I can’t go to the market. I am a single white female who doesn´t speak Spanish and who stands out like a sore thumb in Lima, Peru, which means I need to be accompanied at all times. That also means that normally I would just take a taxi everywhere but both the taxi and the destination are considered risky. Muggings happen in taxis (and most taxi drivers don´t speak English), and robberies happen in busy areas at all hours of the day (especially in markets where I want to buy fruit, it seems).
Fortunately I´m in good hands at the music conservatory in the city, where the teachers and students are being sequestered to take me on walks and join me in cab rides during the day. They seems to think the only safe place for me is in my hotel in the relatively safe district of Miraflores (though a top story on the news this morning was about a spectacular abduction in the Miraflores region where video cameras caught men with guns stuffing a man off the street into their SUV in broad daylight yesterday).
Through all this, I am managing to find fruit. At a little snack bar yesterday I tried my first lúcuma juice. It´s a local, tropical fruit that doesn’t really show up anywhere in the world but a few South American countries. It´s very sweet and starchy (Wikipedia compares the taste to a mix of sweet potato and maple syrup…but I lean more toward a lighter flavour, not that the lucuma I had last night was the best lucuma ever. I think Peruvian people have a very different idea of maple syrup than I do, coming from Quebec where maple syrup comes in light, amber, dark , and very molasses’-like flavours. But maybe so does lucuma.
About Lúcuma
The only way to taste it in the rest of the world is in the form of a powder, though in Peru it´s the most popular flavour for ice cream, beating out heavyweights vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.
It´s also referred to as the ´Gold of the Incas´and a ´lost fruit´, though it certainly seems to have been found. The Incas had a few things figured out, what with carving cities into the sides of mountains, building aqueducts, and terraced agriculture. Lets just forget about the whole being wiped out thing and the conquistadors and the more than 10,000 years of Peruvian history I walked through yesterday in three hours at two of the city´s biggest muysems by accident, after hopping in a cab with two English-speaking men (though we switched to French when we realized we were all from the same place) from my hotel who ended up being Montreal business men who essentially swore me to secrecy on their artistic reasons for being in the country, but lets just say you can expect Peruvian art to show up in Montreal around Sherbrooke and Guy in the next few years. Lots of phalluses and lucuma fruit symbolizing fertility and duality from the Moche people (pre-Incan, if I remember correctly).
The lucuma is ‘nutrient-dense’, says Wikipedia, and has a pit like an avocado, so I figure it’s maybe high in fat, but there´s no nutrition breakdown available online. And I firmly believe that if the internet can´t answer my questions, it´s a sure sign that I´m very lucky to try this fruit. I´ll keep trying it and report back soon. Next stop, guanabara, aka soursop.
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