An oft-heard, anguished cry these days chez nous is “there’s nothing to bloody eat in this house except baby food!”. Never actually true and rarely even close to reality, this refrain was aired again earlier this week when, left to my own devices while Amy enjoys a well-deserved week at her family’s shore house, I returned from work and opened the fridge. Having recently watched Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”, I was reminded that the more one looks at something the more curious it appears, and an apparently bereft fridge began to transform before my eyes into a chest of plenty.

Curiouser still, I remembered that the small, peculiar-looking plant that we’d acquired in May which now resembled a bush and was in need of a drink, was none other than Plectranthus amboinicus, known in Puerto Rico as brujo oregano, or wizard’s oregano, and not really thinking about why I was doing it, I snipped off a couple of the fat green leaves and put them in my pocket. After watering the rest of our garden, and in an increasingly possessed mood that I’m blaming on the heatwave we’re enduring rather than the medicinal herbs secreted on my person, I began ransacking the kitchen cupboards, emerging sweaty and slightly crazed with a can of black beans in one fist and a jar of Haitian piklis in the other, convinced that together it all must feature in one kind of voodoo ritual or another.

Remaining somewhat unsure of my intentions but determined to step behind the burners in spite of the stickiness around my gills, I sought counsel from Mirta Yurnet-Thomas’ “A Taste of Haiti”, opening it entirely randomly at page 50 which showed a recipe for “Zepis”, a herb and aromatic vegetable blend used for the marinading of meats. How fortuitous that a rather tough piece of steak appeared, recently defrosted, on the counter? Again, rummaging through the fridge, and convinced that amid the browning and limp assortment of chilled vegetables I spied a white rabbit peeking out, I laid my hands on an onion, some aged scallions, and a head or two of our very own homegrown garlic. Chopping these all roughly and combining them with two tablespoons of piklis plus two additional tablespoons of piklis vinegar to create a marinade, I left the steak to tenderize, and went in search of a cauldron and broomstick.

An hour later, now highly perfumed with the dense, almost skunky, aroma of the brujo oregano in my pocket, and having drawn a blank on both these two sorcerers accoutrements, I started stewing the black beans with the oregano in a plain old saucepan. Some twice-fried green plantains spirited themselves in to tostones in a matter of minutes while the now tender and spicy steak was fired to a medium-rare. Left with a bold marinade and some black beans that though wildly aromatic lacked a little punch, I combined the two while the meat rested, bringing it to a satisfyingly thick and dark hubble-bubble.

Without ear of rat or leg of toad to add to the pot, I was unable to produce a potion that either shrank me or made me enormous (beyond slightly enlarging my already distended belly), but what I produced did have a hint of magic about it. The beans were among the best I have ever made, and the steak, similar examples of which can be found throughout many countries bordering the Caribbean, was satisfyingly piquant and juicy. I can’t speak to the exact causes of the fugue-state that brought on this bout of fevered concocting, and evidence of it persisting through the plating of the beans can be found in the plantain chip in the form of a pointy hat, but I can recommend that one be careful around ones fridge lest a parallel world beckon you from within.

The hardworking folks behind this non-award winning blog are enjoying a deserved warm weather break on Florida’s Gulf Coast right now. No offense to the locals, but we did not pick this particular destination for its well-known and highly prized food culture. Instead, it was selected as a fitting location for our first post-baby trip that would be easy to get to, easy to negotiate in situ and with guaranteed good weather, something we’ve been craving after a hard winter made tougher by a sleepless infant.

However, we are happy to discover that we didn’t touch down in a food desert at all, and we could have posted about the delicious and moist blackened mahi-mahi sandwiches we had yesterday at Randy’s Fish Market, but after a preparatory month of near-total meat deprivation that helped us fit into our bathing suits with less embarrassment, we were feeling decidedly carnivorous. So, here are some grilled cross-cut beef short ribs, leftover from the tablita parrillada we gorged on during last night’s visit to Martin Fierro, an Argentine-run parrilla hidden away in a strip-mall on the other side of town. Named for the central character of Argentina’s famous epic poem by Jose Hernandez, it’s a faithful recreation of the parrillas we so enjoyed almost exactly two years ago during our visit to Argentina and Uruguay, in every respect but the strip-mall.

