Last night I discovered that the coffee I drink in the morning isn’t made of coffee. The coffee I drink in the morning is made of corn. Although my host family grows coffee, they drink none of it; it is solely a cash crop. “Bad for the nerves,” they say. Instead they toast kernels of corn to a carbon black, mill them, add sugar (judging from the taste, my guess is one part corn-grounds to one part sugar), and brew in a large pot. All ages drink the stuff. I’m jealous of one of the other trainees, who told me that her host mom roasts fresh coffee beans in the toaster oven every morning to make her coffee. Here I am among some of the world’s best coffee farms—there’s an entire tourist industry centered on Salvadoran coffee, I just read an article today—and I’m drinking sugary black corn juice.
This small example of intra-cultural variation in gastronomic preference is representative of Salvadoran cuisine as a whole. It varies widely, from family to family and day to day. When all the trainees go to San Vicente for technical training sessions our host mothers pack us lunch, and I look forward all morning to the unveiling. Everyone has tortillas wrapped up in a little cotton cloth, of course, but beyond that there’s no telling. Salads with strange tropical fruits (some of which are delicious, others distinctly not), little sausages, meatballs, hunks of chicken, rice prepared in various ways, fried dough with cream inside, hard-boiled eggs, black beans, fried tortilla-and-egg mixture, French fries, and the list goes on. It doesn’t seem like there are as many pupusas on a daily basis as you might expect, but even so it’s still a big cultural touchstone. My host brother and his cousins have changed the words to the Don Omar song I mentioned in the last post to: “Uno, dos, tres, héchame cuatro pupusas de frijol y loroco!” which means, “One, two, three, make me four pupusas of beans and loroco.” Loroco is a green flower with a very distinctive smell and taste. It’s the national flower, and it’s delicious in pupusas.
