Eating guinea pig in Quito
If you are not familiar with Quito or where it is located I will give you time to go look it up, especially if you are American. As the great American humorist Mark Twain wrote: “God invented wars to teach Americans geography,” and he wasn’t being funny. To save time and space I will advise you that Quito is the capital of Ecuador, which is located in South America and even for Americans that should be simple enough to figure out. We’ll get around to the guinea pig part soon enough.
For reasons I can’t understand I was invited twice on media trips to Ecuador. My guess is they liked the first article I published so much they invited me back for seconds. The first story was about the cloud forest with a side trip to the Galapagos, which makes for two stories for the price of one. I loved both those destinations and if you sell your house and one of your children and put your spouse to work cleaning toilets on the night shift as a second job you could afford to go to the Galapagos too. Probably not.
Media trips get subtitled as either cultural, adventure, culinary, horticultural or whatever the local Tourism Board wants to promote. It’s always good to read the fine print before accepting any trip. I took a trip to Louisiana once and forgot to notice that it was a “culinary tour.” I had already been to Louisiana three times and I loved it so much I would go back even if I had to write about the shrubbery. Unfortunately it was a culinary tour, and all we did for a week was eat, non-stop. The seafood in Louisiana is fantastic, which was the main problem. Everything there is deep fried. I was the only male writer on the trip and I weigh over 200 pounds and the ladies were all larger than I am. I barely survived. Thankfully I left room for desert.
As mentioned elsewhere in my travel stories, the swamps are infested with nutria in Louisiana, a large rodent imported from South America to replace all the beavers the French fur traders killed long ago before it became politically incorrect to hang a dead mammal around your throat as a status symbol, and if you can eat a nutria you are certainly a better man than I. The rumour is they taste better than they look, which they had better because they look so ugly they hurt your feelings. However, nutria also look a lot like very large guinea pigs with very bad front teeth, and if you wait just a moment more we will get around to discussing the cute little guinea pigs soon enough.
The great thing about press trips, aside from the fact that the plane fares, hotels, drivers, translators and food are all free, is that you get to eat native foods you have never heard of or tasted before. I am not a ‘foodie’ in the slightest, which means I don’t live to eat but I am known to eat every day and sometimes more often than once a day when the opportunity arises. I live in a multicultural Canadian city where I can eat Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Thai, Mexican and sometimes even Canadian, whatever that is. I can eat anything as long as it is not deep fried every day of the week, or wants to crawl off the plate when I want to stick a fork in it, and as long as there is no kale or Brussel sprouts involved. How anyone can eat Brussel sprouts is beyond me. Even the people in Brussels don’t eat something that smells like a stink bug.
On my personal trips, which is to say those journeys where I am forced to pay for things myself as much as it pains me to do so, I have eaten some foodstuffs which in retrospect I am now forced to express regret. When my son was young we brought him to Southeast Asia for a few months and he took great delight in ordering the weirdest things on the menu he could find. Which means, naturally, that it was Dad who was forced to eat them. I can tell you that frogs are very bony, or at least the ones in Cambodia are. Of course, everyone in Cambodia is bony. The fact that he came down with food poisoning in Bangkok has nothing to do with the size of the local reptiles. I never ate any snakes on that trip, because all the snakes in Cambodia are in government. It’s a wonder that snakes are not on any menus in America. Or any guinea pigs.
My favourite country for food is Taiwan. Most of the food in Taiwan is Chinese, which should not be surprising because most of the people in Taiwan came from mainland China, from whence they fled to avoid the Communist oppressors. In one tiny island you get food from all over mainland China, so there’s Cantonese, Szechuan, Hakka, Beijing, the works. As a fairly modern country, in the bigger cities in Taiwan they also serve pizza, hamburgers, ice cream and I bet if you looked hard enough they might even have fermented Icelandic shark. Everything but Canadian cuisine, which really doesn’t exist except for poutine and maple sugar. However, they don’t serve guinea pig in Taiwan. For that you have to go to Ecuador.
My favourite meal from my many trips to Taiwan was the very last dinner in the capital of Taipei. On that media trip our interpreter did all the ordering of meals. Since I can’t read Chinese and wouldn’t recognize any of the names of the weird vegetables on order, I didn’t mind at all. I didn’t know what I was eating and had no idea how anything tasted until I put it in my mouth. Since the meals were free, you didn’t actually have to eat anything if you tasted it and subsequently objected that it hurt. If you swallowed something and it blew your eyeballs out of your head, you simply didn’t eat any more of that particular explosive. Personally I am against anything that is fermented, unless it is beer, but that’s a different story. You order beer to wash down the strange and exotic substances you have eaten without knowing what they are.
