The Origin of Lima’s Creole Street Food

By Nico Vera

Modern-day anticucheros in Lima. Photo by Nico Vera.

Lima’s love for street food spans centuries. Today, locals in Peru’s coastal capital seek out food carts and market stalls offering traditional creole street food—soothing herbal infusions, ancestral brews, warm tamales, baked empanadas, sugary milk caramel cookies, crispy sweet potato donuts, mashed potato casseroles, smoky beef-heart kebabs and creamy purple corn puddings. But it was Lima’s colonial-era criollos of Spanish, Andean, or Black heritage who first cooked and hawked these dishes. Singing pregones from morning ’til night to announce their wares, they were Lima’s original street food vendors.

 During the Viceroyalty of Peru (1542-1824), Spanish colonists brought enslaved people from Africa to Lima, to work in the city or on cotton or sugar coastal plantations. By the time Peru gained its independence (1824) and abolished slavery (1854), Afro-descendants were half of Lima’s population. Though slavery ended, the need for labor in coastal plantations continued. This attracted indentured servants from China, adding to Lima’s racial diversity. Lima’s population growth created a demand for produce markets throughout the city. And from these markets, street food vendors poured into the streets of Lima and created an informal economy.

 But who were these vendors? And what did they cook? In the 1872 book Tradiciones Peruanas (Peruvian Traditions), Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma (1833-1919) shares stories of Peru’s history. Some were about Inca traditions or Peru’s independence, but most were about all aspects of creole life in colonial-era Lima. In one story, he documented the daily routine of street food vendors. From 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., they sold drinks and a variety of sweet and savory foods that are still popular today. These are some of the hourly highlights:

7 a.m.: tisanes and chicha

10 a.m.: tamales

12 p.m.: empanadas

1 p.m.: alfajores

2 p.m.: picarones and causa

3 p.m.: anticuchos

7 p.m.: mazamorra morada

After the 6 a.m. milk vendor came the tisanera and chichera at 7 a.m., and according to Palma both were Afro-descendant women. Tisanes are medicinal infusions, made with different curative herbs, that customers often enjoyed for breakfast. Chicha is an ancestral grain brew which the Incas prepared since precolonial times by fermenting corn. Palma says that the chicha vendor hailed from Terranova, an Afro-Peruvian community in Lima.

 Savory tamales came at 10 a.m. and empanadas at noon. Colonial foodways brought empanadas from Spain to Peru, and Lima’s creoles sold them, filled with picadillo—ground beef cooked with spices. But the Peruvian tamal has precolonial origins. The Incas prepared tamal-like humitas by boiling grated corn wrapped in leaves. According to anthropologists, Afro-descendant women added savory spices and ingredients to humitas. These creole humitas were similar to Mexican tamales, so that’s what colonists and vendors ended up calling them.

 Spanish foodways also brought sweets to colonial Lima, such as alfajores and buñuelos. Derived from a Moorish confection, alfajores are shortbread cookie sandwiches filled with milk caramel and dusted with powdered sugar. Buñuelos are fried dough balls, but Afro-Peruvian cooks transformed them into picarones—doughnut-shaped fritters made with an anise-infused sweet potato and squash dough, then bathed with a cinnamon and clove spiced syrup. Alfajores and picarones were among the first desserts of the afternoon, at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., respectively.

 Then, for a savory midafternoon break, came the 2 p.m. causa. Palma writes that causa was from the northern coastal town of Trujillo, an epicenter of Peru’s independence movement. Causa is a mashed potato dish made with salt, citrus juice, oil and hot peppers, then topped with olives and fried fish or shrimp. Creole cooks today shape the mashed potato into a casserole with different middle layers, such us tuna or chicken salad with onions and mayonnaise. To serve it, they slice into a tall square piece, like a cake. Locals suggest that the name “causa” hinted at Trujillo’s revolutionary past, fighting for a “cause,” for independence. Then, at 3 p.m. came anticuchos, one of Lima’s iconic street foods. Afro-descendants grilled these smoky beef-heart kebabs marinated in vinegar, lime juice, spices and hot peppers.

 The last food of the day was ice cream at 8 p.m., but an hour before came mazamorra morada, a creamy purple corn pudding that originated in Andean communities. In Lima, creole cooks prepared it by boiling purple corn with cinnamon, cloves and fruit peel to create a stock. Then, they added sugar, lime juice and sweet potato flour to thicken it. Palma’s story says the vendor was a woman, or mazamorrera. This dessert is so popular in Lima today that Limeños (people from Lima) proudly call themselves “mazamorreros”—meaning “those who eat mazamorra.”

 From Palma’s account of the food vendors’ schedule, it would seem that Limeños ate all day long. Palma also tells us that vendors sang pregones to describe their foods and attract customers. Other writers, contemporaries of Palma, documented these pregones—which were only sung in Lima—and detailed how they were sung, what tone the vendor’s used.

 Twentieth-century Afro-Peruvian musician Victoria Santa Cruz recreated those calls in the a cappella song “Gritos de Pregoneros.” The chichera, for example, sang: “chicha que el cuerpo mejora y acaba con la desdicha.” She promised that drinking chicha betters the body and ends misery. While the tisanera announced her arrival, bringing fresh tisana with shaved ice and pineapple: “la tisanera llegó, aquí está la tisanera, tisana con nieve y piña, ¡tisana!, tisana fresca.”

La Tisanera (1850) by Pancho Fierro. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The complement to Palma’s writings are the watercolor paintings of Pancho Fierro (1807-1879). In lieu of photographs, some of his illustrations are a visual record of street food vendors in Lima circa 1850. Fierro draws the tisanera as a Black woman on foot, balancing a large vase with tisane on her head, and holding a smaller basket with cups. The tamalera is also an Afro-descendant woman, but she is riding a mule carrying two baskets filled with tamales. And the anticuchero, an Afro-descendant man, is sitting on a wood crate while grilling anticuchos. The almuerzera, a Black woman who cooks lunch, is seen announcing her food, child in tow.

 Creole street food has been a constant in Lima for centuries. Today, the pregones are gone, but locals and tourists rush Grimanesa’s Anticuchos at the annual outdoor Mistura food festival, or frequent Parque Kennedy in Miraflores for push cart vendors like Picarones Mary. Near the north east corner of the park, across Avenida Jose Larco, stands Ibero Librerias, a bookstore that carries an exhaustive collection of Peruvian cookbooks. Their street food recipes closely resemble those in early creole cookbooks, such as “El Nuevo Manual de la Cocina Criolla (Lima, 1903).” And through these traditional recipes, Lima has maintained a strong connection to a past that evokes culinary nostalgia for the street food vendors of yesteryear.