Guinea pig: the other white meat
The country: Peru. The city: Lima. The critter on the menu: ‘Cavia Porcellus’ otherwise known as the humble guinea pig. It was nearing the end of my jaunt in South America when it dawned on my fellow traveller, Strachan, that there was one thing missing from our Peruvian experience. We’d tried some of the popular dishes such as ‘Ceviche,’ which is essentially raw seafood marinated with chilli and lime served up with some potato and potato-like alternatives. There was one dish, though, that had eluded us: ‘Cuy,’ the Peruvian name for Guinea Pig.
We donned our sleuthing outfits (remarkably similar to our backpacker outfits) ready to do some serious detective work to find out where we could eat some Cuy, which is not actually found abundantly in coastal Lima. It is better represented in Cuzco and other cities and towns more inland. After about an hour of fruitless search we caved and consulted the Bible (otherwise known as Lonely Planet), which directed us straight towards a market in the historic centre.
Understandable, really; relying on the traveller’s bible since I speak very little Spanish so asking people would not have helped massively. In fact, I’ll tell you, in Spanish, exactly how much Spanish I can speak: ‘un poquito.’ It supposedly means ‘a little’ or ‘very little.’ That’s all well and good, but if you ask any traveller in Spanish speaking countries (I’m currently trying to coin the term ‘Spancophone’) if they speak Spanish they will, 100% of the time, reply ‘un poquito.’ I heard it from people who had been travelling in South America for a year, having studied Spanish in school for years and at university, and I also heard it from people whose Spanish vocabulary consisted of the words ‘un poquito.’ After a while I stopped asking. Rant over.
We approached our task with some hesitation. The reviews we had heard from other people who had tried Cuy were not, on the whole, positive. One that sticks out in my mind is “Imagine really fatty, raw bacon with tiny, irritating bones.” I can just see that description appearing on a menu at the Ivy. We weren’t deterred, though, as no trip to Peru is complete with out trying Guinea Pig; it’s actually considered quite the delicacy.
Strachan, whose ‘un poquito’ of Spanish was considerably greater than my own, asked around the restaurant area if any of the chefs served up Cuy. The answer was a resounding no. The final ‘no’ we received was accompanied by squeaking and the tiny pitter-patter of footsteps. No, it wasn’t bring-your-toddlers-to-work day at the market nor had Strachan fell into one of his ‘turns.’ We had, in fact, stumbled across a vendor of live guinea pigs. Lady Luck truly smiled on us that day. I turned to Strachan and waited, expectantly, for the same idea to appear in his head. This took a few minutes, he can be quite slow.
What followed was surreal for a number of reasons. First of all once the sombre woman who sold the guinea pig to us agreed a reasonable price she snapped open her cage and grabbed a, supposedly, tasty looking guinea pig by the scruff of the neck. The podgy brown-and-white creature started squealing its head off almost as if it was aware of the grizzly fate that awaited it. She then, suddenly, took off towards a deserted area of the market, underground and beckoned us to follow. Her face was just as impassive as before but the spring in her step told us that she lived for this moment.
She handed the critter over to someone else who had the grim task of killing and de-furring the poor little guy. The actual moment of death was the biggest anti-climax of all. She causally strolled through the kitchen holding the squirming, squealing guinea pig by its hind legs and, with a flick of the wrist, she unceremoniously banged the struggling animal’s head against a work surface. Needless to say, the guinea pig stopped wriggling instantly. So the deed was done and unaffected butcher went on to dunk the dead animal into boiling hot water and literally ripped out its fur. As a dutiful tourist I captured the whole thing on camera.
We then brought the corpse to one of the aforementioned chefs who was more than happy to fry up the little fellow and minutes later we were ‘enjoying’ Cuy with a side salad of lettuce and red onion. The meat was extremely fatty; even fattier than I had imagined when I heard the earlier review. It also almost adhered to cliché in so much that it at least resembled chicken in texture if not taste. The bones were rather annoying, and to be honest there was not a huge amount of meat on the bones. That said, it actually wasn’t too bad. Not something I would order again but beyond the taste there was something complete and organic about having watched our meal transform from a living, breathing, scurrying rodent to something that resembled a very small fried chicken. I was also given pause to think about the journey that all my other meaty meals underwent to arrive at my plate; only a slight pause, though, that was interrupted by the mixed grill I had for dinner.
Next week, Papua New Guinea and stepping up the ‘strange meats’ from rodent to human…
