Part Eight: Santiago, Chile

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Day Thirty-two

After breakfast we drove to the picturesque town of Pinaflor to meet our hosts for next Saturday's press conference. But when we entered the restaurant compound we found it locked, so we sat in the adjoining sunny open courtyard and waited for our host to arrive. I noticed a small, bushy, resinous tree with short trunk and a compact, rounded, spreading crown. Its bark was reddish-brown, rough, and furrowed into scaly ridges. It resembled some sort of pine. Strewn around its base were a number of large nut-like seed pods. One of our party suggested that this was a special tree whose nuts, called pinones, were a popular food of the Araucanos,the original inhabitants of Chile. I was fascinated, and urged him to tell me more. 

He explained that an estimated 30 million aboriginal people were living in South America when the Europeans arrived, living as far north as where Santiago is today. Archaeological excavation shows evidence of a great culture dating back 12,000 years. The Spaniards called the Chilean natives Araucanos, but they called themselves Mapuches, or "people of the earth." These early inhabitants of Chile had socially complex pre-Columbian cultures, surpassed only by the Inca. The Mapuches, although farmers by nature, put up the strongest resistance to the arrival of the Spaniards to the American continent.Today, descendants of these peoples live in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northwestern Argentina, and Chile.

We peeled a few nuts and tried them on the spot. They were delicious, and reminded me of large, oily mild flavoured pine nuts. I am sure they would have made a superb pesto sauce. Later on, I did some homework and discovered that this tree was known as Pinus edulis, or the Two-needle Pinyon. The nuts from this tree are apparently also extremely popular in North America where they are known as pinyon nuts, and Indian nuts. They were also a popular food of the early indiginous Navajo Indians, who harvest the nuts even today.

Our second night of classes were another amazing culinary triumph. The boys and girls appreciated the high level of hands-on tasks allotted to them, like making the panir cheese by themselves
(I had shown them how at yesterday's class), and producing fresh hot chapatis, India's premier flatbread, from scratch. The thinly-rolled breads all obediently puffed like balloons when carefully dry pan-baked then cooked over the naked flames. 

In our early correspondence, Adikesava had asked me to design a menu with a large variety of vegetable curries, so I had chosen some of my favourites. Tonight I showed the students how the humble pumpkin and potato can be transformed into something magnificent (Gujarati Pumpkin Curry and Masala Potatoes). The succulent, spongy doughnuts submerged in fresh, creamy strawberry yogurt, malpoura, were memorable.

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