Venezuelan Cuisine Finds Rebirth in Diaspora
Text and Photos by Kevin Vaughn
Gloria del Fogón’s andina, quesadilla and arepas de trigo.
The smell of green onion, potato and wild cilantro picked fresh from the garden next to the papaya and mandarin trees drifted slowly from the kitchen into Gloria del Fogón’s bedroom every Sunday morning of her childhood. The perfume woke her up and pulled her toward her mother, Gloria Abril Sanmiguel, who had likely been up for hours already. Her mother’s pisca andina, a pearly white soup topped off with a poached egg and a touch of milk, filled the house and signaled to the family that it was church day. Fogón knew that breakfast was ready when her mother crushed up crackers in her fists and let the crumbs drop into the broth.
When her four children had everything they needed, Sanmiguel took the afternoon to rest and worship. When money in the house was tight, she worked all seven days. Each day, she kneaded 15 kilos of dough, rocking the table back and forth like an ocean wave as Fogón sat across from her and finished her homework. She baked everything in a home oven that was held shut with a broomstick, and as the morning light filtered into the bright blue kitchen, her basket slowly swelled with a half dozen types of bread—almojabanas, pillowy sweet cornbread rolls stuffed with cheese, or pan campesino, a rough country-style bread. Once her basket was filled she would sell door-to-door in the streets of San Cristóbal, a small city on the foothills of the Andes mountains known throughout Venezuela for its breadmakers.
Fogón has recently begun making pisca andina. The return to her mother’s kitchen is also a departure of sorts. When Fogón left Venezuela for Buenos Aires in 2013, she sought out kitchen experience in the city’s high-end restaurants. Two years ago, she began creating her own multicourse meals alongside her boyfriend, Damián Blanco, with their pop-up, Trashumantes. Their menus zigzagged between inspirations from all over the globe next to riffs on Argentine classics: bao stuffed with pejerrey jalea, smoked corn empanadas, Pekin duck raviolis and local chickpea bread, fainá, stuffed with Brussels sprouts.
In March, the duo was set to follow a job in a resort town deep in a Bavarian forest, but COVID axed that plan when much of the world went into lockdown. Without work and stuck in Buenos Aires, the duo began making pasteles, a savory fried pastry that cracks loudly and spills out pillowy bites of potato clinging to long strings of cheese or beef cooked down until the fat turns to juice that stains your shirt if you forget to eat them hunched over. You’re meant to bite just enough off the top to stuff them with cilantro-heavy guasacaca sauce. Their dough is homemade, borrowed from the recipe of a woman named Doña Mercedes, known for her pasteles in a village that clings to a small valley in the Andes mountains. Initially, making pasteles felt like a regression but as the quarantine progressed and Trashumantes began working seven days a week in take-away mode, Fogón began leaning back into the food of her childhood and the memories of her mother’s kitchen.
“At first when we started making pasteles, I kind of felt like I was taking a step backwards,” says Fogón. “But there is a reason why I am making food from the Andes. There is a reason why the pastel called me. It is part of my origins. I understood that in moments of uncertainty the only thing that was going to save me was to build a foundation and build it strong. That foundation was my identity. This experience has been incredibly emotional. When I left Venezuela, I didn’t realize I was leaving. I would have written stuff down or brought books had I known otherwise. I am making food from my past and much of it is from memory of this place that doesn’t exist anymore. These are incredibly intimate and powerful recipes.”
Andean cuisine has always been a part of Fogón but it wasn’t until recently that she began to see the “humble, country-style recipes” of her childhood as something worthy of selling.
She isn’t alone. Fogón is part of a micro-community of Venezuelan chefs in the midst of a culinary self-reflection, described by many as an intuitive magnetism toward restoring dishes of the collective consciousness passed down by their ancestors.
“Maybe there is something magic in my hands, maybe it is my own intention and the energy I put into what I do,” says Fogón. “This food made from ancestral recipes unifies all of us to one another and to our origins. That is more powerful than anything that I could pretend to be in control over.”
Andean cuisine has always been a part of Gloria del Fogón.
