Panamá Gastronómica. For Real

Girls in national dress primping in bathroom

Sorry to all those who checked an earlier post to find a blank page.  A genie.  So here we go again.

One of the best food conferences I have attended in ages, this occupied four whole days from 8 in the morning to 8 at night (with parties or restaurants thereafter though as an early morning person I mainly passed on those).  Plus an exhibition hall and tours. Almost no dud presentations.   I’ll post on many of the issues below at more length later (hence limited links) but here are some highlights.

The old colonial center, soft blues and greys, crumbling tenements, fancy restaurants, golden churches, and little dusty food shops.

Elena Hernández and her pupil Luis Young on pickled pig’s feet and fried fish in the African neighborhoods, plus a modernist reinterpretation.  And Pachi McAusland and the Afroantilleran sweets of the Columbian coast.

And while we are at it, the artist and restaurateur Leonor Espinosa (Gourmet’s list of the best restaurants in the world), on her travels to back country Columbia for recipes.

Arepas, “tortillas” and “buñuelos” (the latter two nothing like their Mexican counterparts) with bacon crispi for breakfast.

Tortillas, buñuelos and bacon crispi

Ceviche master class with Doug Rodriguez, famed for Nuevo Latino, the latter still a bit of a mystery to me.

Move over Martha, here comes Cucu, who can give you a real run for your money.

Gorgeous girls hanging out to encourage sales, edecanes I would call them in Mexico, here in Balboa beer tee shirts or Panama’s national dress, surely a leading competitor for the world’s most elegant and enticing.

The Biomuseo designed by Frank Gehry, its exhibit showcasing the ten kinds of rice grown by the indigenous.

Marcelo Tejedor of Casa Marcela in San Sebastian, Spain eloquent on fish and sea weed and casually expert in the most modern of Spanish dishes that he produced.  If as a historian I have quibbles with his stories about sea weed, that in no way detracts from his sweeping skill as a chef.

Marcelo with hake

A super elegant reception in the Hernández household, lots of nibbles followed by the Panamian classic beans, rice, roast pork, and fried plantain.

A long, long talk with an Embera pastry chef about Embera cuisine (hope that has you guessing, it certainly had me guessing).

The Latin American TV cooking circuit boy wonder Omar Pereney from Venezuela, at 15 in his fourth year of a syndicated show.  An exceptionally nice, mature lad, with lots of parental backup.  Say you saw it here first when he pops up n the Food Channel.

The most charming of bloggers, María Luisa Ríos, also of Venezuela, as well as Rosi Conzález, Puerto Rican globetrotting expert on wine.

Grocery stores, packed with imported American and British processed foods, but also with unknown beans, pounded maize, world class coffee, local sugar, local rice in 20 lb bags, and pataconeras (of which more later).

The fish market, inshore fishing with lots of shellfish and small fish.  And then Patilla, the most upmarket neighborhood where Donald Trump has one of the many skyscrapers for a Chinese-owned fruit and vegetable market and a Jewish bakery.  The older Sephardic and newer Ashkenazi communities live side by side.  But the breads seemed to be Panamanian.

Fish market

The not-to-be-missed singing, dancing Afro-Columbian cook Maura Orejuela, here thanks to Rosi González.

Four days of this and more and I was dazed and bedazzled.  Best of all, it gradually began to filter though to me that I was encountered a cuisine family I scarcely knew about, the cuisine family of tropical America, the cuisine family (and culture) that encompasses the western Caribbean, Panama, Venezuela, Columbia, and (with language barriers) northern Brazil.  Foods and markets and routes quite new to me, proof of my ignorance of this vital region.  And one that taken together, as it was historically, stands against the big Latin American giants, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.  One huge hole in my knowledge of the global gastronomic geography plugged. Hurrah.

For help on understanding this, one of the best food histories of a country ever, Cultura Alimentaria y Globalización by Panama’s world-renowned historian, Alfredo Castillero Calvo, who also talked at the conference.  See why I say it was so eye-opening?

And so it was such a privilege to be the one American in the hundreds at the conference (discounting Doug Rodriguez of Cuban descent and Roberto Madrid of Mexican).    And what did I do?  A report here and here.

And another blogger who is writing this up, my new friend JC Gibbs.

• ← Foie Gras and Gastronomical Heritage
• The long road from cacao to chocolate →