Joining them were a quick salsa criolla and some rounds of fried yucca. Sure, it’s not exactly beach food, and we stripped off at the pool with noticeably less enthusiasm today, but it was delicious and exactly the kind of indulgence we had been looking forward to for weeks. And, as every Englishman knows, a little of what you fancy does you good.

Guyana, sitting on the top right of the land mass of South America, is among the least known and most mysterious of that continent’s countries, something that is almost as true today as it was when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used it as the setting for his 1904 novel, The Lost World. Home to the most intact and least spoiled rain forests in South America, Guyana’s biodiversity is simultaneously staggering and largely undocumented, and cascading from its mossy, permanently cloud-topped peaks, fall several of the world’s largest waterfalls. Guyana is also unique on a human-scale, having the distinction of being the only English-speaking nation in South America, and, perhaps because of this, of having been among the world’s largest producers of natural latex for the manufacture of cricket balls

The cricket-loving population is a heterogenous mix of Indian, African, European and native peoples, roughly in that order of volume. However, like much of the English-speaking Caribbean, Guyana also has a tiny, but significant, Cantonese population — a legacy of the same forces at work during the days of the British Empire that also relocated large numbers of Tamil and Gujurati Indians there to work as indentured plantation workers. Numerically insignificant, the lasting impact of these Hong Kong Chinese has been on local commerce and the cementing of certain southern Chinese dishes, the most popular of which is chow mein, in the diverse local cuisine.

Of course, the chow mein enjoyed in Guyana bears only a certain resemblance to that eaten in Canton and other parts of China, I am sure. Indeed, Chinese food all over the western world has been amended to suit local tastes and ingredients, and so it is in Guyana where access to even basic Chinese staples like soy sauce was not always possible. Similarly, the inevitable mixing between local gastronomic cultures, namely the addition of a sly pinch of West Indian curry powder that seems to find its way into all kinds of unlikely dishes across the Caribbean, is what makes this chow mein recipe inherently Guyanese, not to mention the bright yellow noodles, made with soft wheat and plenty of food coloring. Other local variations on the original include the addition of yellow squash and green beans.

We had never eaten this dish before, but we’d experienced it up-close at several West Indian parades both in New York City and London, where it was served in trays with plastic forks as street food, and where the searing perfume of garlic and curry managed to cut right through the ripe fragrance of perspiring dancers. In truth, the flavors, with the combination of curry and soy sauce, aren’t that dissimilar to the popular Singapore noodles found throughout South-East Asia and at many British Chinese restaurants, and they should feel relatively familiar to anyone who has eaten both Chinese and Indian take-out food before. So, while you (or we) may never get to visit exotic Guyana and witness first hand either it’s beautiful landscape or delicious cuisine, you should try making this dish. It only takes about twenty minutes to prepare and will satisfy a host of your ethnic food cravings.

For more authentic Caribbean recipes, check out Cynthia at Tastes Like Home.

We understand from our Colombian friend Juan Camilo (who longtime readers may remember from this podcast) that the Bogota nightlife is on a par with any of the world’s party capitals, and that when it comes to late night boozing, the aguardiente-loving natives of Colombia’s capital are among the most experienced. It should come as no surprise then that they have also spent some time figuring out effective cures to the inevitable DT’s the morning after — something that I am sure Charlie Sheen, with his well-known enthusiasm for the odd briefcase of Colombia’s most famous export, already knows about.