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According to information gathered by the UN Refugee Agency, more than 5.1 million Venezuelans have fled their home country in the last six years, with massive spikes occurring in 2018 and 2019. Not only is it the largest exodus of people from the region in recent history, but within a global context, the numbers are similar to a war zone. The Syrian civil war, for comparison, has displaced 5.6 million refugees since 2011. The reasons for fleeing are comparable: a deteriorated economy, runaway inflation, absence of state infrastructure, chronic food insecurity, malnutrition, political repression, human rights violations, constant threats of violence and no end in sight.
As of September 2020, more than 200,000 Venezuelans were residing in Argentina. The Institute for the Politics of Immigration and Asylum at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero conducted an extensive survey of Venezuelan immigrants across six metropolitan areas in 2017. The study was conducted just prior to a peak in Venezuelan immigration and found that 75 percent of the 56,000 residents living in Argentina at the time came from upper-middle-class backgrounds with highly specialized undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
Many of the sources I spoke with contended that the social background of Venezuelan immigrants in Argentina had a strong impact on building the foundations of a budding restaurant scene. Educated professionals turned to entrepreneurship and opened restaurants in order to have physical businesses. In a city where South American restaurants are uncommon, cheap and abundant Peruvian food being the only noticeable exception, many opted for dishes that were simple to prepare and palatable to the local population. As is often the case of immigrant restaurant communities, the food was more about quick customer acceptance and less about building a nuanced culinary culture, often cooked by people with little experience in professional kitchens.
A rough scan through the city’s main food delivery apps and a simple Google search suggests that there are well over 100 Venezuelan restaurants across Buenos Aires and its immediate outskirts. With few exceptions, most establishments serve the same tactile dishes fit to line the stomachs of a gluttonous proletariat: arepas, tequeños and empanadas, as well as a pornographic fantasy of greasy North American style fast-food, like meteoric-sized hamburgers, hot dogs as long as your forearm and pizzas lined with ham and cheese spheres in lieu of crust.
José Eizaga arrived in Buenos Aires in 2017 from the rural plains of the Cojedes state. He bounced around mostly high-end kitchens in the city while dabbling with haute approaches to regional food under the name ZAGA. Prior to the pandemic, he rented a restaurant space to make arepas with nixtamalized corn alongside maize-based dishes from across the Americas, like mute, a hominy soup akin to a Mexican pozole or Peruvian patasca. Although the restaurant is temporarily on hold, in September he launched El maíz nos une, or Corn Unites Us, with three other Venezuelans spread around the Americas. The investigative project aims to rescue regional dishes and ancestral cooking traditions whose gradual loss has been exasperated by the sudden exodus from the country.
“We started out by asking why. Why is Venezuelan food this way? What happened in our culinary history? We eat so much food that is not ours. Everything has become completely industrialized,” Eizaga says. “Arepas in Venezuela were once reserved for special occasions, it was a festive food, and when the product was industrialized it became a part of our daily diet. That’s great but there was very little care in protecting its origins. So our research began by asking those questions about what happened to that culture. What changed in our society? Why does all of our food come out of a plastic bag? How come in Venezuela we lost a food culture, whereas in Mexico or Colombia or Peru they continue maintaining pre-Colombian food traditions?”
Eizaga points out a nuance of Venezuelan cuisine within the context of a growing diaspora. It is not food that is being simplified abroad as the result of a diaspora, but rather the diaspora is exacerbating a long and sustained process of industrialization and urbanization. The prolificness of arepas, tequeños and empanadas isn’t entirely inaccurate to the Venezuelan zeitgeist. It is instead the result of a century’s worth of economic development that displaced the rural population and, as a consequence, quickly depleted ancestral food traditions to make way for simple food molded around an urban lifestyle.
“As a society, we don’t know our recipes. We don’t understand our ingredients. And that has happened with corn and so many other products,” Eizaga says. “What are we left with now? That knowledge today is lost. If our ancestral traditions haven’t completely disappeared already, then they are right there ready to vanish.”
