Chicheme.

Chicheme belongs to La Chorrera, the town on the highway west of Panama City, firmly enough that chorrerano is part of the name almost everywhere else in the country. Anyone driving out towards Coronado or the interior passes a run of roadside stands and small shops selling it by the cup, and the town holds an annual festival around it. That geography is not accidental — La Chorrera sits in a maize-growing stretch of Panamá Oeste, and the drink is built on maíz pilado, dried white field corn that has had its hull removed, which is a storable commodity rather than a perishable vegetable.

The wider family is Indigenous. Corn drinks called chicha exist across the whole of Latin America, and in Panama chicha can mean anything from a fruit squash to chicha fuerte, the fermented corn beer still made in Ngäbe and Guna communities and drunk at ceremonies. Chicheme is the sweet unfermented branch of that tree, and what makes it recognisably colonial-era rather than pre-Columbian is the dairy: milk, cane sugar and later condensed milk, all of which arrived with Spanish cattle and Spanish sugar. The cinnamon and nutmeg come from the same trade routes that made Panama a transshipment point for four centuries. So a cup of chicheme is a fairly literal record of the isthmus — Indigenous corn, European dairy, colonial spice.

Recipes disagree on almost everything except the corn. Some cooks use only fresh milk and sugar and keep it thin enough to drink from a bottle; others build it thick with evaporated and condensed milk until a spoon stands up in it, which is the version sold to travellers who want it to do the job of lunch. Vanilla is common, salt is essential and often forgotten, and a few households add a strip of lemon or orange peel to the simmering corn. The one thing every version shares is that it is drunk cold. Chicheme served warm is considered a mistake, and stands keep it in coolers packed with ice all day.