I set myself a challenge of making three traditional Paraguayan dishes. I took ideas from different sources, but probably the best source I found for Paraguayan recipes was http://www.pyadopt.org/recipe.html which has a free PDF version of Flavours of Paraguay: A Cookbook by Lynn Van Houten.
Payagua Mascada
The first dish I made was Payagua Mascada which are cassava patties with beef and onion. I'd never cooked cassava before and had no idea how to prepare this root, so it was fun finding out - I watched a video on YouTube of a woman in Africa preparing cassava root, so I took my lead from her.
Cassava has an unusual texture and taste. The peel is almost like a bark and I couldn't help feeling that I was eating some kind of tree. I fried some minced beef and onion, boiled the cassava and mashed it, mixing all the ingredients together (with cumin, salt, garlic and cornflour), then made patties which I fried on a pan.
Sopa Paraguayana
Probably, the most traditional dish in Paraguay, Sopa Paraguayana is a type of cornbread. I've made cornbread before, by mixing cornflour with wheat flour, however this bread is cornflour only, lots of cheese and milk, also fried onions and tomatoes, which was really delish!
Zoo-Tosopy
My main dish was Zoo-Tosopy, a traditional Guarani beef stew. The recipe said I should boil the minced beef in water, but I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I made sure the minced beef had cooked through properly before adding water to it.
I then fried onions, tomatoes and plantain, adding them to the beef, with some long-grain rice and a dash of hot-pepper sauce. Just like cassava, I had never cooked plantain before, so that was cool and the banana aroma was tantalising. The overall taste was a bit bland, so I would recommend having some hot-pepper sauce to hand as a garnish, or perhaps using tinned tomatoes, to give the stew a more tomatoey taste. My pot was probably a bit too small as well, just about managed to get everything in!
It took me about three hours to prepare all three dishes. I'm not sure whether these dishes are meant to go together, but I wanted to learn how to cook cassava and plantain, and I think the tastes kind of complemented each other. I ended up making a lot of food, so I imagine we'll be freezing some of it. The whole lot cost me about 14 GBP, which is approximately $21 and 99,000 PYG (Paraguay Guarani).
I couldn't find any Paraguayan-made films but, as I had never seen The Mission, this seemed like an opportune time to rent the DVD.
It was amazing seeing the Paraguayan jungle come to life, hearing the entrancing music of Morricone and watching some fantastic acting by De Niro, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson. I must admit the life of the Jesuits and the society of the 'reductions' seemed somewhat idealized and I guess, given the centuries that have passed, we may never know for sure, what the missions in Paraguay and Brazil were really like. The only remnants are those eerie ruined abbeys that one sees in photographs. Tellingly, one of the missions in the movie, San Miguel, is now in Brazil, so I knew that the Jesuit territory would be handed over to the Portuguese, long before the movie had ended.
I saw James Cameron's Avatar recently and, funnily enough, I found many parallels in the storylines of these two movies. Before I went to Avatar, I'd heard a lot about the movie. Most people told me that it was visually stunning, with amazing 3D effects, but that the story was boring. Having seen it, I agree the technical aspects were amazing, but I also quite enjoyed the story. I mean, it wasn't brilliant, but I liked the message behind the film.
I think the Na'vi of Avatar, could easily have been based on the Guarani of Paraguay (or the Sioux of the Dakotas, or any of the tribes of the Amazon). When the bad guys come with their guns blazing and their machines tearing up the forest, blasting sacred trees and burning down the huts/teepees of the villagers, you can only watch in anguish as a civilsation steeped in centuries of harmony with the natural world, is crushed uncomprehending by a merciless foe and shot down in cold blood by those thirsty to squeeze a profit out of the forest/earth/native population.
A lot of time has passed since the Jesuits were forced out of South America and the jungles opened up to exploitation. The Mission is an interesting record of this period. I'm not sure whether or not Avatar is a lament for what we've lost, or a warning of things to come. Either way, the message is simple:
Tree-killers, bad. Tree-huggers, good.
Image credits
The image from the mission at Trinidad, Paraguay has been provided by flickruser Travel Aficionado using the Creative Commons License.
I'm doing my first South American country and I'm really excited about Paraguay because, being a big fan of travel magazines like Wanderlust and Lonely Planet Magazine, I've read a lot about Paraguay's neighbours: Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina. Paraguay, on the other hand, is a country I know absolutely nothing about!
Looking at Paraguay on a map, it looks relatively small compared to either Brazil or Argentina. Finding out that it is only a little bit smaller than both California and Sweden, helps put things in perspective. It's quite a sparsely populated country and most people seem to live in the East, between the Paraguay and Parana rivers. The western Chaco is already intriguing me, with its remoteness and its history, bringing Paraguay into conflict with Bolivia in the 1930's and leading, ultimately, to 35 years of dictatorship under Stroessner, and Paraguay's self-imposed isolation from world affairs.
Apart from Stroessner's years in power, the two things that immediately jump out at me, in relation to Paraguay, are the influence of the Jesuits and the status of one of Paraguay's two official languages, Guarani (the other being Spanish).
I'm just beginning to realise how different Guarani is from other native languages of the Americas. I spent a lot of time last month researching the Native American cultures and languages in the US and I think any of these would love to have the status that Guarani has, with its estimated 5 million speakers and the support and resources of the Paraguayan government. Guarani is classified as a member of the Tupi-Guarani language family and is the only native American language that has also been adopted by non-native American speakers, namely the European ancestors of Paraguay's majority mestizo population.
It's also unusual in that it has a strict system of nasal harmony, not just in affixes, like many African languages but, in fact, the whole word will be nasalised, including all vowels and consonants. When Europeans came to South America, they decided that all native American languages were more or less the same and belonged to one big language family. This seems like academic apathy to me and I'm much more excited about hints that Guarani might be traced back to places in Central Asia. To Guarani we owe words like Jaguar, Tapir and Piranha.
So why did Guarani thrive when other native languages were eclipsed by Spanish, Portuguese and English? The easiest answer is - the Jesuits! Founded by the Spanish-Basque, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, became a sort of 'defenders of the faith' sect, within the Catholic church, stopping Protestantism from spreading to places like Poland and Lithuania, later spreading the Catholic faith as religious missionaries to Asia and the New World.
The Jesuits strongly believed in and promoted use of the vernacular (as opposed to Latin) and their universities became famous as centres of study for lawyers and civil servants. Also, when the Jesuits came to South America as missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, they used Guarani to spread the word of God and established 'reductions', which were Christianised native communities, that gave the native people some protection from the excesses of colonisation that were so common elsewhere.
So great was the Jesuit influence, in Europe and the rest of the world, that they were eventually banned by most European countries, seeking refuge, ironically enough, in the only country that would tolerate them, Catherine the Great's Russia!
I've only hit the tip of the iceberg with these two themes and it's fascinating, but too much to blog about in one go. Reading about the Jesuits, in particular, has filled in another jigsaw piece for me, in the puzzle of world history.
I'm going to leave you with a short clip from Al-Jazeera, available through YouTube, so we can learn a little bit more about Guarani and (most exciting of all), hear the spoken language. Enjoy!
Image credits
The image of the man on the road is by flickruser Olmovich (Olmo Calvo Rodriguez) from Madrid, who is a part of a journalist co-operative that highlights the work of social movements and publishes an interesting (Spanish language) periodico called Diagonal. To find out more, check out their website http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/
The image of Ignatius of Loyola is a reproduction of a painting by Rubens, from Wikimedia Commons, and is copyright free.
