STORY by KATIE BRANDON
PHOTOS by ANDREA MORALES
Daydreaming of a nostalgic holiday meal, the picture for most of us is the one Norman Rockwell painted: a family gathered around a table crowded with bowlfuls of buttery mashed potatoes, tart cranberries, old-fashioned stuffing and a golden roast turkey.
The pride of many cooks, turkey is the quintessential symbol of a holiday meal in the United States.
But high in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, the holiday table revolves around something dramatically different. Forget turkey, the Ecuadorians are slicing into guinea pig.
In Andean Ecuador, the native guinea pig is an extraordinary treat, revered for thousands of years. During the Incan empire, guinea pigs were eaten only for special occasions, most often holy days. Spanish colonial paintings of the Last Supper in many churches show Christ and the disciples eating guinea pigs.
Today guinea pigs are savored, but in a region of Ecuador where the monthly salary is $180, ordering an $8 meal of guinea pig that feeds one or two people is a delicacy that many families cannot afford as a weekly or even monthly splurge.
Specialty of the House
Sixteen men sit on either side of a long, polished wood table, laughing and telling stories over glass pitchers of cold beer. It’s a celebration. The youngest of the group is getting married, and his father has invited some friends for lunch in honor of his son. They have chosen this restaurant, La Choza, in Chaltura, Ecuador, because the menu features only one dish — guinea pig.
At La Choza, guinea pigs are raised just steps away from the old barn-turned-kitchen. In cool concrete sheds, they huddle in clay hutches beneath fronds of frilly alfalfa dotted with tiny purple buds. When a visitor comes near, the pen comes alive with the animals’ chirp-like cries. In Quechua, an indigenous language of the Andean region, a guinea pig is called a cuy (COO-ee) — onomatopoeia for the sound they make. They scurry around the cuyeros, meaning hutch, as owner Fabiola Herrera de Pita tosses more of the alfalfa stalks to the hungry animals.
“Ten cuyes eat the same as one horse,” she says. “They never stop. That is the most expensive part about raising them. If you want good cuyes, you need to have good feed.” As Fabiola walks through her shed, she stops to pluck a black guinea pig from the corner of a pen. “These are good luck, but that doesn’t keep us from eating them,” she says, chuckling. She plops the black guinea pig back down into the cuyero and decides that it’s time to cook.
The guinea pigs we just saw will not be our lunch today. Pita begins the process of readying the guinea pigs she will serve that day at 5 a.m. She slits its throat, dips it into boiling-hot water and pulls its fur out. The organs are removed and the guinea pig, whole, is plunked into a marinade where it will stay until it’s ready to be fried.
An ancient-looking wood-burning stove commands attention on the back wall of the old barn. The fuel, an 8-foot-high pile of branches and scrap wood, sits next to it. The walls behind the stove are shiny black with soot, and on the cement floor, a flattened refrigerator box catches drips and spills.
At the far end of the room, eight members of the Pita family are gathered around a table sharing lunch. At a smaller wood-burning stove, a girl is stirring a sauce that will accompany the cuy. Pita’s nephew announces that the oil is ready. The flames lick the bottom of a large, shallow, iron pan of well-seasoned, coffee-colored vegetable oil. An identical pan sits next to it over a cooler part of the stove. When the whole cuy is pulled from the salty, garlicky marinade, it’s hard to see any resemblance to the furry animals we just saw in the barns.
Pita slowly lowers it into the first pot of scorching-hot oil. The oil pings and pops and furiously gurgles. This first step, she says, rids the animal of much of the excess fat under the skin. After two minutes, the cuy is transferred to the cooler oil to cook the meat without burning the skin. After five minutes there, it is ready for a final dip in the first pot, now even hotter than before.
“This last part makes the skin crisp like this,” Fabiola says, snapping her fingers. Two more minutes, and it is ready for the plate. Back in the open-air dining room, we wait in anticipation. The party of men has reduced their platters to piles of tiny bones, and they rinse their hands with the remaining beer. “Gets rid of the grease,” Pita explains.
