Catua it’s a small town in Jujuy from the department of Susques, in the Puna deep argentina. It is inhabited by a few families that preserve the invaluable heritage of their ancestral culture; that kind of legacies that are not kept in museums or locked up in books. They inherit it from generation to generation, just by living.
Now some well-informed tourists sometimes come to that arid place, almost 4,000 meters above sea level, to see its wonderful geyser. But thirty years ago, when the Chef Walter Leal decided to adopt it as the mecca of his professional training, few outsiders had discovered it.
At twenty, the chef from Jujuy had already done the classic homework. From genetic engineering he had gone on to gastronomy, with the family endorsement of a famous grandfather for having created the factory of Jujuy Pomami pasta. I study in Buenos Aires, flew to Paris to train at the legendary Le Cordon Bleu, worked in restaurants in Europe and had the pleasure of being part of the French Culinary Academy. Until she realized that there were too many cooks doing the same thing. And he remembered smells and flavors of childhood, when he accompanied his father, a traveling salesman, on that repeated route between the capital of Jujuy and La Quiaca, with an overnight stay at the client’s house that included sharing a table. His thing would be to investigate Andean cuisine. So he turned around and went to live in Catua, that place near the border with Chile. He had the dream of extracting from the silence of its inhabitants the oldest and most unknown culinary traditions outside the hermetic Puna.
“It took me two years to learn to differentiate a weed for smoking from a medicinal one,” now tells the greatest Argentine diffuser of endemic cuisine, so called because it is typical of the place, made only with products from the area and the season, self-sustaining and pre-Inca ” . “To understand it –he says- you have to walk the puna and the extreme height. Talk to the ladies in front of their pots, with the llama herders.” Leal gradually broke down the Colla’s resistance to opening up to a stranger. And he is on that mission; recovering for the country and the world that “Andean ancestral cupboard” made of an incredible variety of potatoes (blue, oca, overa, smooth), corn, ñuñas, a thousand colored beans that look like painted beads, herbs, weeds like the rich rica and the muña muña, quinoa, amaranth and flame meat.
The small area of Jujuy has the same diversity of native foods as the one that exists throughout the entire Peruvian mountain range. And the recovery process of that ancestral cuisine that is being generated in the province is unprecedented. “Ours is a territory full of natural products with a great history, which were not introduced by the conquest and were even there when the Incas arrived,” says Leal.
THEORY AND PRACTICE
Walter Leal’s life is divided between his Finca restaurant, in the historic center of the Jujuy capitalhis kitchen on the other side of the mountain range, in the hotel Serrano River of Torres del Paine, and research and dissemination of original gastronomy from Maima Test Labhis most personal project, with which he intends to transmit the knowledge he has accumulated in recent decades walking the Puna. An itinerant laboratory of flavors that organizes trips to the most unknown Jujuy and brings other chefs together to discover it. It also works with IPAF, the Institute for family agriculture dependent on INTA, which seeks to stimulate the production of these almost forgotten crops so that they can be planted again by local cooperatives. With a double objective: that these products be consumed again in the province, the school cafeterias, and also generate a business by expanding towards
other national destinations. Leal points out: “As the producers say: what is eaten is what is produced”.
AGROECOLOGY
Nestor Vilcand his wife Joaquina are one of those families dedicated to farming like their grandparents did in Big Gravea town in the heart of the Humahuaca. They believe that the earth should be treated like any other being. They take care of her and appreciate what she gives them. “With agrochemicals we make the soil sick,” says Néstor before explaining that he sows respecting the phases of the moon and some traditions such as sprinkling the seeds with chicha (a drink derived from corn fermentation) to protect them from insects. In the kitchen, Joaquin He prepares some juicy empanadas and serves his “tijtincha”, a typical dish that consists of meat and corn cooked slowly in clay pots. “Flavors and knowledge” they baptized their rural enterprise so that tourists get to know the area with their guide, learn something about its culture and share the table with the family.
In his wanderings through the Pune, Walter Leal built friendship with doña Florentyna Alejoan institution in the town of Barrancas, also known as Abdon Castro Tolay, in honor of a teacher who built his school in the town. A very small community founded in 1919 within the department of Cochinoca, which is reached from Purmamarca after passing the big salt flats, along National Route 52 and taking a 6 kilometer detour (well signposted) along Provincial Route 75. With her large family, Florentina opened a dining room, “El Tolar”, which welcomes those who visit the adobe town and lonely streets at the shelter of some monumental cliffs furrowed by the river.
Leal convinced the cook to open the gate of her land, on the outskirts of town, and receive small groups interested in knowing where the raw material for their dishes comes from.
Florentina serves fresh Ulpada, a drink that is prepared with corn flour (in Buenos Aires one would say: drinkable popcorn, just as rich) and shows us how a llama stew has been cooked over a wood fire for many hours. At ground level in its kitchen with stone walls and a dirt floor.
great hostess, He takes visitors to the llama corral and opens it so that more than a hundred animals go out to graze like every morning, with school discipline. Until he summons them at dusk by throwing stones at them (which sting them nearby) with a slingshot, a method he makes outsiders try. A Florentine she likes to tell stories: she gives express lessons on shearing, spinning, weaving and gives away some couplets before going to the table, stretched out in the sun with the most wild and peaceful landscape one can imagine.
SAME PRODUCT, REVERSED
174 kilometers from there, in San Salvador de Jujuy, the historic building Casa Gámez hosts “Finca”, the restaurant in which Leal displays his urban version of that Andean cuisine. At night, a menu of steps surprises with gnocchi of blue potato tartare llama, humita with kid and cauliflower foam; creamy quinoa and beetroot, smooth potato with trout and many other dishes that rotate according to the availability of fresh products, according to the seasons of the year. Impossible to miss the local spirits such as the very citrusy chicha morada, fermented with sugar cane.
The chef’s favorite dish, which is never lacking, is tulpo, an ancestral soup that is the true Jujuy locro. It is that in the matter of kitchen nobody has the complete authorship. In the most remote places on the planet, cooking has always been similar. “I was coming back with shepherds from touring the Puna,” says Leal, “and a lady was waiting for us with a llama stew cooked all night in a well of hot stones. So I thought: low temperature, long time, fatty matter. This is confection!” The French did not invent everything.