José Eizaga’s version of mute, a hominy soup akin to a Mexican pozole or Peruvian patasca.
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The history of contemporary Venezuela gravitates around petroleum. The country began exploring its vast oil fields at the beginning of the 20th century and entered the international oil market in 1917. By 1926, the oil industry represented the largest contribution to the country’s gross domestic product, and by 1940, the country had become the world’s third largest oil producer.
Ten years later, the oil boom would make Venezuela one of the world’s wealthiest countries and it would remain the most prosperous nation in South America up until the end of the global energy crisis in the early 1980s. Venezuela was the greatest expression of capitalism in South America. Blindly maximalist in its methodology, the country extracted petroleum to line the pockets of foreigner investors and the local elite at the expense of thousands of years of agrarian knowledge, production and consumption. While the economy became rich in oil earnings, the rural working class began to starve, a problem that would turn chronic and invade urban centers well into today.
As journalist Miguel Acosta Saignes would write in his landmark book on the plight of the Venezuelan farm worker, Large Estate (1938), rural Venezuelans were experiencing malnutrition as a consequence of incomplete diets, contracting tuberculosis and other preventable diseases.
“Not too far from Caracas, farmers speak of hens that don’t lay eggs because there isn’t enough corn to feed them,” he writes. “When there are eggs, they are sold. Farm workers have stopped consuming beef and chicken, and any little animals that they do have, are usually used to cancel debts.”
Saignes would be forced into exile for his work as an investigator and Marxist political organizer.
The rapid development of the oil industry eliminated the historic production of cacao and coffee for export, as well as other household staples like pork, butter, preserved fish, juice, beans and even corn, which were gradually imported into the country in higher numbers as less land was cultivated. Divestment in the agrarian sector and a shift toward importation left farming communities, both sovereign subsistence farms and large plantations alike, without enough production and capital to feed themselves. Rural populations drained into urban areas, where today nearly 90 percent of the country lives.
In his book ¡Viva la arepa! (2015), historian Miguel Felipa Dortas Vargas outlines this unusually quick shift from long-standing ritualistic food culture to hyper processed fast foods in the mid-20th century. The addition of corn in Venezuela was relatively late in comparison to other cultures within the Americas. Maize is believed to have originated near present-day Mexico City, and the oldest known maize pollen dates back 80,000 years. The plant arrived in South America in 3000 BC and is believed to have arrived in present day Venezuela 1500 years later. Its domestication and culinary use isn’t totally known with estimates ranging from 900 BC to 500 AD.
Regardless of the exact timeline, indigenous communities would develop the same semiotic, religious relationship to corn as a sacred symbol of life and abundance as the Mesoamericans did. The Yukpa people of the northwest worshipped Osemma, the god of agriculture, whose hair was made of corn and coffee that he shook into the soil. From him, the Yukpa learned the secrets of the land, which grows in silence guided by a higher power. It was the Cumanagatos of the Carribean coast and islands that supposedly created the first ‘erepa.’ Over time, two processes evolved: pelao, a nixtamalization process in which dry corn is boiled with ash (and later cal) to soften and hull the corn, and pilao, a physically arduous process of mashing soaked corn by hand before milling. The pelao became the standard process for making arepas traditionally cooked on round clay pans called budares, whereas the pilao was more frequently used to make breads, cakes, chichas and hallacas.
The sacred arepa and maize-centric dishes would survive the European conquest of America, when colonizers brought their own holy wheat with them in the 15th century. Corn would become central to the creation of the national criolla cuisine during the 17th century, a culinary and cultural inheritance that was birthed from the collision of cultures of indigenous peoples, enslaved African people and European settlers. Food historian José Rafael Lovera wrote in his essay Between Fine Dining and Daily Bread (2000) that criolla cuisine would remain almost completely unaltered until the 1930s, and argued that the history of modern Venezuelan food can largely be divided into the pre- and post-petroleum ages.
Not only did recipes remain largely unchanged, the cultural construction around food was consistent well into the 20th century. Cultural critic Mariano Picón Salas mused over the godly aspects of the arepa in 1953, “the two most famous corn ‘breads’ of America, the tortilla and the arepa, are formed like a solar disc, as if the noble races that created them wanted to worship the first and most visible god that warmed the earth and birthed its fruits.”
