Papaya (Day 2) and Chicha Morada

I’m becoming a little obsessed with papaya juice. I’m convinced it’s supposed to taste better than it has to me in the past, so every time I go to a restaurant with fresh juices I want to try the papaya.

On Day 2 of my papaya quest I asked for a glass of papaya juice ($1.30 Canadian) and got served an entire jug of the stuff. I really hoped this was better than the last time or there would be a lot of papaya through which I would have to suffer.

Fortunately, this papaya was a little better. It was a little sweeter, and the slightly bitter aftertaste was stronger, so it at least had something to latch onto in terms of flavour. And it kind of grew on me. Severely dehydrated as I was (the suffocatingly humid air tricks you fast here), I could barely make it through a bowl of chicken noodle soup in a table d’hote lunch spot where most normal Limeños (people from Lima) start with a soup or some kind of meat, follow it up with a big plate of (meat-filled) ravioli topped with steak (more meat), and finish with a thin slice of triple-milk cake (tres leches – condensed milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream – aka my lactose-intolerant death) and a sweet chicha (in Lima this means an un-fermented sweet juice made from purple corn that is very much not like corn in North America) for a grand total of about $5 Canadian for the entire meal. But I did make it through one small glass of papaya juice before calling it quits and asking to take the rest to go. Even a nice restaurant will give you a fast food take-out cup for juices, thank goodness.

“Para llevar?”

I think that means “to go”, as in “pour emporter” in French. I get a lot of funny looks for my poor Spanish, but I have a new respect for tourists who walk around Montreal with a French-English dictionary…I can’t do that here. It’s too likely I’ll get mugged. Though, everyone already knows I’m a tourist, so maybe it doesn’t matter so much. I crossed a bridge yesterday and all I could think was maybe this was like crossing onto the wrong side of the tracks and it was about time to turn around. Still, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (aka the other side of the bridge) was the sight of two women selling custard-filled cookies, alfajores, on the side of the road. They were all stacked up like circular pop tarts. The ones at the beginning of this video with Gaston Acurio (Peru’s culinary god) are bigger than the ones the ladies were selling, but listen to the honking, see the traffic, and try to smell the ocean in the air, and that’s Lima:

The papaya juice grew on me. Instead of dehydrating me with more sugar I think it actually acted as a miracle cure for dehydration, and since juice goes down pretty easy, I think I even got enough calories into me so I wasn’t starving a few hours later. Now, like the bitterness of coffee, I’m almost craving papaya.

I think that’s the secret of papaya and why it’s so popular; I think it’s a little addictive. It may not seem like there’s much there, but you start craving the aftertaste and you keep sipping more and more so the subtle flavour sticks around a little longer. And it’s completely justifiable because all that beef needs a little digestive help, and papaya is just the fruit to do it.

Note: Two days later the thought of papaya is making me a little sick. It’s much, much better as a juice than eaten fresh. And that’s true for a lot of fruit here. But not mango. Mango can be eaten with a spoon here. No knife is necessary. I ate mine with a fork and it was the best mango of my life. More to come…