Culinary heritage: Embera cuisine (Panamá)
Here’s a really long overdue post, promised to Chef Lastino Apochito a year ago when I was visiting Panama City for the quite fascinating first Panamá Gastronómica.
He approached me after a session on the Afro-Antillean cuisine to be found in Panamá.
Pastry chef Lastino Apochito
He was, he said, worried that his people, the Embera, were losing their traditional culture, their dances, their clothing, and most of all their cuisine. They played their music in hotels but not in the community. Would it not be possible to save the cuisine if it were made accessible to tourists? Would it not be possible to refine the dishes to make them appealing to a wider audience?
I had to tell him that this was really far outside my area of expertise but that I would love to know more about the cuisine of the Embera and about his own story. So we settled down on some hard chairs in the entrance to the exhibition hall where I struggled to take notes as the band that was circulating inside played under the echoing corrugated iron roof.
Lastino Apochito’s story
And how did Lastino Apochito come to be a pastry chef and instructor in Panama City?
He came, he told me, from a settlement of twenty to forty houses, small straw houses with a balsa frame, thatched with bihoy and then covered with rice straw, set in the mountains and rivers of the Darien peninsula, a place that echoes back to my childhood.
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
As Robin Hanbury-Tenison explains here, Keats got it wrong. It was Balboa, not Cortez, who stared at the Pacific. And Darien remains a wild area, the one uncompleted section of the pan-American highway.
Lastino’s family was very poor so he left home at 15 to make his own way in the world. He was taken in by an uncle in the big city. A friend encouraged him to learn to make sweets, both national and international. In the mid 1980s, there were no culinary schools in the city so he learn the old-fashioned way by working in hotels, often with professional European chefs until he had mastered pastry making and bread making.
Bollos and tamales of rice, maize and cooking bananas: Embera cuisine
The Embera’s basic crops were a varietiey of kinds of rice and maize, as well as bananas and sugar cane. The rice, for example, might be three-month rice, silver rice, purple rice, or garrapatitatas (which I would roughly translate as little clawed feet rice).
Varieties of rice and maize from the Darien Peninsula
This selection of rice and maize came from an exhibit at Panamá Gastronómica. I asked lots of people where the rice came from, from Asia in the east or Africa or the Mediterranean in the west but no one had an answer.
The rice was hulled by pounding it in a large pilón (a section of tree trunk hollowed out). This was women’s work (why is that not a surprise?) with one to three women doing the hard labor. Then it or the maize were ground on a standard simple grindstone. The meal was mixed with water, wrapped in the leaf of the nahuala palm (Carludovica palmata) from which Panama hats are made (these are not really Panamanian but Ecuadorian as everyone in Panamá hastens to tell you), and steamed. This made a bollo, a dumpling essentially, a dish found in, say, Columbia as well.
A number of variants were available. The maize could be made into tamales stuffed with fish or chicken (quite how these differed from bollos I was not exactly sure). Green bananas could also be grated and made into tamales. The rice could be cooked with chicken and bananas. Or for sweets, the banana or the purple rice could be cooked with cane sugar. The cane sugar itself was extracted with a trapiche, a contraption with two vertical rollers that was invented in the mid seventeeth century in Asia or in the Americas, no one knows, but that spread like wildfire.
The Embera extracted oil from a couple of palms (one of them the Coroso, the other I didn’t catch but it was believed to have commercial potential) and from squash seeds. The fruits of palm were pounded , cooked, and then the oil was collected from the top.
For meat, the Embera had chicken, they fished in the rivers, and they hunted deer, rabbit, birds (including toucans), iguanas, peccaries, and monkeys in the forest. It was preserved by cutting into strips, salting with sea salt, perhaps seasoned with ginger, and smoked. As I understood it, this kept for several days even in the tropical rainforest.
And for feasts. Pork!
And all the while as I am trying to get this down, the band plays on, and I am wishing, wishing I had a couple of extra days in Panamá to go and see all the things Lastino is describing.
My thoughts on Embera cuisine
Clearly over the centuries there has been a lot of interchange between the Embera people and both the African and the Spanish populations of Panamá since many of the implements (the trapiche or sugar mill for example, and the pilón), the ingredients (rice, maize, banana, sugar), and the dishes (bollos and tamales and arroz con pollo) have considerable overlap. But how has that happened and who has contributed what? Is there even enough evidence to work it out. The history of the cuisines of the lowland American tropics is just waiting for scholars to tackle.
Culinary tourism in Embera country
Just google Embera and you will find that in fact tourism is already under way. Here is one link and another. In fact, there is a burgeoning Embera tourist industry now as you will find if you google. Here is the program for the National Association of Interpretation (never knew there was such a thing) annual meeting in Panama. Its aim “is to inspire leadership and excellence to advance heritage inter- pretation as a profession” by forging “emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource.”
I’m not sure how I feel about this kind of tourism. I can see arguments on both sides. I find the “let’s go and live with people in loin clothes” cringe-making and worthy of 1950s National Geographic. Against that, the Embera need to live. Any thoughts, readerss?
Scientists are there too. Here’s a picture of the plants of ethnobotanical interest from the Darien peninsula from a presentation by Kate Kirby of the University of British Columbia.