That ideology bled beyond the confines of religion and into pop culture, whether it was in the folklore of the rural montesinos who sang Mi mama se llama arepa y mi taita maíz tostado, my mother is called arepa and my daddy toasted corn. In urban slang, \when everything goes sour, se le puso la arepa cuadrada, or the arepa went square on them.
Corn and the arepa continue to remain central figures in Venezuelan culinary tradition, but their current iterations are wildly different. In 1942, the first hybrid variety of corn was introduced and marked the start of nearly two decades of investigation in line with the Green Revolution, an agricultural movement that utilized engineered seeds, pesticides and monocultures to maximize yields and minimize work. According to food historian Rafael Cartay in Corn in Venezuela[1] (2000), up until the introduction of precooked corn flour in the late ’50s, arepas were still made with the labor intensive maiz pelao process similar to that of the pre-Colombian Cumanagato, made in the homes of rural Venezuelans or sold out of areperas in the growing city centers. In 1959, the arrival of precooked corn flour harina PAN quickly chipped away at the tradition. By the end of its first year, the company was selling 1 million kilos a month, which was indicative of a tsunami shift in culinary sensibilities.
Today, corn mills are little more than decorative objects in most homes, and harina PAN is synonymous with the arepa. Working with the pilao and pelao techniques is equivalent to rebellion. When Eizagá began sharing his recipes using nixtamalized corn on social media, he was surprised by many of the responses.
“We had a lot of recipes that used nixtamalized corn, and a lot of people are not aware of them,” he says. “And there is something that caught me off guard in that exchange. I made tortillas the other day with a nixtamalized corn dough and when I put it on Instagram people went wild over them. But when I made an arepa with that same nixtamalized dough using a traditional Venezuelan recipe, I got a totally different reaction. ‘That’s not an arepa!’ I really wanted to understand that reaction. Our identity has shifted to brands and packaged foods. Everything comes in a plastic bag. It’s like our nationality. Those foods have become the culture and something really important has been lost in that process.”
Embracing ancestral processes is the difference between simply loving a national dish and respecting where it came from, and in that process of understanding inheritance, recognizing everything that has been done to it. In contemporary culture, this means standing in direct opposition to the hegemonic processes of capitalism and colonialism and all that implies in a country that occupies the global south.
“It is just so strange to me. They tricked us into believing that being indigenous was something to be ashamed of when really they are the ones who know the most,” says Eizaga. “They are ones that contain all the knowledge about our land and our traditions. They understand our seeds, how to plant and harvest, the entire process. There are so many people that think that returning to the land and forming a relationship with her is like a step back.”
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The best cachapas, like Ivanova Hidalgo’s, are made with freshly shucked corn turned into a thick paste and cooked on a griddle before being stuffed with cheese, ham or shredded beef.
Ivanova Hidalgo is the owner of Grulla Amarilla Cachaperia, a restaurant in the Chacarita neighborhood of Buenos Aires with little more than a grill top, a mill and a blender. Originally from Caracas, she remembers driving into the hills with her family on the weekends to eat cachapas at roadside stands along the highway. Cachapas are also a pre-Colombian dish, believed to have originated from the indigenous peoples in the Caribbean state of Miranda that borders the capital. Unlike arepas, cachapas are soft like a pancake—harina PAN has a separate line of flour mix to make them with eggs and sweet panela. The best cachapas are made with freshly shucked corn turned into a thick paste and cooked on a griddle before being stuffed with cheese, ham or shredded beef.
A graphic designer by trade, Hidalgo began making cachapas when she was invited to cook at a food fair and thought one of her favorite childhood dishes would be simple to recreate.
“It was a disaster. They were horrendous. I didn’t understand anything,” she says. “I found recipes online and followed them exactly and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t turning out the way they needed to. They all burned. They fell apart. I wasn’t respecting the recipe. I didn’t understand the corn. I didn’t understand the mill. I didn’t understand the whole process.”