Across South America, hangover cures tend towards the liquid — Peru’s famous leche de tigre (“tiger’s milk”, the citrusy liquor leftover from ceviche preparation) and the shrimp and coconut milk stews of Brazil — and are more similar to chicken soup as a cure-all than the meat and starch heavy plates bleary-eyed North Americans and Brits swear by. In caldo de costilla, Colombians have a dish that may well raise the dead as easily as cure the hungover. An intense beefy broth surrounding hunks of braised short ribs and root vegetables, and garnished with lime juice, chopped onions and, occasionally, aji (a spicy vinegary condiment), it restores dehydrated cells, fills the growling belly, and enlivens the palate in one fell swoop.

As a devoted family man himself, Charlie Sheen might appreciate the nutritive value of such a soup on a weeknight as much as after a 7-day Vegas bender, and indeed, such were the circumstances of our own enjoyment of it recently (the former, not the latter). Worn thin by the fearsome demands of work and family, this soup helped us pull body and soul together on a Monday night and gird ourselves for another grinding week. We may not have leaped out of bed the next morning, but that had more to do with us not having been on a drug called Charlie Sheen than anything attributable to the soup.

During his show on Panama, Anthony Bourdain observed that Chinese food somehow gets shinier the further west one goes. He might also have mentioned that it changes in other ways throughout the western hemisphere too, on the whole, becoming less and less Chinese-like. In a similar way to Panama, to which Chinese laborers flocked to help build the eponymous canal, Peru experienced large-scale immigration of Cantonese mine workers during the latter half of the 19th century too, and still has the largest Asian population of any nation in South America. Largely isolated from its home country for the intervening century and a half, the Peruvian Chinese community, like many New World immigrant groups, developed its own distinct peculiarities.

Regular readers of this blog will know of our penchant for the immigrant groups of the Americas, where they came from, how and why they arrived, and how they went about creating their new and entirely unique cultures on foreign soils, often in the teeth of vicious discrimination from those who had arrived earlier. So it was for the Chinese in Peru. Principally from the Chinese province of Guangdong, these immigrants were not just coming for a short time to work, earn a living, and then return home. In a way that is almost unimaginable for us today, given the global mobility many of us have, those who journeyed to South America to work in its silver, copper and silicate mines had to virtually abandon any thought of ever seeing their homes again. It must have been all the harder without any of the comforts of home either – as traditional Cantonese ingredients were (mostly) unavailable in 19th-century Peru.

Culinarily, this isolation and a lack of familiar foodstuffs led to the development of an entirely Peruvian-Chinese phenomenon known as Chifa. Derived from a local corruption of the Mandarin “chi fan” or “eat rice”, chifa cuisine is characterized by somewhat curious ingredient pairings. In the most popular chifa dish, lomo saltado – a beef stir-fry, this manifests itself in the carbohydrate combo of rice and french fries, and the flavoring mix of soy sauce, red wine and spicy Peruvian yellow aji peppers. Purists may quibble that chifa is less fusion cuisine and more mish-mash food given the apparent clumsy pairing of local meat and potatoes with Cantonese stir-fry, but I, for one, find that lomo saltado actually offers the same salty, spicy, sour and sweet tastes typical of Chinese cooking, just with different ingredients.

Understandably popular among hard-working Cantonese miners, chifa cuisine was also a surprise hit among the higher echelons of Peruvian society, and though initially limited to Lima’s Barrios Altos, chifa restaurants soon began to spring up outside of Chinese neighborhoods too, eventually expanding across the capital (where there are now more than 6,000 chifa restaurants) to most parts of the country. Indeed, so popular has it become that today one can find Chifas, as they’re known, throughout the rest of South America. From Argentina and Chile all the way north to Venezuela, chifa cuisine is almost as well known as Peru’s other great gastronomic export, ceviche. Evidently, this trend is growing among the Yanquis too: Chef Jose Garces of Iron Chef America fame, opened a chifa-style eatery in Philadelphia recently, naming it, rather unimaginatively, Chifa.

