story I unveil and undoubtedly sit with for a while, I find another person, ingredient, or culinary tradition that is all about revival and redemption.
My recent trip to Nicaragua was all about this positive spirit, reminding me of the National Geographic documentaries I used to watch as a kid. I’d be mesmerized by the schools of salmon swimming upstream to spawn at the top of our Northwestern river systems. Without fail, there is always that last fish you’re not sure will make it, and the cameras always made a point of telling his story. If you’re anything like me, you’re always rooting for that fish. Nicaragua, despite a century of constant struggles and hardships, is finally reaching the top of that proverbial stream.
Nicaragua is an overlooked destination for travelers, to say the least. Roughly the size of New York State, the country boasts two huge freshwater lakes, Managua and Nicaragua, as well as ocean borders to the east and west. In fact, it’s believed the name Nicaragua means “surrounded by water” and stems from one of the many indigenous languages. The country is visually stunning and scenic, with tropical lowlands, sandy beaches, and narrow coastal plains interrupted by volcanoes. Hundreds of small islands and cays lie on the eastern shores, providing some of the best “let’s get lost” islands in Central America.
A LITTLE HISTORY...
In 1972, a massive earthquake destroyed the downtown in the nation’s capital, Managua. Much of what had been there needed to be rebuilt in a new location. The old downtown is nearly deserted. The businesses all moved, so the residential area around the old city center is nearly abandoned. The old presidential palace, Hall of the People, and the national museum are overrun by squatters. Nobody thinks it’s safe. So with the new city that was erected five miles away, it’s sort of an odd town, missing a vibrant cultural center. Additionally, the area has been plagued by hurricanes, most recently 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which devastated the country.
The people of Nicaragua experienced a huge political transformation as well. Although Nicaragua declared independence from Spain in 1821, it wasn’t able to stand on its own two feet until recently. The country was mostly ruled by the Spanish elite until the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, which resulted in a short-lived civil war that brought a committed band of Marxist Sandinista guerrillas to power. Although the country’s free elections in 1990, 1996, and 2001 all defeated the Sandinistas, it wasn’t until Daniel Ortega’s reelection in 2006 that the country could seriously start rebuilding. Nicaragua seems well on its way to greatness. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that there are no more natural disasters, no more revolutions for a while, and that Nicaragua will get a chance to bloom on its own. Nicaragua has the lowest crime rate in Central America. It is also the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti.
What I love about this country is that despite the hardships, earthquakes, storms, and revolutions, Nicaraguans are some of the most resilient, kind, caring, and open people I’ve met. They are for the most part poor, and yet everyone shares everything with guests. On my first day there, I met up with Sergio Zepeda in his small town of Masaya. He’s a guitar maker now, but he used to be a famous musician in a boy band, sort of like the Nicaraguan Menudo.
Sergio asks if I’ve had a chance to eat the iguana eggs. I haven’t, so he leads me over to a table tended by a crone with three bowls in front of her, each filled with a light tomato porridge. Floating in the bowl are a dozen small golf-ball-size eggs. The embryo is encased in a soft, fibrous shell that you bite into before you suck out the contents. A horrific methodology, but pretty darn tasty. Very much like a chicken egg, but smaller and with a thinner, metallic flavor.
A DELICIOUS RIDE
I spent the next day on a bus from Managua to Estelí, a town high up in the mountains. You catch the bus at Mayoreo Market, roughly ten minutes from the airport. The buses are big American-style school buses, circa 1968, and I finally selected mine, a shimmering red-and-silver beast named Tranquilo No. 7. Every bus has a slick name. Before we hopped on our selected bus, we picked up some nut brittle from one of the hawkers, then set out on the Gringo Trail and headed north on the Pan-American Highway. I quickly discovered that a lengthy Nicaraguan bus ride is like a mobile progressive meal. Every time we stopped, kids and older men rushed onto the bus carrying pieces of fruit, chopped watermelon, doughnuts, whatever it might be. By the time you reach your destination, you’re stuffed. We ate quesillo, a white cheese served in a plastic bag with vinegar chilies and tortilla, as well as cuajada, a curdled cheese made at a farm on a hill high above the highway. My favorite dish was vigorón. It was shredded cabbage topped with pork cracklings and dressed with lime and orange juice and bits of sliced tomatoes. It was fresh and crunchy, and it totally hit the spot after I had spent the day in a hot bus. After disembarking, I wandered around Estelí, checking out the amazing produce market there.
