At that point of our expedition in the deep Peruvian jungles, I seemed to have been, by tacit agreement, elected cook. As there was little else to do in the long, sun-drenched tropic days, Her Grace was usually to be found crouched over the cooking fire on the kitchen floor, keeping the home fires burning—inventing new and sometimes astonishing dishes. I became rather expert at regulating the logs to the right temperature, balancing even two cooking pots on them at the same time without spilling.
On that particular morning I made soup, bean soup. Our larder always contained dried beans of various sorts, as well as the inevitable fideos, which were spaghetti of divers shapes and sizes. The night before, I had put to soak the kin of beans known as paillares, which are something like our Limas, but bigger. I painstakingly removed all the skins, an put them to boil with onion and some dried mutton bones which had a little smoky meat on them.
They cooked till about mid-afternoon, when I lunched sparingly on them an then cast about for a method of straining to make a sort of pureed soup. For I am of the school that holds texture of food to be as important as flavor. The cooking utensils were somewhat limited, being restricted to what could be carried in one- pocket of a saddle bag; so naturally there was no colander. Sandoval had made me a grater by opening flat a tin can an punching minute holes in it with my out- sized darning needle, but a colander he had been unable to devise.
However, I unearthed from a duffle bag a spare butterfly net, which I washe in the stream and then proceeded to strain the soup through it. Perhaps this sounds simple, but it required a goo deal of acrobatic ability (yoga training would have been very useful) and engineering ingenuity to arrange the contraption on a bench—the handle weighed down by heavy stones while the net itself hung over the pot on the ground. It also required more than a modicum of back- bending energy to stir the stuff through. It finally emerged; and seasoned with coarse, grey rock salt and a little of the explosive abi, which is a diabolical species of red pepper, it was triumphant.
A little unexpected luck came later in the afternoon, just as I was returning from the stream where I'd bathed to make myself presentable for dinner. The matter of being presentable might have been problematical, however, as my mirror was two inches by three, so I never really knew.
An Indian woman was waiting for me in the kitchen—my nearest neighbor, who lived some distance down the river and had come to borrow fire. Since hers had gone out and she had no matches, it was easier to go a considerable distance than to start one laboriously with flint. She expertly snatched up live coals in her bare hands, wrapping them in green banana leaves. She smiled shyly, and from somewhere in her skirt produced two little squashes which she gave me an then trotted off.
So far, so good: soup and squash.
It was at the hour when shadows are long over the tangled green forests an great flocks of blue and gold parrots fly screaming to settle in their favorite dead trees for the night, that Sandoval came back to Camp, followed by his painte salvajes. Tzongiri handed me a leaf- wrapped package, and then with his companions proceeded to roast more yuca an bananas from their pile in the kitchen.
“What is this?”I asked Sandoval as I saw large pieces of a delicate-looking white meat.
“Sacba-vaca,”he replied.
“Sacba-vaca,”I mused.“Vaca is Spanish for cow, but what is sacha?”
“Sacba is the Quechua word for mountain. Mountain cow,”smiled Sandoval. That left me as much in the dark as ever, because I'd never heard of wild cattle in the jungle.
“Which is to say, tapir,”he explained.
Their tracks I'd seen many times across jungle trails, and once had seen dimly a large, dark form which Sandoval had said was tapir. A large animal, long- snouted for root grubbing, and much prized by the natives as food.
“I wounded it this morning, an Tzongiri finished it off with one of his spear arrows,”he told me.“Then we took most of the meat to his family. They hadn't had any in a long time.”
While Sandoval went to bathe in the river, and the salvajes cooked their supper. I prepared the tapir meat. I considered several methods, and then decide that, cut into thin slices, seasoned with salt and pepper and a little abo, or garlic, it should be baked in ashes. The best jungle method for this is to wrap the pieces in fresh banana leaves and bury them in the ashes, but not too near the flames. The first time I tried this, after having seen the Indians do it, I met with ignominious failure, as the leaves all cracked and the contents were burned and ash filled. Sandoval smiled and said,“But you must do this first.”He cut fresh leaves and toasted them carefully over the flames, after which they folded without cracking.
Pinterest