On one particular occasion we were treated to a special meal in a fancy Japanese restaurant in Taipei where we enjoyed our very own private dining room. Many dishes were served; I have no idea what they were but I managed to work my way through most of them and only raised a mild sweat although my cheeks were flushed and my eyes were watering, an indication of red chili peppers in the mix. In the usual fashion we shared all plates, although some of us received individual portions based on request. It may have been that I indicated a personal preference for seafood. Yes, that must have been it, because I received a bowl that the others didn’t.
I had my chopsticks dipped in the rice bowl when something caught the corner of my eye. The same situation had occurred to me on a trip to southern Cambodia. I took a good look and certified that something in the bowl was moving. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be a creature resembling a praying mantis, only bigger. It seemed very upset with the way it had been treated and was attempting to escape so it could remonstrate with its betters in the kitchen, likely the chef. I have a personal motto that I like to share with other diners in such circumstances. “I’ll eat anything as long as it doesn’t crawl off the plate when I try to stick a fork in it.” When it stopped moving I ate the thing anyway, largely because it wasn’t a guinea pig. By gosh, we are getting closer to those cute little pigs every paragraph.Hang in there.
If you have read some of my other travel stories, you may have noted that I have developed an aversion to Tibetan butter tea. I don’t mean the version served on the upper floor of a stone hut in Tibetan villages by a kindly middle-aged housewife with no teeth with the yak where the milk came from down below in its pen chewing its cud or whatever yaks do when they aren’t yakking. However, the butter tea served on my expedition in the Himalayas came from butter that had been relaxing for a few weeks in a cheap plastic jug tied to the rear end of a donkey and had gone rancid, the kind of butter tea that goes though you so fast it doesn’t even have time to take a grip and exits faster than it entered. My aversion to certain foods is health related. After that trek I subsequently gave birth to a tapeworm in Kathmandu longer than this story and the less said about that the better.
It may be time to finally get around to guinea pigs. My second trip to Quito was a culinary tour, and once again I didn’t pay attention to the fine print. It was my own fault for what happened. There are two tourist destinations in Quito; the old section where the town was first founded by the Spaniels a few thousand years ago where today they fleece tourists like sheep, and the New Town way up on a hill where the local hipsters dine. In the old part of town we were treated to dinner at a couple of very old and old fashioned restaurants where they served old style food like potatoes, corn and goat meat. Nothing so raw or fresh it complained when you ate it.
The sign above the door at the Heladaria San Augustin said it had been serving loyal customers since 1858. I don’t believe they have changed the menu since the day they opened. The menu was in Spanish but I understood some of the words so I ordered for myself just to be brave. “Carne,” for instance, means meat. “Guatita” may mean goat. So I ordered the guatita with jueves, viernes, sobado y domingo. I had no idea what it was but it came on a big white platter with some meat in a sauce, yellow rice and slab of what might have been a papaya. Hot and tasty.
Perhaps the reason for the meals in the Old Town on our media itinerary was to compare them to the restaurants in New Town. Evidently there was some sort of gastronomic revolution occurring in Quito for which the city was gaining a global reputation. In all honesty I must report that I don’t keep up with the news in South America on a daily basis, culinary or not. There are strikes, coups, corruption, revolutions and all the usual stuff going on, but who knew they were doing revolutionary things with corn in Quito?
The new town, as the name implies, is modern, with high end hotels and smart new cafes. They even have electricity. We started our culinary adventures at Hasta la Vuelta, Senor, which may mean Come on In, Dude, but I forgot to ask. The sign outside said it was a Fonda Quitena, and I think fonda means café. I really should remember to write these things down. It was a bright and airy café with blonde wood floors and skylights and the chef demonstrated his hip new dishes that had a lot to do with fiery spices. I remember there were a lot of peanuts involved, with no death warnings given, so be careful on your next visit there.
Then it was on to several more cafes in New Town, each serving us small plates, all very tasty and next time I promise to take some notes. Achiote is a café I remember because the owner served us several different versions of ceviche in a cool café painted such a bright shade of yellow the room didn’t need any lighting. I took a look at the menu and noted quite a few soups available at lunch. The caldo de patas sounded very old fashioned to me, a “delicious traditional soup of white corn with pieces of cow feet.” I was tempted to ask what parts of the feet; the heels, toes or toenails? Aren’t cow’s feet usually called “hooves”? But he was busy carving hamstrings and I didn’t get a chance to chat.
