anticuchos

The word anticucho comes from Quechua anti, the name for the eastern Andean region, and kuchu, meaning cut or slice. Anticuchu means, roughly, a cut from the Andes. The Inca used the technique with llama and alpaca, skewering offal on thin reed stakes over open fire at festivals and market days in Cusco and across the highland empire. The plural ending -s is a Spanish addition; the Quechua form does not pluralize that way.

Spanish colonists arrived in 1532 and introduced cattle to the Andes within a generation. The colonists kept the prime cuts for themselves and discarded the internal organs as unfit for noble tables. Enslaved African workers in Lima and the coastal haciendas took those discarded parts, primarily the heart, and applied the Andean skewer tradition to them. They marinated the heart in vinegar, ají panca, cumin, and garlic, then grilled it over charcoal. The result was neither Spanish nor Inca but wholly Peruvian.

By the 18th century, anticuchos were sold in Lima's streets by women known as anticucheras, who worked the corners near churches and markets with small clay braziers. The association with working-class Lima was total: anticuchos fed the people the colonists had dispossessed, cooked from the parts the colonists had thrown away. When middle-class Lima began eating them in the 19th century, it was understood as an act of crossing over.

Today anticucheras still work the streets of Lima at night, identifiable by the smoke from their braziers. Gastón Acurio, the chef who brought Peruvian cooking to international restaurants in the 1990s, placed anticuchos at the center of his menus precisely because they carried that history. Beef heart remains the standard, though chicken and potato anticuchos are common variants. The reed skewer is now metal, but the cut is still Andean.