Exploring the food of Cuenca on a wet Saturday
Author’s note: This is the first of a four-part series about how an expat with no culinary credentials somehow found himself judging one of Cuenca’s most beloved traditional foods. It’s also a story about the generosity of strangers and the adventures that begin when you simply decide to see what might happen next.
By James Li
One very wet Saturday not too long ago, my wife and I went to an event for a free public food contest in Cuenca. As non-Ecuadorians, we arrived at the hour announced but found the doors locked and the office closed. We decided to stand under our shared umbrella to see what might happen. We do a lot of that here. One of the special things we’ve learned is that just hanging around to see what happens can lead to the most interesting things.
A short while later, I spotted a baseball-capped fellow sitting in the front seat of an unmarked van watching football on his device. Knocking on the window, I asked in Spanish if he knew where we could find the judges for the culinary exposition. Later, I figured that what I had really asked was, “Is this the spot where we get our sack of potatoes?” But without missing a beat, he jumped out of the van, whisked the back door open, and gestured us inside. We thought he was just being polite to some wet strangers. All the same, we gratefully hopped in.
What followed was a curious Spanish-only interview that went something like this: “Where are you from?” “Where were you born?” “Where were your parents born?” “Do you like Cuenca?”
This came from the baseball-capped fellow and a second well-dressed older man who simply popped into existence in the seat next to us. We were pleasantly surprised that we could keep up with the conversation until, after being amiably satisfied with our answers, the two broke into a rapid discussion of something fascinating that the first fellow had seen on his device. We still didn’t know if we were in the right place but we knew we were in great company and were happy to be out of the rain.
A few minutes later, a gaggle of young men and women appeared outside the van door, each animatedly typing or talking on their phones while holding umbrellas. Everyone was greeting each other in the proper Cuencano way: hugs, kisses, buenos días, como te va? Someone threw open the sliding van door and the group hustled inside, shaking off the rain as they entered. We were greeted as long-lost friends by each person entering. Then we recognized someone and finally realized we were in the right place!
Now I love cooking but I’m no expert in the culinary arts. Years ago, a good friend watched my endeavors to prepare a full dinner using only a blunt steak knife for preparations, which included, among many other things, mincing a bushel of onions, a thud of rutabagas, and a partridge in a pear tree. Shortly afterward, I received a package in the mail with a deadly sharp and enormous steel blade. The note attached read simply: “This is a real chef’s knife. Learn how to use it.”
After eating my way through Cuenca for years, my wife one day suggested I tabulate the places we liked by finding them on the Google reviews I’d written to keep track of our urban wanderings. That became a several-year project that turned into a book called ¡Cuenca Eats! To be clear, the book was not a dispensation of expert gastronomical wisdom. It was a book to help us keep up with all the unique foods that we discovered here, a labor of love, a fun-time creation, and something that makes me smile whenever I read it.
To Cuencanos, the idea of a non-Ecuadorian writing about their food has been somewhat stupefying. Once when I tried to explain that tuna is a rich person’s food in the US, my taxi driver simply said he preferred chicken. Cuencanos take for granted that they can get a great lunch for $3 at a thousand places in town and shake their heads in disbelief that such a thing isn’t to be found anywhere in North America.
However, the Cuencanos who read my book found it fascinating to see their traditional foods through the eyes of a foreigner. My Spanish editor told me she had abhorred encebollados since childhood. On reading my description involving a lot of chifle cracking and tuna loving and slurping and condiments, she found herself salivating and WhatsApp’d me to say she was on her way out to get one for lunch.
All in all, I realize this is a very roundabout way of explaining how we ended up in the van on one wet and particular Saturday. Apparently, word had gotten around about some loco ex-pat who had written a book about Cuencano food. Months later, that somehow landed us at the department of tourism. For a while, we sat through an energetic Spanish conversation, understanding just enough to know we didn’t understand most of it. We nodded thoughtfully whenever it seemed appropriate and tried to look intelligent. Then the woman leading the meeting, a poised and impressive figure who had just returned from representing Cuencano food in China, raised her hand. Everything stopped. She said something.
Everyone looked at us. We looked at everyone else. As far as we could determine, we had just been invited to spend the weekend eating papas con cuero. Swallowing hard, we accepted with as much grace and Spanish as we could muster.
And there we were.
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James Li is an emergency physician and incurably curious wanderer who has lived and worked in Africa and authored dozens of medical research articles in journals such as The Lancet and Chest. He also served as an editor for Annals of Emergency Medicine and is the author of Anesthesia Off the Grid. Together with his wife, he has spent years exploring Cuenca’s markets, traditional foods and neighborhood restaurants. What began as a personal attempt to keep track of favorite meals eventually became ¡Cuenca Eats!, an affectionate and deeply personal look at the culinary life of Cuenca through the eyes of a perpetually fascinated outsider who still finds himself happily surprised by where a good meal can lead. Buy it in Cuenca at Carolina Bookstore, the tourism office at Parque Calderón or on Amazon.
