South American Cuisines & Recipes.

South America gave the world the potato, the tomato, the chile, corn and chocolate, then kept the interesting varieties for itself. Peru alone grows potatoes in thousands of cultivars, in colors that do not survive export. That surplus of raw material shaped three very different culinary regions. The Andes cook at altitude with tubers, quinoa, freeze-drying techniques older than the Inca, and a spice cabinet built on ají peppers — Peruvian ceviche, where lime acid does the cooking in minutes, is the most exported result but nowhere near the most representative. The Amazon basin runs on cassava in every processed form, river fish, and ingredients like tucupi and jambu that barely appear outside the region. The Southern Cone is beef country: Argentine and Uruguayan asado is a method and an entire afternoon, chimichurri its sharp counterweight, with Italian and Spanish immigration visible in every empanada and every plate of gnocchi eaten on the twenty-ninth of the month. Then there is Brazil's Atlantic coast, where West African cooking arrived with enslaved people and became Bahian food — dendê palm oil, coconut, moqueca — one of the great cuisines of the hemisphere. Colombia and Venezuela split the arepa between them and disagree about it permanently. The country pages below map each of these on its own terms, with the dishes worth cooking first.

80 recipes on this route