On a visit to Argentina, Anthony Bourdain commented that the common Porteno carb combo of pizza and chickpea faina must have been invented by drunk people, and rice with fries would seem to fall into the same category. Sure, double starch is weird, but that doesn’t mean to say it’s not good, drunk or sober.

Those of you who raised your eyebrows at the very idea of lentils mixed with chocolate might be forgiven for thinking that we have lost our tiny minds, that too long around infant children, cooing and a-goo-goo-gooing, has softened our already mushy brains beyond repair. Indeed, had we not gone out on a limb ourselves and given this a bash, I daresay we would be right there among you sucking our teeth and rolling our eyes, but, like many foods that turn out to be extra delicious, a small leap of faith is necessary.

Rather like the sensation you experience shortly after realizing you put on your underwear inside out, eating lentils with chocolate is initially unsettling. That something as earthy and savory as lentils can work with luxurious chocolate is certainly a surprise, but a very dark, high cocoa-solids chocolate does have a distinctly savory quality, and I don’t have to remind you that until some bright spark mixed it with milk and sugar, chocolate was an exclusively savory product for centuries.

The origins of this unusual dish are unclear, or at least we were unable to discover them using Google Translate, and we cannot lay claim to being its inventors, but a recent flick through some old photos reminded me that I had been intrigued by it a while ago. Those among you with long memories, may remember that back in the fall of last year, when we made the traditional Argentine dish locro de mondongo, we mentioned having eaten some Buenos Aires’ favorite empanadas at La Cupertina, a charming little cafe in the Palermo Soho district of that glorious city. And the especially keen-eyed may have noticed that in a photo illustrating said post featuring the window of said cafe the specialties of the house were listed, including lentejas al chocolate.

Certainly not a common dish anywhere, lentils with chocolate can be found on both sides of the Atlantic in northern Spanish, especially Asturian, and Portuguese cuisine, as well as throughout Latin America. The lentils are usually served soupily with a humble garnish of fried, garlicky croutons and a good glass of red wine, but in our own unique, whimsical manner, we paired them with a monster pimenton-spiked pork chop, and attempted a strange kind of winter scene as a garnish, decorating the plate with steamed asparagus tip “Christmas trees” gaily adorned with festive ribbons made from roasted red pepper strips. In quite what role the roasted pearl onions were cast remains uncertain. Perhaps they resemble over-sized tree ornaments, perhaps not. Maybe we are going soft in the head after all.

Being the innate pessimist that I am, watching a small boat being knocked around like a dodgem car on the rollicking, blue-grey seas at the normally placid Jersey Shore this past weekend put me in mind of the Costa de Muerte, the coast of death, on Spain’s north-west coast, where Galician fisherman have taken their lives in their hands for generations. [In a quirk of editorial fate, I may, unwittingly, have taken inspiration for this flight of fancy from the cover (then unopened) of this month's Bon Appetit, but as you will see, if you persevere, there is a mite more detail below than Barbara Fairchild typically provides.]

The ocean’s bounty has never been translated into material riches in that part of Spain, and even in modern times, in spite of renewed interest centered around its albariño and mencia wines, artisanal cheeses, and gooseneck barnacles, it remains comparatively impoverished. Consequently, Gallegos have, for generations, cast their fortunes in the wind and sought better lives for themselves in other parts of Spain and the New World, including Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba.

Interestingly, and this is mostly unrelated, during researching this post, I learned that Fidel Castro’s father was one such Galician emigrant. His mother was also of Galician descent. In fact, Castro is a common Galician family name that is derived from the circular stone-built houses or “castles” of the Castreña — the Celtic Bronze Age culture that left a number of characteristic walled villages across the region. [Ironically, of course, Galician heritage is perhaps the only thing that the communist Fidel shared with his fascist counterpart Francisco Franco, but it was enough for the former to take up an invitation from the-then leader of Spain to visit their shared "home" region in the 1960s.]