Through the breezeway from the kitchen, Pita’s 10-year-old niece carries our plates to us. Certainly not for the faint of stomach, the whole, deep-fried guinea pig rests atop a mound of boiled potatoes with a sauce made of tomatoes, peppers and onions –and the heart, liver and kidneys of the cuy. It is reminiscent of the gravy made from turkey giblets. A green salad lightly dressed with lemony vinaigrette cuts the richness of the meal.
The meat is moist and tender like rabbit, but not the slightest bit gamey or greasy. The skin is delightfully salty and so crisp it cracks into pieces. Accompanied with ice-cold beer and crunchy kernels of roasted corn, it is quite a feast.
Big business
In Salinas, it’s hot. Tucked in the middle of a sparse town of makeshift mud-block homes and dusty clay-colored streets, Roberto Moncayo’s farm is like an oasis. The green of the surrounding trees and grass is lush and inviting. He greets our truck with a smile and a bottle of bug repellent to ward off biting flies.
Although today is Sunday and the rest of his staff of 14 is off, he is dressed for work in a wide-brimmed hat, lightweight pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He proudly walks us toward his 12 concrete-and-metal barns and stops in front of a large metal door marked with the number eight.
He takes out a set of two dozen jangling keys, unlocks two separate locks and swings the large metal door open. Instantly the room erupts in a chorus of the chirps and cries of the 3,000 guinea pigs that live here. It’s reminiscent of an aviary full of songbirds and is so loud we almost shout to be heard. This is the largest, and arguably most important, guinea-pig farm in the world.
Moncayo grew up around guinea pigs. His father raised them, but sold his small farm when he was in his 80s. In 1982 to continue his father’s legacy and because he was familiar with the production, Moncayo started his own farm, called Aquicuy, which in the Quechua dialect means “Prince cuy.”
And for good reason. Moncayo is known for having some of the best and most profitable guinea pigs in the world. Unlike most of the Ecuadorian guinea pig farmers, Moncayo is a certified agronomist, and graduated from the Escuela Agraria Panamericana in Zamorano, Honduras. In the late 1970s, he began to cross breed Ecuadorian guinea pigs with a stronger, more genetically engineered breed from Peru. Through several years of taking “the best of the best from the best,” he says, he eventually developed his own breed known for their impressive size and hardiness.
Moncayo is considered by many to be the foremost expert on the production of guinea pigs. Whereas many Ecuadorian farms raise anywhere from 100 to 1,000 guinea pigs, Moncayo’s farm is home to 55,000 of the prized animals. He sells primarily to restaurants — in fact, some restaurant owners travel six hours once a week and line up in their trucks in Moncayo’s dirt driveway just for his specialty cuyes. However, it’s his breeding stock that made him famous. He sells his hardiest males and females to farms in Ecuador, Peru, Columbia and Bolivia at nearly twice the price of those he sells to restaurants.
When Moncayo started his farm, Ecuadorian guinea pigs generally produced one to two pups per litter, and each litter took approximately 17 weeks to mature to 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds), which is the size most consider ideal for cooking. Due in a large part to his research and breeding techniques, litters have expanded to three to four pups and are usually 1.5 kilos after only 12 weeks.
Richard Wheeler, a farmer and U.S. expatriate, knows Moncayo from a farming co-op where they both sit on the board of directors. He says nearly everyone in Ecuador is familiar with Moncayo’s influence on the production of guinea pigs throughout Andean South America.
“Roberto Moncayo is responsible for the renaissance of the cuy,” he says. “He is the father of mass production. Cuy farming would be nowhere near where it is today if it weren’t for the breeding practices of Señor Moncayo.”
Moncayo’s farm is unquestionably different from most other guinea pig farms in Ecuador. His 12 barns, which each house 3,000 to 5,000 guinea pigs, are cooled from the sweltering midday sun by rooftop sprinklers. He grows the alfalfa and grass to feed his animals — which is rare, even for larger farms. The sheer size of his farm is impressive, as are the two tractors that haul the more than 26,000 pounds of food to the animals each day.
Steeped in ancient Incan culture
Moncayo tells the story of an indigenous man who arrived at the farm looking for 150 of Moncayo’s fattest, biggest guinea pigs. They were for his daughter’s wedding, he explained, and he wanted each of the 150 guests to have his or her own cuy when they sat down to dinner.