It was on page four that I finally found what I was looking for. Past the starters and soups, on the bottom of the page was listed cuy entero asado.” I knew that entero means “entire,” but I didn’t know what a cuy was. Thankfully, this being a hip new restaurant in the tourist district, an English translation had been added. Cuy entero asado crocante y delicioso cuy servido con papas cocidas, nuestra exclusiva salsa de mani, tomatey aguacate meant it was a whole guinea pig cooked in the house’s own peanut sauce. Just under that was the offer of a half guinea pig, grilled, or even a quarter guinea pig, just for a taster if you so desired.
I always make a point of eating Indigenous foods new to me in every country I visit, especially those that are unique to that country or region. I once wandered through a country market in the Guilin district of southern China and came face to face with a roasted dog, available whole or in parts and I was so disgusted with what they had done to man’s best friend I almost forgot to take a photo that I will not include here. I almost ate a whole deep-fried spider at a festival in Cambodia until I saw it was the size of a Frisbee and I have already mentioned my aversion to food that moves while I am in the process of thinking about putting it in my mouth. I have eaten in greasy diners in “developing countries” where you can almost hear the howls from the kitchen but I don’t as a rule snack on the family pets.
In North America guinea pigs are regarded as cute pets to be played with, not roasted on the grill for a meal, house style peanut sauce or not. Doing some research I find the guinea pig was first domesticated as long ago as 2,000 B.C. in the Andes. Yes, they were originally kept for food, but some may have become family pets for the children even back at that time. They would be housed in what passed for the household kitchen, allowed to run around freely if they didn’t get popped into the cook pot when the larder was low. In the 1700's Dutch and English traders brought guinea pigs over from South America to Europe, where they became popular pets for the aristocracy. On the journey over to Europe they did stop at the country of Guinea, Africa, leading people to believe that was where the little varmints originated. Queen Elizabeth the First owned a pet guinea pig, which probably accounted for their popularity as pets from that time ongoing.
Guinea pigs are now extremely popular as pets. They are very friendly and have no tendency to bite or scratch or complain about the cat. Worse than that, they are cute as can be. When you talk about an animal as if it were human, you’re anthropomorphizing it. The Easter Bunny is an anthropomorphized rabbit. Guinea pigs are even cuter than the Easter Bunny. They become your friend. Who could possibly eat a friend? Why, you would have it on your conscience for life and if word got out then your name would be mud.
Nonetheless, for whatever reason, bunny rabbits (sorry, I meant to say guinea pigs) are very much on the menu all over Ecuador, not to mention Bolivia and Peru as well. This was the last day of the media trip and early the next morning it would be a flight back to a world where you will never see a guinea pig outside of a pet store, so it was my last chance to nibble on one. This is known in the travel writer’s trade as a conundrum. What to do? There was also the much more serious problem that since the media visit was officially over, I was “on my own,” as the itinerary always states when the meal or room is not comped, so I would have to pay for dinner myself, a painful circumstance at the best of times.
I could lie to you and say I did the right thing and ordered a hamburger, but you can get a hamburger anywhere in the world from Vladivostok to Zurich, although if you ordered a Big Mac meal in Zurich (as I almost did once before looking at the price) you would have to sell your passport on the black market to get back home. This was my one and only chance to order and taste a guinea pig, so I went for it and damned my peerless reputation. That is, I ordered the quarter pig because it was the cheapest. It came with some potatoes, a few slices of lettuce and a chunk of tomato.
Given that it was only a quarter and not the entero pig I didn’t have to look it in the eye. I dare you or anyone out there to eat a guinea pig if it is looking you in the eye. No one but Dick Cheney could be that heartless. Suffice to say, I did the manly thing and stuck my fork into its ribs, just south of where its kindly loving little throbbing heart would be if it hadn’t been previously popped into the oven and basted with the house’s very own peanut sauce, and gave it a bite. I don’t know if this was a particularly dry pig or if they all tasted the same, or if my conscience was giving me a problem, but I couldn’t get it down, house peanut sauce or not. All I can say is that, for once, it didn’t taste “just like chicken” as the old phrase goes.
Since I didn’t actually eat it, I can bravely deny that I have ever devoured a guinea pig in all my global travels, even when offered the opportunity to do so (which is a lie, but what the heck). No one will ever know the truth, and I certainly wouldn’t write a story about my experience, even if demanded by a publisher. After all, there’s no proof or evidence I was even there. You’re not calling me a liar, are you? The photo in this story has been professionally photoshopped. Also, it’s been authorized and copyrighted. I’ll see you in court.