The late 19th century marked the beginning of mass Galician emigration to the New World, and an unknown, but significant, number of Gallegos emigrated to Argentina and Uruguay during this period. Today, the two New World cities with the greatest number of people of Galician descent are those countries’ respective capitals, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, so much so, that it is not uncommon for Porteños to refer to all Spaniards as “Gallegos”.

Regular visitors to this blog will, perhaps, recall last April’s post about Argentine pizza which ventured a sociological theory on the impact Italian immigrants have had on the culture and food of their adopted country. It is just possible that I overstated things a little. You see, beyond its magnificent meats, Argentinian cuisine’s next most famous item is not, as I said, its pizza or pasta, but its empanadas. To explain this, I had originally intended to embark on a lengthy discussion of how Galician immigrants were behind the development of the iconic Argentine empanada. Sadly, I could find no evidence whatsoever to support this hypothesis, especially since Argentine empanadas resemble more closely the typical Spanish empanadilla than the much larger Galician empanada, and were likely to have been popular in Argentina long before Gallegos arrived en masse. Instead, a brief description of how we came across Galician empanadas in a veritable sea of Argentine-style pies during our stay in Buenos Aires last year will have to suffice. Sorry about that.

We snacked almost constantly on empanadas with a variety of fillings throughout our ten days in Buenos Aires, and began taking their quality and ubiquity mostly for granted. It was only later on in our visit when we came across Pizzeria la Americana (aka La Reina de las Empanadas), an established bakery and cafe a block from the Palacio del Congreso de Argentina, that we realized not all empanadas are created equal. In this giant place that takes up most of a city block, a bevvy of savory pastries, large and small, sat glowing warmly under spotlights behind glass screens. These piles of regular small empanadas beckoned, crustily, at us, and we would have reverted to habit and ordered a slew of them had we not spied some giant pies on individual cake stands next to them. We hadn’t seen anything like these before — two or more inches thick, baked to a shiny golden patina and filled with, among other things, greens, boiled eggs and ham — yet they were also described as empanadas. What were they?

Even more confusingly, one of the large ones was labelled “pascualina”, a moniker for pies we had come across only once before, and then in Genoa, to describe that city’s special Easter variation of the spinach/chard and ricotta torta de bietole. Could these pies be variations on that? We weren’t sure, and couldn’t summon enough of our tourist Spanish to ask what might turn into something of a lengthy and garbled question about nomenclature, semantics and gastronomic anthrolopology.

Argentina’s ethnic mix has contributed to a unique South American melding of Iberian and Italic culture and cuisine, in which a pizzeria could quite legitimately describe itself as the queen of the empanada, while simultaneously serving Genoese-influenced Galician specialties without breaking stride or encouraging skepticism from potential customers. We were momentarily confused by it all, but decided there was nothing to do but roll with it, and so ordered a couple of giant slices of the empanada Gallega de pollo, which turned out to be a delicious, if over-generous, appetizer for our subsequent lunch at one of the city’s oldest Italian restaurants.

Neither of us had ever had a pie quite like this before. It didn’t really resemble the free-form tuna and sardine empanadas I’d tried in Santiago de Compostela and Vigo years ago, nor was it like an American-style pot pie we’re so familiar with, brimming with sauce and chunky vegetables. With a bready, pizza-like crust, top and bottom, and baked in a dish about the same dimensions as a deep-pan pizza, the filling was a moist and peppery combination of chicken, sauted greens, onions and red pepper. It was absolutely delicious and we have both been raving about it ever since, but everytime we’ve tried to make any of the many variations on Galician empanadas, we’ve failed to produce anything similar, nor have any recipes for Argentine empanadas worked out the right way.

In truth, the, what I’m going to call, Argentine-style empanada Gallega that we did make, wasn’t quite as good as the one we ate in Buenos Aires. The dough was too firm, not bready enough, and I should have tried using a modified pizza dough instead, but the filling more than made up for its shortcomings. In place of chicken, we slow-roasted half a Long Island duck that we had left over in the freezer from the hand-rolled Tuscan pasta with duck ragu and mixed it with sauted kale, green pepper, garlic, smoked paprika (pimenton) and lots of onions.