Moncayo explained that it would be a month before he would have 150 fat animals to sell, and asked the man to come back. The man then turned to his daughter and told her the wedding would be postponed until the guinea pigs were ready.
Stories like this are not uncommon in Andean Ecuador, where the culture is still strongly tied to indigenous traditions. Nearly every rural Andean home has at least one or two guinea pigs roaming in the kitchen or sometimes an outdoor pen. They’re not pets — in fact, Wheeler says, most families won’t allow the children to name the guinea pigs. “Then they’ll never want to eat them and they’re too expensive of an investment not to.”
Not having at least one guinea pig in the home usually means the family is very poor. “It is very rare that you don’t see cuyes in a home here,” Wheeler says. “But they generally run free in the kitchen or are kept in clay pens in the yard until they are big enough to consume.”
Wheeler says it took him a while to get used to the idea of eating guinea pig after seeing them as pets in the United States. But, he says, in Andean Ecuador, the consumption of guinea pigs is not just customary — it is expected.
Outside assistance
Further proof of this renaissance of producing guinea pigs is a project called PROCANOR, which is a government organization that assists 4,000 northern Ecuadorian families in the production, processing and marketing of cattle, pigs, sheep — and guinea pigs. PROCANOR (which stands for Production Carnes en Norte de Ecuador) was developed by a Belgian non-profit organization at the request of the Ecuadorian government in October 2004 to help the agricultural families in rural Ecuador.
Hubert Geoffray, the international director, explains that the majority of assistance is educational rather than monetary. “We help with some money sometimes, but only after they have attempted themselves to make money,” he says. The educational assistance comes in the form of instructional booklets, visits to the farms by PROCANOR officials and seminars on subjects such as breeding practices and disease prevention.
Of the 4,000 families participating in the program, 800 produce guinea pigs. And, interestingly, most of the small farms are run by women. Consalación Rosales de Alvarez owns a farm high atop a winding mountain road where the clouds touch the treetops just outside of the Imbabura province. She has lived on this mountain her whole life save for an eight-year period when she lived in Ibarra to educate her children. “PROCANOR showed me that it is possible to make a living by selling cuyes,” she says. “It has been a very helpful part of our lives here.”
The PROCANOR program will come to an end in 2010, and by that point, Geoffray says he hopes the families will be equipped with the knowledge to sustain their farms, thus continuing this legacy of rural farming in Northern Ecuador.
Healing powers
Guinea pigs have been used for years in shaman rituals for healing and spiritual renewal, explains Jorge Cadena Escobar, a PROCANOR veterinarian and cuy expert. In one ritual, a healing masseur, called a sobadore, massages the ailing person with a large cuy, most commonly black, for 15 to 30 minutes, or until the guinea pig stops breathing from suffocation. It is then cut in half, and the sobadore interprets the condition of the animal’s organs as an aid in the diagnosis of the ailing person.
It’s believed in many indigenous communities that guinea pigs are carriers of positive energy, and that by eating the animals, the energy is passed on. Especially in pregnancy and childbirth, soups, stews and other concoctions using everything from guinea pig hearts to their blood and fur are prescribed to ease everything from morning sickness to labor pains.
Escobar says he met a woman who had a serious surgery and was recovering very slowly. The village doctor recommended she make a clear soup made from the meat and bones of the guinea pigs and to eat it for one month. According to Escobar, her health rapidly returned after eating the broth. “Her cheeks were red, and she was light on her feet,” he says. “We call cuyes levantador de los muertos — raiser of the dead.”
A tradition all their own
It’s a challenge but not impossible to find guinea pig meat in the United States. Some Latin markets around New York offer frozen meat. Several years ago, New York officials shut down a stand at an outdoor Ecuadorian festival serving guinea pigs for health code reasons. And California banned guinea pig meat because it comes from an animal that is a common pet.
Both Ecuador and Peru export guinea pigs to the United States, but the market for the meat is still very small.
Eating guinea pigs isn’t likely to be a culinary trend any time soon. Even the residents of coastal Ecuador just 100 miles away think that the custom of eating guinea pigs is strange, says Moncayo.
“It’s just a rodent to them,” he says. “Eating cuyes is strictly an Andes tradition. We’re proud of that.”