“No hay receta, no mas lo haces,” says my dad when I call to ask him about his ceviche recipe: there is no recipe, you just make it. This is the only meal he knows how to make, so there has to be a recipe, or at least a list of ingredients. The man struggles to do something as simple as frying an egg, he has to have a set of instructions to make something as good as his ceviche.
Ceviche is Peru’s most recognizable dish, it’s available at every Peruvian restaurant, and helped get Peruvian cuisine recognition as a titan of international cuisine. Chef Gaston Acurio, who owns multiple upscale cevicherias around the world, brought ceviche and Andean ingredients, like quinoa, to the masses. Acurio is an advocate of using Andean ingredients in order to produce “authentic” meals that educate the public about Peru’s resources.
I decide to figure out how to make ceviche myself, since my dad refuses to give me his recipe because, “it doesn’t exist.” I follow Acurio’s ideas of using only Peruvian ingredients, for authenticity. I end up in a market in the Mission looking for aji amarillo paste, fresh cilantro, Peruvian corn, rocoto (a pepper that only grows along the Latin American coast,) key lime, sweet potatoes, and purple onions. The most important part of ceviche is the fish, but there isn’t a specific kind of fish required, it just needs to be whitefish and as fresh as possible. I chose tilapia because it was the cheapest.
I get increasingly frustrated while shopping for the ingredients. I don’t know what brands to buy, I don’t know what rocoto looks like, and I can’t find fresh corn. So I do what anyone would do, call my mom for help, since it’s my parents’ fault I don’t know what I’m doing, right? I was, and still am, a picky eater, which my parents enabled. I didn’t really try most Peruvian food until I was a teenager, and even now I mostly stick to Chifa (Peruvian-Chinese fusion) and seafood dishes, or as my dad calls them “niña blanca” (white girl) Peruvian food.
Chifa and seafood are the easiest dishes for foreigners to digest because they’re simple and familiar. And in a way, I’m a foreigner. Sure, I was born in Peru, but I haven’t lived there since I was seven. We don’t really maintain any Peruvian customs at home, except for speaking Spanish, keeping a giant Señor de los Milagros portrait in our hall (I don’t know what he’s the saint of, we’re not practicing Catholics,) and eating at Peruvian restaurants every once in a while. It’s the classic immigrant dilemma: you either assimilate to fit in, and lose part of your cultural identity along the way, or you don’t. My family chose to assimilate, and I assimilated a little too well.
My dad considers Gaston Acurio’s $20 ceviche inauthentic “ceviche de niña blanca.” According to him, Acurio’s award-winning ceviche is, “overpriced, over-spiced, and pretentious.” So why is my dad the authority on ceviche? He isn’t, this is really more of an example to show just how passionate we are about ceviche. Every coastal Latin American country has its own version of the dish, but only we claim to have invented it, and mock changes to the traditional ingredients (white fish, onions, lime, aji amarillo, cilantro, and salt.) Adding tomatoes to ceviche, the way they do in Mexico and Ecuador, is pretty much sacrilege. Our passion for the dish borders on the surreal, it even has its own national holiday.
But for all this passion about how ceviche is ours, no one really knows when, who by, or why the dish was developed. Take my dad, who claims to know everything about ceviche; as soon as I ask him where ceviche comes from he pauses and says, “quien mierda sabe de donde viene,” (who the fuck knows where it comes from?)
There are two theories about how ceviche was developed, but they both say that ceviche originated in Peru. One says that it originated from the Moche, a pre-Columbian society in the Northern coast of Peru, who called the dish “siwich,” or “young fish,” in Quechua. They made it using passionfruit until the Spanish colonists arrived with limes.
The favored theory says that a predecessor to the dish, escabeche (fish cooked by a citrus marinade,) came with enslaved Moorish women that arrived to Lima, Peru (the capital of the Spanish Empire) with the conquistadors. The dish was then adapted to be cooked with Peruvian ingredients, since all the ingredients for escabeche couldn’t be grown in Latin America.
I may not know where ceviche comes from, but I’m determined to make it without a recipe, because it’s my birthright as a Peruvian, according to my dad [and the ceviche chefs I’ve been googling for the better part of the day.] Ceviche seems like the easiest thing to make, but it’s easy to ruin. If your fish isn’t fresh enough you risk food poisoning, if you add too much lime it comes out too bitter, if you use too much salt you risk drying the fish out, if you use too much aji it comes out yellow and too spicy.
I ruin the first batch by over salting the fish and adding too much lime juice, making the meat tough, like little cubes of jerky. I give up and start looking for recipes because I’m clearly too far removed from my Peruvian identity to cook this by trusting my gut. A Javier Wong recipe catches my eye, because Wong is basically the god of ceviche; his cevicheria in Lima has a seven month waitlist and it is often on best international food lists. His recipe has no measurements, and the note, “If gringos can’t make this, they’re just dumb” introduces it.
Maybe I am a dumb gringa for not being able to figure this stupid dish out. Maybe I deserve Wong’s insult. Maybe I should’ve eaten more comida criolla growing up. Maybe I should’ve asked more about Peru. Maybe I should’ve tried to dive deeper into the culture. But it’s too late now, so I get over this small [recurring] identity crisis and make a second batch, guessing the ingredients, like my Inca ancestors would. It comes out too sour.
I try again, reducing the lime juice and adding more cilantro. This time it’s good, not as good as Wong’s, Acurio’s, or my dad’s, but it’s definitely good enough to have seconds. I wash my lemon soaked hands and call my dad to tell him the good news, “I know how to make ceviche, because I’m Peruvian and all Peruvians obviously know how to make it, without a recipe and everything.”