Experimentation on this front will continue because I could usefully spend some more time beautifying my rather scruffy attempt at a decoration, but also because one empanada fed the both of us for dinner that night and for lunch three subsequent days, and it just got better with each passing meal. Feel free to mess around with the dough recipe to your heart’s content, just as we will when we make this again, and, of course, the filling is entirely up to you too. Duck is kind of a luxury, and chicken, tuna, sardines, boiled eggs, a variety of vegetables, or plain old ground beef, would be absolutely fine. You should also feel free, should you feel geeky enough, to develop your own specious theories about the development of various global cuisines. They probably won’t be any less likely than mine.

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A quick, sweet post to kick-start your weekend about a ridiculously simple, ridiculously delicious Argentinian dessert – Chocotorta. This very popular dulce de leche-spiked, layered dessert reminds me a bit of tiramisu with an Argentine twist. What could be more Argentinian than dulce de leche? When Joan of Foodalogue revisited her Culinary Tour food event (which I love, by the way) to represent South America, I looked at the list and saw Argentina and thought about all the Argentinian specialities we still wanted to make for the blog. We had done so many Argentine posts before (including locro, milanesas, choripan and the ubiquitous parilla delicacies), but never anything sweet. With the deadline looming, I quickly did what I could to recreate the fabulous, famous Chocotorta. It’s not perfect, but it sure was delicious.

Just like any famous American desserts, the Chocotorta can be made in a variety of ways.  It seems as though different families make it different ways.  Two things that are constant in every family’s recipe are chocolate wafer cookies or biscuits and dulce de leche.  Some soak their cookies/biscuits in coffee before they begin to layer, others soak it in milk, cafe con leche or even sweet wine. Many use a mixture of only cream cheese and dulce de leche for the filling while others use whipped cream or a mixture of whipped and cream cheese. Some top their chocotorta with icing, chocolate or dulce de leche and others just top it with a final layer of cookies/biscuit.  I take all these variations as a “freedom of choice” – be creative and make your chocotorta the way you want to!

Unfortunately, I had to “wing it” on the chocolate biscuit front because there were only a limited type at my grocery store. Traditionally, the Argentines use the rectangular Chocolinas to do their layering. I used the circular Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafer Cookies (which, after some research are sometimes difficult to find in stores…strange) and even had to throw in a layer of Goya Maria Cookies because I was desperate and ran out of the others (don’t kill me over lack of authenticity, please!). The final result ended up pretty because of the circular cookies and, because I let the flavors meld together for a day, it held together very well and tasted fabulous.

This is most definitely a dessert anyone can make, even someone like me who CAN NOT BAKE. If you can dip, stir and layer, you’re good to go. This recipe probably makes more filling than you need. Do what I did and store it in the freezer for a day when you either want to make another one or (like me) feel like grabbing a spoon and having filling for dessert.

Virtually everywhere they make sausages, and in a lot of places they don’t, some form of sausage in bread combination is sold by street vendors, often to the inebriated, and, in many cases, the consumer is best advised to be under the influence before taking their life in their hands with one of these mystery bag sandwiches. The night I met my wife, for example, I remember being horrified that her sister (who had introduced us earlier in the evening) was reckless enough — even after 50 drinks — to buy an insanitary-looking sausage in a roll from a street vendor in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Where sanitation isn’t the biggest issue, a sense of disappointment often is, with the boring and insipid offerings available at any of the myriad hot dog stands lining almost every Manhattan street exemplifying this. Do not get me wrong, a New York hot dog — pulled from the disquietingly opaque water, slapped into a curiously spongy potato roll, and painted with mustard and an unidentifiable relish – is certainly a real taste of NYC street life, and when you’ve been pounding the city streets for an afternoon, almost enjoyable, but it is not great street food, regardless of what Adam Platt at NYMag says. (feel free to post your own disagreements with me below)

However, the more I travel, the more I realize that these sausage and bread combos can actually be both safe for human consumption and, in some cases, a delicacy. You may remember our merguez frites sandwich of last year, which was not just the best street food we’d ever had, but right up there with the finest sandwiches too. Even the overtly filthy nature of that vendor in Carcassonne failed to put us off. Indeed, it’s probably true that we would risk a searing bout of intestinal drainage on a weekly basis if only merguez frites were readily available.

