The Latin American Cookbook | Virgilio Martínez
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Virgilio Martínez: I'm Virgilio Martinez. I'm from Peru. My cookbook is The Latin American Cookbook. I live in Lima, Peru, and I have the restaurant Central.
Suzy Chase: First of all, a huge congratulations to you and your wife, Pia. Your restaurant, Central, in Lima, Peru was crowned number four on the World's 50 Best Restaurant list. I am so curious to know what you think it takes to get on that list.
Virgilio Martínez: Well, I think it's just a result of our work, of our discipline, hard work, passion, and many other factors that we put on our cooking, on our space, on the restaurant, on whatever we do. I think it's part of enjoying this and making this a place where people feel the need to come and enjoy an experience.
Suzy Chase: Now, on to the cookbook. So for people who don't know, this book includes 600 recipes, spans 22 countries, and aims to give the region's cuisine some long overdue recognition. What were you looking for in the recipes? What was the criteria for a recipe to make the cut?
Virgilio Martínez: We tried to articulate a history, an anthropology of us as a place. Part of doing the criteria, doing recipes, we are picking the ones that probably are needed to be understood in this time. They are very traditional recipes that are very important for our gastronomy in this region, so the idea was to make them visible. So we have chosen the ones you will see, probably you will find somewhere in Latin America. And the ones that you will see because you got to go to a very specific place, let's say up in the mountains of la Corderie de los Andes in Colombia or just one specific place in the Amazon, in the jungle of Venezuela, where probably you will never get there. So, that was the main idea.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of recipes, I've heard you talk about how the wrong recipes were sent out to the world, the heavy, the fatty recipes, and the fruits and vegetables were largely left out.
Virgilio Martínez: Well, that's some stigma about Latin American cuisine. People have this idea that we do heavy stews with lots of chili pepper, lots of spices, and very strong food, heavy food. And there's also this idea of huge conception of meat in Brazil, in Argentina, Uruguay. We're actually showing in the past few years how many vegetables, how much fresh food we see in Latin America. If we count a variety of grains in the Cordeiro, in the Andes, in the Amazon, the wild aromatics that you find in the altitude everywhere in the mountains, and then the fruit that you find in the Amazon, which probably some of them have never seen before. Even for us, it's something new to explore. I would say like 50% of the vegetables are pretty much unknown in the world.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. I've heard you talk about how there are a lot of ingredients we take for granted. Should we be more thoughtful about the origin and the context and the history of something like corn that we take for granted?
Virgilio Martínez: I don't know if people go to the fields where the corn is growing, and you get a chance to speak to the person who is in charge of the farm, and you get to see how special is growing corn. For instance, in Peru, in Cusco, in the Sacred Valley, we got a farm where we grow different species of corn, and this is just pure magic to see. So we try to push in the book a bit, encourage people to go to farmer's market and speak to the farmer, like speaking to your doctor.
Suzy Chase: To understand the deep soul of Latin American cuisine, what is one ingredient home cooks should be aware of?
Virgilio Martínez: The oil that we use whenever we cook. Just try to be more diverse on what oil. Like if you are using like a pork fat, which is very good, if you are using avocado oil, olive oil, if you are using pumpkin seed oil, that fat. Keep exploring and changing the uses of fat on your food, which is important, to add some fat on your food.
Suzy Chase: This is not just a cookbook, it's a historical and culinary map of Latin America. So what's the biggest lesson you learned from doing this project?
Virgilio Martínez: How important is tomato for the world. You know. The first tomato that the world saw was in the Andes of Peru. The area is between Bolivia and Peru, somewhere there. I'm talking about a tomato, right? A tomato probably we consume once a week or whatever, like probably every day, I don't know. These tomatoes coming from the same family of potatoes, right? So they also grow potatoes. Potatoes are from again from South America, and then all these quinoas and different grains that are becoming so popular, like Chia. How much we're producing cacao and coffee, and how much we are exporting to the world, and different vegetable oils and different fruits coming from the jungle, from the Amazon. Again, the corn. We export ingredients, right? Produce, but not many ideas. It's time for us to produce ideas that will be doing good for the people.
Suzy Chase: Every single recipe has a headnote story to give us a ton of context. So people can also use this as a history of Latin America. One of the 600 recipes that caught my eye was on page 90, potatoes cooked in an earthen oven. The potato is a very important, if not the most popular ingredient in Peru, but most of us don't have earthen ovens. So I'd love to hear a little more about the inclusion of this recipe and the history of it.
Virgilio Martínez: So it's just a perfect example of this local cuisine, where the food doesn't travel much. I mean, actually don't travel, like they harvest and they cook it in the same thing where they harvest the potatoes. So they cover the potatoes with soil. They warm the soil, and they cover the whole thing, and after like 45 minutes, you uncover this soil, and you see the potatoes. And you actually eat the potatoes with soil. So the name of the preparation is called huatia, and this is happening in the Andes where people harvest the potatoes. They do this preparation just as example of gratitude of the harvest.
Suzy Chase: So the other night I made your recipe for scallops and Pil Pil. Is that how you pronounce it?
Virgilio Martínez: Yeah. Pil Pil.
Suzy Chase: Pil Pil sauce on page 222. This is a delicious, simple recipe. Could you describe this, and tell me about Pil Pil sauce.
Virgilio Martínez: I personally love scallops. I enjoy the technique of doing the Pil Pil sauce, which is something that is coming from Spain. We started to do this melting pot, this natural fusion, where you see some like Pil Pil sauce, something very Spanish and then you put something very Italian and something very Japanese, something very Chinese, something very African. So these recipes, most of them are part of 500 years of fusion, which is a natural fusion by immigrants.
Suzy Chase: Now, to my segment called "dream dinner party," where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why. And for this segment, it can only be one person.
Virgilio Martínez: I enjoy a lot, which doesn't happen much, to dine with my son. This is something for me very important nowadays. In my case, I'm running the restaurants with my wife, and whenever we get back home, our kid is sleeping. We try to get the most of our time to invite my little son to any party restaurant, high-end restaurant, casual restaurant, street vendors, food. So, that would be my boy.
Suzy Chase: How old is he?
Virgilio Martínez: Six.
Suzy Chase: Oh, so cute. Oh, that's such a sweet answer.
Virgilio Martínez: It's just amazing to see this kid getting involved so much into this world of food. See my kid having ceviches and having raw food, having sashimi, and trying African food, trying paella with lobster. I do enjoy seeing my kid be eating like this and having this curiosity I was having when I was maybe like 25 years old. He is doing this process while he is six years old.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Virgilio Martínez: VirgilioCentral on Instagram and Twitter. Facebook, Virgilio Martínez.
Suzy Chase: To purchase the Latin American Cookbook and support the podcast, head on over to cookerybythebook.com. And thanks, Virgilio, for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.
Virgilio Martínez: Thank you.
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