Peruvian main dishes

The main course of a Peruvian meal has a name of its own — the segundo, the second plate, the one that follows the soup. Almost all of them start the same way, with an aderezo: onion, garlic and ground chile fried down slowly until the raw edge is gone and the mixture darkens. Nothing on this list tastes Peruvian until that base has been cooked further than you think it needs.

After that the list splits four ways, and the split is historical rather than geographical alone. The criollo coast married Spanish technique to Andean chiles and produced ají de gallina, arroz con pollo, anticuchos. The highlands kept the older logic of tubers, dried potato and cooking with heat stored in stone — carapulcra, pachamanca. The Amazon cooks with plantain, river fish and leaves instead of pots, as in juane. And the chifa kitchens, opened by Chinese cooks from the nineteenth century onward, gave Peru the wok — which is why lomo saltado, the most famous Peruvian dish after ceviche, is a stir-fry served with both rice and fried potatoes.

Rice is the other constant. It appears beside almost everything, and it is judged on one quality: graneado, the grains loose and separate rather than clumped. A Peruvian cook can survive a mediocre stew. Sticky rice is harder to forgive.

Where to start

Twenty-three dishes is a lot to face at once. These three are the shortest route to understanding how Peru cooks.

Lomo saltado. Start here. Beef, onion and tomato seared hard in a wok and served with both rice and fries — the dish where Chinese technique and Peruvian ingredients met and stayed. It takes twenty minutes.

Ceviche. The one Peru is known for, and the one most often done badly abroad. Firm white fish, lime, red onion, ají and salt. Minutes, not hours — that single fact separates good ceviche from bad.

Ají de gallina. The comfort dish. Shredded chicken in a sauce thickened with milk-soaked bread — no flour, no cream — with ají amarillo, walnuts and parmesan. It is what Peruvian households cook when nobody wants to think.

Questions people ask

What is the national dish of Peru? Ceviche, officially and by declaration. Lomo saltado and ají de gallina are cooked far more often in ordinary homes, and papa a la huancaina turns up on more tables than any of them — but ceviche is the one the country puts its name to.

What is chifa? Peruvian-Chinese cooking, and its own cuisine rather than an imitation. Cantonese laborers arrived in the 1850s and cooked with what Peru had. Lomo saltado, arroz chaufa and aeropuerto all come out of that meeting, and there are more chifas in Lima than most visitors expect.

Which of these can I cook without Peruvian ingredients? Lomo saltado, arroz chaufa and pollo a la brasa work with what most supermarkets carry. What genuinely cannot be faked is anything built on ají amarillo or ají panca — ají de gallina, carapulcra and the adobos need the real thing, and the recipes say so rather than pretending otherwise.

Why do so many Peruvian plates come with rice AND potato? Because they arrived from different directions and neither gave way. The potato is Andean and thousands of years old; rice came later with Chinese and Spanish influence. Bistec a lo pobre takes it furthest, piling rice, fries, plantain and a fried egg around one modest steak.