So, during our recent trip to Argentina we were intrigued by rusty little cabins that we passed throughout Buenos Aires, either parked-up or slumping shack-ily on the sidewalk, emitting wonderfully aromatic smoke and advertizing choripán and morcipán on gaily painted signs. After one particularly lengthy trek across the city from Palermo to Recoleta to the edge of Balvanera, we were ravenous and mentally-prepared for something of questionable hygiene wrapped in a roll and doused with condiments.

Following a tip we had picked up online, we headed to the corner of Avenida Juan B. Justo and Avenida Santa Fe in Palermo [right next to the Palermo Subte stop (D line)], to a very sweaty looking snack bar for a pre-dinner choripán — a chori(zo) on bread (pan). Smaller than our pitifully-sized Brooklyn apartment and decorated with aging posters of scantily-clad beer models, our senses immediately told us that this cafe was exactly the kind of place that would deliver the equal measures of delicious, greasy victuals and stinging doses of the raging squitters we were looking for. [Happily, only the former arrived.]

Your typical sausage and roll combination features a roll that follows the dimensions of the sausage: long and narrow. However, one of the many things I immediately liked about choripáns and morcipáns is that they invert this absolutist relationship on its head. The sausage is split down the center, seared on both “faces” a la plancha and, dripping with bright orange fat, is placed inside a rectangular hunk of French-style bread. Not only is it texturally superior to its flimsy American counterpart, but its increased surface area and the greater density of the bread, make it a far better designed sandwich than the hot dog. As, enclosed in a larger roll, your choice of condiments — in this case, mayonnaise, “golf sauce” (not unlike Russian/Thousand Island dressing), ketchup, mustard, and chimichurri — are less able to escape and damage shirt or shoes, as frequently happens when biting down on the open-topped frankfurter.

Unfortunately, once you go choripán, you can never go back, and their absence from my everyday street food scene has become a source of extreme frustration now that I’m back in New York. Passing-by vendors of the humble hot dog several times a day, I can’t help sneer a little at their meagre offerings of limp weiner and rubbery potato roll, and I mutter to myself that the magnificent, spicy, chewy choripán is a shining light compared to their ghostly reflections.

Happily, choripáns and morcipáns are easy and fun to make in the comfort of your own home and make a great alternative to the unimaginative backyard barbecue staples of weiners and burgers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we couldn’t find Argentine-style chorizo in Brooklyn, but the easy to find, and similarly fresh and soft Colombian and Mexican varieties make worthy replacements, even if they are longer and slimmer than their Argentina counterparts. This past weekend, humming “the choripán man, the choripán man’s really got it going on…” inanely to ourselves, we mixed-up a tangy chimichurri, grilled ourselves some chorizo, and enjoyed a taste of Buenos Aires with a cold beer, even if we had to imagine the warm weather and palm trees.

As Odysseus was nearly drawn to his destruction on the rocks by the enchanting song of the sirens, so your hardy WANF voyagers were almost powerless to resist breaking themselves on the plentiful tables of Uruguay. However, unlike Homer’s hero, for whom women were the main weakness throughout his epic peregrinations, during our recent travels in South America, we found that grilled organs, specifically sweetbreads, are the likely source of our eventual ruin.