Later, I hooked up with a pal who lives in the area. We hung out in Estelí for a while, eventually making our way north into the foothills of the Cloud Forest. We stopped at a truck-stop place called Don Juan Papaya’s for a little bowl of soup, and a short while later at Antojitos, where I met some of my friend’s Peace Corps buddies. We ate some grilled armadillo and grilled boa constrictor in a restaurant that specializes in this local fare; the food was superb, and I was full.
A PERFECT CUP OF COFFEE
We spent that evening at a place called Selva Negra, an old coffee plantation turned eco-hotel. The howler monkeys kept me up most of the night, but it was worth it to wake up in absolutely stunning surroundings, with a dense tropical rain forest high above the hot plains. We finished the drive to Matagalpa that morning to hit the Sol Café. If you’re a coffee connoisseur, add a visit to Sol Café in Matagalpa to your bucket list. The coffee business in Nicaragua is fascinating. Here is a food item representative of the campesinos’ years of struggle against oppressors who’ve exploited their livelihood. However, like the rest of the country, this industry is bouncing back.
The Thanksgiving Coffee Company, which operates out of the Sol Café, is a conglomerate of hundreds of local farmers, some of whom have only a few acres of trees to pick beans from. As a co-op, they sell to coffee companies all over the world. Starbucks, Newman’s Own—you name it, they’re buying coffee from Thanksgiving Coffee. The coffee association hired tasters and blenders to help craft a signature coffee style from beans that hail from different farms. When you see how slick and innovative this system is, you become a believer. This is going to work.
They are a fair-trade coffee company and they receive a fair market price for their goods. A certain percentage from each sale goes to civic works projects such as local clinics or helping rebuild schools. We toured the facility at Sol Café, where local farmers bring their beans to be dried in the sun, graded again, and bagged for selling. Hundreds of laborers work in superb conditions, with benefits, and earn about 20 percent more in their pocket than at other agrarian enterprises in Matagalpa. It’s a really positive story, and just more prrof that Nicaragua is a turnaround country.
TO THE BLUEFIELDS
One of the great experiences along those lines came the next day when we flew to Bluefields, located on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Bluefields is a Creole community, where everyone speaks English with a pronounced Creole lilt. And since there are no roads to the area, Bluefields is cut off from the rest of the country. You can get there only by boat from another port or by taking the one plane a day that stops in the teeny town on its way to Corn Island, a tropical paradise popular with the beach freaks. We spent the night in a hotel above a casino and journeyed the next day to the home of Edna Cayasso, a local grandma who specializes in the traditional Atlantic coast cuisine developed by the first Africans in Bluefields. Edna, her three sons, and the sons’ wives and kids all live in one building, with Edna still ruling the kitchen. During our visit, she made rondón, a traditional Creole dish called “rundown” in Creole communities outside of Spanish-speaking countries. Rondón is a melding of flavors and cultures—born in Africa, filtered through flavors of the Caribbean, and now treasured by small communities who have eaten it for generations.
It’s a thick stew of meat, vegetables, and coconut milk, sturdy with sweet potatoes, plantains, yucca, and starchy tubers called cocos, which remind me of a cross between a cassava and a potato. The ingredients are thrown into a bowl filled with water. As far as protein goes, Edna opted for a chopped, browned wari, which is essentially a wild jungle rat that resembles a peccary. The starches and meat absorb the liquid as it cooks, resulting in a dish as delicious as it is diverse.
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| Rondón |
She served the rondón with coconut rice and beans, coconut bread, and two homemade beverages made from cassava and seaweed. These drinks are called “seaweed pop” and “cassava pop.” The seaweed pop was crafted from a puree of local seaweed, rehydrated with water, and seasoned with nutmeg. It’s more of a sludge than anything else. I politely accepted the nearly undrinkable beverage, but in my head I wanted to run screaming from the table.
On our last day, I had the ultimate uplifting food experience I’d been hoping for in this country of redemptive experiences. We traveled south to Granada, a city where everything comes together —the Pacific, North, Central, and Atlantic regions — both in the people’s food and in their heritage. Granada is a colonial Spanish town that in many ways has remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
You can climb to the top of the church’s bell tower and look out over the rooftops. It’s a sea of gorgeous curved clay-tiled roofs, not an antenna or satellite dish in sight. The smell of cooking fires wafts through the streets. It’s an absolutely charming place, with artisanal chocolate shops, and cozy city parks teeming with visitors and performance artists everywhere you look. The narrow cobblestone streets are a challenge to navigate, only because you spend the whole time craning your neck gazing at all the stunning Spanish Colonial architecture. We were there the night of a big poetry and arts festival, where I had the pleasure of meeting the Nicaraguan vice president as well as a bunch of local dignitaries.
