Sweet Treats around the World by Timothy G. Roufs Ph.D. & Kathleen Smyth Roufs

Author:Timothy G. Roufs Ph.D. & Kathleen Smyth Roufs [Timothy G. Roufs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610692212
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Further Reading

Jaffrey, Madhur. At Home with Madhur Jaffrey: Simple, Delectable Dishes from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

"Pakistan." Food in Every Country. Accessed August 14, 2013. http://www.foodbycountry.com/Kazakhstan-to-South-Africa/Pakistan.html.

"Pakistani Food." iFood.TV. Accessed August 15, 2013. http://www.ifood.tv/network/pakistani.

Peru

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Both the ancient Incas and modern-day Peruvians are well known for their potato dishes as southern Peru is the original home of the potato, now sprouting in over 4,000 types. One staple potato-like tuber still grown high in the Andes, primarily for home consumption by Quechua and Aymara descendants of the Inca, is sweet oca, a prized tuber that gets its name from the Quecha language. Traditional Andean preparation methods expose oca to the sunlight in a manner that reduces the acid content of these tubers to the point where they are served as a sweet. "Like many other Peruvian roots they come in two classes: the sweet, which may be eaten raw, cooked, or sun-dried and made into causi, which is described as tasting like dried figs and was used as a sweetener before cane sugar was available; and the bitter, which is freeze-dried and made into a storable product called ckaya" (Coe 1994). In the Quechua language, the oca are still known as wayk'u (boiling) and miki'i (sweet/delicious), and they differ genetically as well as linguistically. "Sweet oca" is a use-category, and constitutes the most-favored type, but the two kinds of oca do also form distinct genetic clusters. Oca was so important that Inca law regulated its planting, storage, distribution, and "how they should be treated" (Coe 1994). Whether the devoted caretaking was in part related to the fact that Inca considered oca an aphrodisiac is unknown. While sweet oca is primarily grown today for family use, restaurants now feature sweet oca mash as part of cocina novoandina, the nouveau Andean cuisine. Oca is being touted today as a symbolically important part of cocina novoandina, which also makes use of Amazonian fruits and other traditional sweet roots.

The Inca traditionally also ate the sweet roots of achira, another staple crop, especially at a winter solstice festival honoring the sun god held in their capital of Cuzco. The Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, is today the second largest festival in South America, and at the great new year festival Peruvians still share and eat the sweet achira.

Ancient Inca and modern-day Peruvians, of course, also used honey and ripe fruits as and in sweet treats. Today, for example, the sweet native fruit lucuma is one of the most popular ice-cream flavors. Inca mainly used lucuma, papaya, plums, cucumbers, avocados, and caimitos, the "star apple." In addition, they had a local sweet tasting fruit, pacay (guamas), a large bean-pod like fruit now known also as "ice-cream bean" due to its refreshing sweet flavor and sugar-rich smooth-textured pulp. Pacay and lucuma were so important to the ancient Peruvians that they depicted them in their ceramics. So valued were the pacay that the Inca emperor sent a basketful of pacay along with gold and silver to Francisco Pizarro as a gift.

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