The Culinary Art of Peruvian Witchcraft By Jen Karetnick Rose Vera was dining with her family at Tacna, a popular restaurant in the jungle city of Iquitos, Peru. She decided to take a bathroom break after ordering her favorite preparation, Andean anticuchos, or beef heart kebabs. Practically the national dish, the beef hearts, after all the stringy nerves and interfering fat are removed, are cubed and marinated in fresh ají or rocoto chiles, garlic, black pepper, oil, and vinegar. Then they’re skewered and grilled over coals to succulent, medium-well perfection. Her mouth watered as she pictured the salsa picante de Peru, a blend of chile peppers, green onions, and garlic, which she would spoon on top of each morsel. Day-dreaming about the forthcoming meal on her way to the rest room, Vera accidentally took a wrong turn and wandered into the kitchen. There, she witnessed the stout, female chef waving the skewered raw beef hearts Vera had just requested in the air. The woman appeared to be conducting an invisible orchestra, or a fencing match with an imaginary partner. On closer inspection, however, Vera realized that the cook wasn’t just waving the skewers, she was actually stroking her body with them. The hearts were passed down across her arms, then back up into her armpits. She repeated the gesture down the front of her legs, laving her thighs, calves, and even the soles of her feet. She then brought the kebabs up behind her knees. Vera backed out of the kitchen before the cook could rub the food against her buttocks or private parts. She gathered her family together and left the establishment pronto. In actuality, what Vera encountered wasn’t just appallingly bad hygiene. The cook was practicing spell-casting, and Vera’s brush with this brand of witchcraft was certainly more startling – not to mention stomach-turning – than encountering the average Samantha Stevens nose-twitch. But while it is unusual for a customer to observe this type of ritual in a restaurant kitchen, it’s not at all odd for the cooks and restaurateurs to practice it, says Bonnie Wyatt, an American who has studied, lived, and dined in Iquitos for the last eleven years. Wyatt calls these rituals “encantes, or bewitchings,” which in this part of Peru, a remote city bordering the Amazon where the only way in or out is by airplane or boat, are common. In fact, some cooks will go even farther, by immersing themselves naked in a tub of freshly cooked rice until they sweat. Then they serve that rice to the customers. The diners who sup on the enchanted foodstuffs, the locals insist, are more likely to return to that particular restaurant, thus ensuring a good business for the owners. And such spell-casting does seem to work, at least empirically: At the end of the day, Tacna, for example, rakes in a nice chunk of change. Wyatt, who has run lodges in the Amazonian rainforest surrounding Iquitos and works rescue missions with native animals, has her own theory on why this sort of rite may work. “It’s not magic,” she says. “It’s pheromones. The female cook – and she’s always female – rubs the food, after it’s cooked, over her skin in order for it to absorb her scent. The diners who eat that food will be attracted to her, and consequently, the restaurant.” But while the restaurant may prosper for a time, either coincidentally or as a direct result of pheromone-induced desire, practicing witchcraft on the premises of an eating establishment is illegal in this city, which Wyatt ironically calls “the last frontier, where anything goes.” (Wyatt’s been offered jobs that include assisting a plastic surgeon during a face lift to running a bordello.) Still, chefs are rarely imprisoned for sweating over the side dishes. Cooking with human bones, however, another frequent occurrence, is a different story altogether. Wyatt relates an urban legend about a wealthy restaurateur in the Baya Vista area of Iquitos, who ran an eatery in an old, abandoned ship. His business boomed so rapidly, despite his terrible fare, that he became suspect in the eyes of local authorities. They eventually caught him in the act, boiling a human skull in his rice pot along with that evening’s ration of the grain. He was sent to jail and stripped of all his property, including the houses and cars he had purchased with his profits. His tale is now told out-of-school to keep white magic-worshippers in line. Regardless, those who dabble in the art – witchcraft, not culinary – firmly believe that human bones bring good luck. Despite strict penalties including jail time and confiscation of properties, many cooks stir their sancoche de gallina (chicken stew with sweet potatoes and pumpkin) with a femur and season their escabeche de pescado (cold fried fish in