I ended my night at a sleepy little restaurant and hotel where, I admit, my expectations were low. At first glance, Casa San Francisco, a quaint, family-run hotel about three blocks off the main square, was nothing special. However, once I entered the ancient courtyard, I changed my tune. Quiet and beautiful, with a plunge pool surrounded by bougainvillea, the place just had that old Spanish western feel. Upon learning of my arrival, chefs Octavio Gomez and Vernon Hodgson went out of their way to up the ante a little in the kitchen. Vernon decided to reinvent a few rural dishes and raise them up on the altar.
TRADITIONAL DISHES OF GRANADA
They kicked off dinner with historical local fruit flavors, serving a platter of nispero, pera de agua, green mangoes, and star fruit. We washed that course down with a batido, a sapote fruit milk shake. The main dish was quintessentially Nicaraguan with a modern twist— wild iguana, marinated in sour orange, cumin, achiote, and garlic. They roasted the lizard whole, crisping the skin just like duck à l’orange—it was outstanding.
Aged Chontales cheese was the real star of the meal. It’s a small wheel of soft, Muenster-like cheese, served in the ancient style of the Caribbean coast. You allow the cheese to age in the heat of the day, just long enough to produce large maggots. When you open the cheese, these juicy cheese worms, as they call them, are then eaten right along with the cheese, just hundreds of these suckers wriggling on the end of your knife. It’s one of the most horrific and wonderful things I have ever seen on a plate.
The worm origin somehow remains a mystery, scientifically speaking. But I did manage to get the cultural story. One of the chefs explained that the cheese process originates from the time of the very first Sandinista National Liberation Front. During that period, people near the front wouldn’t throw away old cheese because it was so difficult to obtain any food at all in that time of war. Instead, they let the cheese ferment, hanging it in a sack to eliminate the suero, or whey, from the fresh cheese. Once the cheese lost its liquid, it began the process of decomposition. It’s at that time that the cheese develops the worms, which continue to grow as long as you let the cheese ferment. Some people remove the worms and eat them fried; others eat them in their natural state.
The whole idea of eating maggot-laden cheese is enough to boggle most anyone’s mind, but what I couldn’t shake is the idea that a traditional food like worm-filled Chontales cheese has been eradicated from this part of Nicaragua. Octavio admitted he’s been clueless on how to make it, consulting aged family members to resurrect the delicacy. The cheese wasn’t a dying breed—it was already dead and in the ground. When the chef learned I was coming to town, he saw the perfect opportunity to re-create this cheese for an audience that might actually enjoy eating it.
He started out with fresh country cheese, queso casero or queso creolo. (It’s important that you use raw-milk products from rural areas, because dairy products in the city use too much scientific methodology to kill the bacteria and avoid decomposition.) He crafted a basket of plantain leaves, hanging the fresh cheese from it for three days to remove the suero. Next, he rolled the cheese in fresh plantain leaves to hold its shape. Once the cheese begins to decompose, flies will lay their eggs in the rotting matter. On the seventh day, the cheese starts producing eggs, which resemble fine grains of rice. It takes an additional twenty-four hours to hatch the worms. Luis served it to me four days later, which allowed the worms to grow to quite a decent size.
Although nature does much of the work for you, it takes a lot of patience to stick out the two-week-long decomposition period. That, in addition to the fact that the cheese tastes like a rotten-foot bomb went off in your mouth, has a lot to do with its phasing out. The cheese flavor is strong and pungent— something I adore. It reminded me of the washed-rind cheese Stinking Bishop, which I eat whenever I can find some, but this one has the bonus of the wriggling worms busting out of it. Suffice to say, there’s not a big market for Chontales cheese riddled with maggots, despite the desirable protein in those worms. And the process can goof up on you if the cheese doesn’t lose its liquid. If that happens, the flavor will be kept even more rotten and putrefied and you can’t eat it. So there is a very fine balance here. This isn’t Fear Factor food, this is good cooking.
The most disgusting-looking food is often the best-tasting. As foul an idea as it is to shove a runny, smelly fromage, riddled with something you’d rather bait a fishing hook with, into your mouth, it was pretty darn tasty. Eating outside your comfort zone allows you to acknowledge the baggage that you carry into each meal, that evil corruptive contempt prior to investigation, which thankfully can disappear pretty quickly.
By Andrew Zimmern in "Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Foods", Delacorte Press,USA, 2011, excerpts pp. 77-86. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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