A comparatively short (by Odysseian standards) three-hour Buquebus ferry ride from Buenos Aires across the Mar del Plata – the enormously wide and constantly brown estuary of the Rio de la Plata (River Plate) – lies Uruguay’s capital and largest city, Montevideo. Arriving by water feels delightfully old-fashioned, and it allows the visitor to get a sense of the lie of the land in a way that a plane ride cannot. Rather than the confusing meander through a city’s outskirts on the way in from the airport, the city slowly revealed itself to us as we approached it by sea, face-first, so that we could see the way it had been built, outwards from the port.

Centered on the port is Montevideo’s cuidad vieja (old town), which with its faded colonial glory and salty night-time reputation, is immediately charming to the visitor. Only the giant ultra-modern cruise ship towering over everything prevented us from wondering if the ferry hadn’t also been a time machine. The hub of the old town is the Mercado del Puerto, a magnificent Victorian-era market with a skylit roof supported by wrought iron pillars, where the air is thick with the thwack of cleaver on meat, the cries of competing vendors and the sooty warblings of its resident pigeons. It no longer serves as a venue for trading fresh produce, a fact that might be sad if it weren’t now a giant parilla (grill/barbecue) serving all manner of traditional Uruguayan meaty preparations.

More accurately, there are actually a bunch of different parillas within the mercado all in friendly and typically laid-back Uruguayan-style competition with one another for the title of best in the city. We spent a good fifteen minutes cagily circling the mercado trying to figure out some way of discerning which might be leading this contest. After inspecting rack upon similar rack of sizzling meats, we decided to let demographics be our guide and plumped for Estancia del Puerto, the place with the fewest available seats (2), and the most drunken dudes with guitars serenading the patrons (1).

We had left Buenos Aires on a very early morning ferry and, having eaten nothing on the journey, arrived in Montevideo in a terrible, bleary-eyed state of hunger. The only way out of which seemed to be robust servings of charred beast. Happily then, the menu was the most extensive of its kind we have ever seen, containing more than eight choices of steak, five of sausage, 3 or 4 matambres (stuffed beef rolls), chicken, pork, and an intimidating selection of organ meats, not to mention a full range of pasta, salads and sides, in both full or half portions. Understanding, by this point in our carnivorous odyssey, that servings tended to be of a generous nature in this part of the world, we ordered half portions of mollejones (sweetbreads), morcilla (blood sausage), lechon (suckling pig), the potentially gruesome chotos/chinchulines (guts), and a bottle of typically Uruguayan tannat (red wine), in the hope that this might save room for further sampling of the menu.

Since, like all good grills, only certain sections of this parilla were used to actually cook meat, with others functioning as warming areas for ready-to-serve meats, we were presented with our choices within seconds, and what a presentation! No garnish, no sides of vegetables, no wasted real estate at all, just meat on plates and silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, with deep, communal tubs of chimichurri and salsa criolla scattered around the bar. We dived in recklessly.

The star of the show was the lechon, or milk-fed baby pig, which was heavenly. So good in fact, that were it not for the perfectly crispy skin overlying a thin-layer of incredibly sweet fat, and the moist, almost milky-tasting, flesh of unweaned piglet, it would truly be a barbaric dish. But our pause for reflection on the plight of young pork was brief as we tore into the golden beauty of the sweetbreads, the complex spices of the morcilla, and the (surprisingly) wonderful crunchy texture and minerally-tasting joy of the chinchulines. It all tasted to us like no meat had before, even the condiments had a singular tang and freshness to them that we found a step-up from those we’d had earlier in the week. And it seems we were not alone in this.

Glancing up at our surroundings and fellow diners as we approached fullness, it was comforting to see that everyone else was head-down and going full-bore into their lunches too. And who could blame them? Like the irresistible song of the sirens, the evocative combination of wood-smokey atmosphere, beautiful Victorian architecture, and the surround-sound effect of wall-to-wall sizzling would surely stir the soul of any meat-lover and be ruinous to the anti-meat resolve of even the most hardcore vegetarian.

Mercado del Puerto
Rambla 25 Agosto de 1825 y Perez Castellano,
Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo, Uruguay
Mercado del Puerto online