She has spent the few years since learning the subtleties of the cachapa and the intricacies of corn. At her restaurant, which she opened just before the March lockdown went into effect, she shows a crate of corn she purchases from a purveyor in the Argentine northwest region of Salta. According to Hidalgo, not only is every corn cob different, each grain of corn is. She studies the craft of corn and cachapas with the same precision that a ramen master examines noodles or a piazzola their dough.
Corn in Argentina is sweeter than what she grew up with in Venezuela. Winter crops tend to be starchy while summer crops are often watery; some cobs come filled with lots of seeds while others are hollow and burst with juice. Thus, each individual crate of corn produces a different batter and Hidalgo approaches every one with intense care—understanding the corn she is working occupies all five senses.
She examines each plant as she pulled back the silk and husk, taking in its varied shades of yellow, noting the faint sweet smell of starch that dripped down her hand as she popped kernels between her fingers and listening for the faint hollow echo that let her know this was a watery batch and would need a spoonful of corn flour to stabilize the batter. As the nebulous batter transformed into a flattened pancake, she slaps it with her spatula, flips and rotates as she patiently watched the yellow turn charred brown like craters on a full moon.
“I wish I could add other things to the menu,” she says, “but my hands are full with cachapas. They require all of my attention.”
For Hidalgo, this is the only way to make a cachapa. She isn’t just making food to fill a biological function. Her cooking fulfills an urge that lives within her — the manifestation of an unbreakable connection to a cultural inheritance that is transcendent in nature.
“Corn is fundamental to the Latin identity,” she says. “At home, we ate pasta, pizza, bread and other stuff but it always felt like something that was outside of me. Corn is ours. We are a country that has mixed everything. Food, traditions, people but what was there first was our corn. This is a dish that I respect because it is a dish that belongs to me. It belongs to this body, to my genes, to my stomach. It is what my mother and grandmother gave to me and is what truly nourishes me.”
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Over the last few months, Fogón has been cooking her mother’s pisca andina. She taught it to a group of women that run a community kitchen in the city’s outskirts she was invited to give a class to. It also appeared in the final edition of a recent brunch series, the anchor of a spread that also included arepas served with smoked nata and avocado cream, and sweet breads called quesadillas brushed with mulberry jam like she used to take a detour for whenever she returned home from university.
“Feeding people is an act of rebellion,” she says. “I feel like if a pisca andina is made here in Buenos Aires for someone that has never tried it, and they liked it, they will replicate it. I know that something is happening here. We are keeping alive the Andes that have been beaten and decimated, which is not only the story of Venezuela but the story of Latin America.”
Fogón describes the experience as a moment of coming full circle, a means of re-calibrating and following something deep within her. It was something that had been talking to her all along that she hadn’t been willing to listen, like the silent hand of the god Osemma, or the voices of her grandmothers, telling her that this was also a moment of importance meant to be shared.
The day before the brunch, she got news that the job in Germany was back on track and that they had two weeks to get all their things in order. The responses from her customers were overwhelming and curative for both cook and diner. And she got word from Isabel and Marcela, the women she taught pisca andina, that they had taught it to a dozen other women who run their own community kitchens and that the soup of Gloria Abril was being used to feed hundreds of people all over the city’s vast urban sprawl.
“What ancestral food does is bring us closer to ourselves,” she says. “Every time that I make a pisca andina I feel a little closer to my mother. When we eat, when we cook, something happens to us. I feel like I am calling all of my grandmothers, the ones who are alive and the ones who are dead. And I don’t think that any of this is coincidence. It isn’t casual that when I began to explore this I developed this sudden, inexplicable obsession with putting flowers on everything. My grandmothers are named Margarita and Rosa. They bloom from my hands and grow into my food because what I am making is genuine, it isn’t stained, it doesn’t deny my inheritance. The things that you eat. The things that your ancestors ate. It forms you. I am corn and flour. Cilantro flows out of my hair. These are the things that made me. My grandmothers have returned to tell me something that I still don’t understand but I am willing to follow.”
