Lets be honest, my Spanish, while passable in most situations is not shit hot, and there are lots of words I don’t know like… bucket, contact lenses and hair ties – which incidentally kills me every time, as it is ALWAYS the one thing I never have enough of - however the section of any menu that says Especialidades Tradicionales is pretty self explanatory really, regardless of your competency level the clue is in the name.
Well let me tell you, I got a crick in my neck from all the double taking involved in reading said menus, when I discovered the colourful, heart attack inducing and international array of foods that are considered traditional in this little country.
- Chivito – ‘sandwiche’ or ‘al plato’ (pictured)
A massive road crash of food piled onto a plate, or into a sandwich, none of which have any relation or correlation to the other elements involved. Starting from the bottom up, and be glad you couldn’t see it all, the actual contents of this plate are….Potato salad, frozen peas and corn, palm hearts, tomato, lettuce, pickled capsicum (peppers), steak, ham, a side of fries, and a fried egg, thrown in for good measure, to add a little more white and yellow to the plate.
To be honest I couldn’t find a massive amount of background on this taste bud extravaganza, and could only assume that this traditional dish came about as an (un)happy accident one day, when someone in the ye olden days was starving and went to make a sandwich but couldn’t decide what to put in it so they cooked the contents of their fridge instead. On realising that they also had no bread, the mêlée was unceremoniously plonked onto one plate, as they were low on dishes. Clearly it was a man who devised this concoction, so the more likely story is that there was only one clean dish in the house. As he was sitting down to dig in, his friend popped round, saw what he was eating and decided to copy him. Thus the Chivito al plato was born. And judging by the amount of people who eat them, it is going down a storm!
- Milanesa – Breaded meat, normally beef or chicken. Often eaten in a sandwich, with tomato, mayo and lettuce – very tasty – but shown here with fries and salad…for those of us that don’t feel the need to eat bread rolls 4 – 6 times a day.
All I can tell you is pretty much every food under the sun influences Uruguayan cuisine, and the Scandinavians and the Italians were no different in this instance. For some reason eating this always reminds me of my dad, as he was always a fan of a good bit of breaded meat when I was growing up.
- Pizza. Well you know what that looks like, don’t you.
As with the above, the European influence certainly extends to pizza here, but with more cheese than you could possibly have imagined was able to fit on a pizza and eaten in a sitting.
- Gnocchi – Potato pasta, in a nutshell. (Figuratively only, of course)
Quite an history behind Gnocchi and Uruguayans really - most places only serve it on the 29th of each month, as traditionally that was just before pay day, and generally the time when people were poorest…. and all they could afford to cook was potatoes, which they turned into Gnocchi. Possibly they didn’t realise what a goldmine of possibilities they had on their hands, I mean the things you can do with potatoes is a whole book in itself, but more likely they couldn’t afford the additional ingredients involved to make potatoes extra delicious – either way, that is the Gnocchi story.
- STEAK!!!!!! Needs no introduction nor explanation, but it is worth noting that Uruguay consumes more steak per capita these days than even Argentina. Bear in mid however that while the statistic is very big, the country is very small
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