a marinade of onions and chile peppers) with a little scrape of skull. Of course, you can’t just use any old bones. The femurs and skulls must be purchased from a brujo. The brujo, a dealer in medical hexes, is also a keeper of the bones, which are supposed to be from the discarded physical bodies of two native South American spirits, Tunchi, a playful jokester, and Chullachaqui, a more bad-tempered specter. The microscopic material from these trickster gods is mixed in with the fare and swallowed by the consumer, inducing return visits. Do the math, and you quickly realize that only four femurs and two skulls – the only bones that are used to cast spells – would be available. But witchcraft is not all about logic, or no one in their right mind would scald their nether regions in a vat of steaming rice. So Tunchi and Chullachaqui have about as many femurs and skulls as the brujos can scrounge up. And scrounge they do. Most of the bones come from the cemeteries, where guards throw stones but do little else to deter grave-robbers. In some of the city’s cemeteries, the deceased are dug up as soon as they have sufficiently decomposed. Their skeletons are tossed into a corner, and fresh new bodies are planted in their place. Dental and medical students often obtain samples for their anatomy classes at these sites. “It’s not even grave-robbing,” Wyatt sniffs. “It’s dumpster-diving.” In fact, you’d get into less trouble for robbing and selling a skeleton than you would for cooking with one. But the arguable origins of the bones and the immorality of their acquirement matter just a little less when you consider the real dangers of practicing witchcraft rituals in restaurant kitchens: the effects it can have on the traveler’s health. Alan Murphy’s Peru Handbook reports that “Travellers’[sic] diarrhea and vomiting is due, most of the time, to food poisoning, usually passed on by the insanitary habits of food handlers.” Skewered beef hearts used as back-scratchers and leg bones employed as spatulas certainly constitute foul, to say the least. Plus, says Joseph Stutz, M.D., a dermatologist at the Dermatology Center of Rochester Hills in Michigan, “Pheromones won’t make you sick, unless it’s with love, but the bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, and yeasts that all live on the epidermal layer can trigger food poisoning-like symptoms when ingested. Any food can also be infected with fecal matter from a human, which can result in hepatitis.” As for rice-bathing, diaphoresis, or human sweat, according to The American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine, is composed of 99 percent water and one percent waste material, including sodium chloride (salt), ammonia, and urea. These substances also combine to comprise urine, but “sweat is sterile,” Dr. Stutz admits. It sounds repulsive, yes, but in this case, the diner might not become ill from the witchcraft practitioner’s perspiration itself. More dangerous is the rice, which is usually left out in the open air and becomes a moist environment, ideal for the reproduction of avaricious bacteria such as salmonella. Furthermore, the witch herself is not above contracting some ailment from these rituals. “I’d be concerned about allergic contact dermatitis,” Dr. Stutz notes. Anyone touching raw or cooked foodstuffs runs the risk of developing a rash, hives, or eczema. When it comes to eating native cuisine, such as anticuchos or capybara (giant rodent, usually stewed in a green curry sauce) in Iquitos, the traveler’s motto is frequently, “Stick with what you know.” But behind-the-scenes in some Peruvian kitchens, the “safest” and most common foods like boiled rice just might be the ones to give you pause. Perhaps you would be better off to sample those termites in the jungle, after all. As an alternative, consider entering any establishment that has the dried head of a black boa posted like a horseshoe over the door. Even the smallest specimen, only as thick as a thumb, could break your arm, and the snake’s ability to hypnotize its prey make the locals consider the boa a very powerful totem indeed. Some folks feel that a restaurant displaying a hanging boa head is a sure sign that witchcraft is afoot. Yet natives like Rose Vera and transplanted residents like Bonnie Wyatt feel most comfortable dining in these eateries, despite their obvious allusions to magic. “I consider the boa to be a good sign,” Wyatt claims. “It’s the stuff you can’t see that should worry you.” Love it? Hate it? Jen cares! (Sort of.) Let her know at Kavetchnik@aol.com. This article was previously published in The Drexel Online Journal, which is now defunct. © 2007 by Jen Karetnick. Please ask for permission before copying or distributing in any form.