Collections
85 recipes is a lot to face at once. These five collections are how we group them — not by difficulty or by season, but by the part of the meal they belong to, which is how a Peruvian kitchen actually thinks about them. Each one opens with three recipes worth starting from, and answers the questions people ask most about that corner of the food.
28 recipes
The plates a Peruvian household actually builds a meal around. Stir-fries that came out of Chinese kitchens in Lima and never left, rice cooked with duck on the north coast, lamb buried with hot stones in the highlands, and the fried fish a cevichería sells before noon. If you only cook one thing from this site, it is probably here.
8 recipes
In the Andes a soup is not a first course, it is lunch. These are the thick ones — the kind that earn the phrase sopa de cuchara parada, thick enough to stand a spoon in — plus the broths sold at hours when nothing else is open, and the shrimp chowder Arequipa treats as a matter of regional pride.
13 recipes
Two traditions in one shelf. The Spanish convents left behind egg yolks, sugar and milk boiled down to caramel; the Andes answered with purple corn, quince and coconut. Some of these are eaten hot from a glass on a cold night, some are sold from a basket on a beach, and one of them is a doughnut fried in a spiral.
17 recipes
What arrives before the food, and what a table orders to share. Potatoes under a chili-and-cheese sauce, scallops broiled on the half shell, mussels piled with onion and corn. Most of them are cold, most of them are built rather than cooked, and all of them work as a plate on their own if you are not that hungry.
7 recipes
Purple corn boiled with pineapple skin and cloves, corn beer older than the Spanish, a cocktail with a foam of egg white, and the herbal brew a street cart pours at six in the morning for people who did not sleep. Some are for children, some very much are not, and we say which is which.
Looking for something specific instead? The full recipe index lists all 85 in one place, and filters by region — coast, highlands, jungle and the Chinese-Peruvian chifa tradition. And if a word in a recipe is unfamiliar, the glossary explains the Peruvian and Quechua terms we use.
