Chef’s Sunday: A Miraculous Sweet, Doña Pepa’s Turrón

Sunday, October 14th, 2012 at 11:38 am 
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Turrón de Doña Pepa

Turrón de Doña Pepa (http://es.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Turrón_de_Doña_Pepa)

 

By The Sunday Chef  (Translated by David Knowlton)

Every year in October people celebrate the passage of the Lord of Miracles through the streets of Lima.  Thousands of faithful accompany the miraculous image praying and asking for improvements in health or solutions to the problems that they suffer.  But that is not all.  A traditional dessert also makes its presence known in October, the Turrón de Doña Pepa Read the rest of this entry

Twitt

Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas’ Energy Draws Visitors and Locals

Friday, June 22nd, 2012 at 12:36 pm 
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Big Sky over the Plaza de Armas

Big Sky over the Plaza de Armas

By Walter Coraza Morveli (translated by David Knowlton)

A green and leafy space with flowing water that opens among orange tile roofs, Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas provides an attractive refuge at the same time it is the most important place in the city. If Cuzco is the navel of the earth, the Plaza is where much of its nourishing energy is created as Cuzco’s people and people of many cultures come together. Read the rest of this entry

Twitt

Palm Sunday in Cuzco

Sunday, April 1st, 2012 at 11:43 am 
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Taking Palm Frond Crosses to Church

Taking Palm Frond Crosses to Church

By David Knowlton (Photography by Walter Coraza Morveli and Hebert Edgardo Huamani Jara)

Cuzco enters into a period of ritual intensity, today, with Palm Sunday.  The plaza will fill with people buying and carrying palm fronds, some going to mass and others not, as Catholicism and Cusco come together and split.  Whether Catholics in the style favored by the Archbishop or not, the people enter into the holiest days of the year, when intensity and passion fill the plaza, streets and homes of this Inca city with some five hundred years of Catholicism. Read the rest of this entry

Twitt

Giant White Corn, Cuzco’s Heart

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at 5:45 am 
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White Corn and the First Haircut

Cuzco's White Corn at the Center of Ritual

Peru has many distinctive foods, but the ”giant white corn of Cuzco”, known for its large kernels, is one of the first to obtain a denomination of origin.  The white corn gained this honor after an arduous bureaucratic process in 2006 while a year ago, January 2010, the traditional “knowledges, uses and technologies” associated with this corn in Cuzco’s Sacred Valley  gained another distinction as “National Cultural Patrimony”.

In both cases, the distinction celebrates a relationship between food and place and between food and culture.   The long mountain valley through which the Vilcanota river meanders is the heart of Cuzco, both now and in times past.  It is a complex ecosystem in which high mountain pastures and potato  fields are connected with the broad fields of corn of the valley’s floor in a single system of culture and food.  And, the production of white corn is at its center. Read the rest of this entry

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