Blood Soup
My plane lands at 9,350 feet above sea level, pulling onto the tarmac of Aeropuerto Mariscal Sucre in Quito, Ecuador. I’ve come to climb Mt Cotopaxi, the second highest peaks in the Ecuadorian Andes. I’ve arrive a week prior to starting the climb, hoping to give myself enough time to acclimate to the lack of oxygen in the thin, cold, mountain air. I will have to haul my body up to 19,347 feet and I am from sea level. Without the time for my body to acclimatize to this new environment, I risk developing either cerebral or pulmonary edema –a potentially fatal condition where the brain or lungs swell with fluid. This isn’t Everest though; at worst, I’ll probably just get a headache. Still, I have to find something to do for a week, and my favorite pastime is eating. My conquests will start with my stomach.
Preparing to travel to Ecuador, I spent hours on the Internet, scouring any corner I could for a clue. I hoped to find something truly unique and authentic. Something to impart on me the essence of what it means to be Ecuadorian. So, I looked in guidebooks marketed towards Americans. I knew I could never adequately prepare myself, but I couldn’t be walking around a Third-World country with a tourist map and a guidebook. I might as well burn my passport as I step off of the plane. I made a list of different eateries and markets around Quito that I wanted to see, and then wrote their names, addresses, and descriptions on an inconspicuous piece of white paper.
I had two goals in mind: eat a broad swath of foods to get a grasp on the essence of Ecuadorian cuisine, and consume enough of a single dish so that I could successfully reproduce when I returned home. I decided on dish called yaguarlocro. Its name, translated from Quechua, means blood soup. It is an herby stew of grains, pork or lamb parts, garnished with tomatoes, onions, avocado, and fried blood. Fried blood. I wasn’t sure I would be able to stomach it, but eating something as viscerally repulsive as blood would be enough to convince myself of my mettle. That was, after all, why I was going.
On my first day in Quito, I head to a farmers market on the edge of the main commercial zone. Inside is a stall known for having the best representation of the soup. Walking through a labrynthian collection of small eateries and tourist traps, I arrive at the dilapidated, concrete warehouse that is the market. Three stories high, and filled with a cornucopic variety of fruits and vegetables, the interior is entirely lined in square, white tiles. I wonder how dirty this building gets that they designed it to be cleaned with a hose. It has the air of an abattoir. I buy a dozen granadillas –a small relative of the passionfruit that looks like a grenade– and head downstairs. The stall I’ve come to visit is located in the basement. In a corner, amongst dozens of food vendors, I find what I’ve been hunting for. The size of Volkswagen Beetle, there is a stall with a single sign, “yaguarlocro con cerdo”, blood soup with pork. I order two.
The stalls line the walls of the floor; the center filled with metal picnic tables painted the same white color as the tiles they rest on. I sit, wait, and ruminate on my decision. Here I am, thousands of miles away from home, preparing for what I am about to inflict upon my stomach. Blood soup. Regardless of the sterility represented by these pressure-washed tiles, I know this could make me very, very sick. I’ve come to climb a mountain, and I am completely willing to jeopardize that success for lunch. I’m on some Hemmingway-esque, hyper-masculine, quest for self knowledge. In my mind, I’m in a boat in the Mekong, listening to Martin Sheen pontificating, “You don’t get a chance to know what the fuck you are at some factory in Ohio.” Is this bravery, insecurity, stupidity, or some absurd combination of the three? I may have just ordered a bowl of pig guts and blood. People arguing that men and women are the same are idiots. Men are obviously the lesser sex.
Ten minutes later, an Ecuadorian woman, her skin the color of tanned leather, brings my food on a black, plastic tray. Two bowls, two plates of garnish; on which diced onions, tomatoes, and avocado surround a purple mound of desiccated blood. First, I taste the unadorned soup. Simple, earthy, and sweet, with strong flavors of marjoram, grain, and meat that come from stewed pork and small, unidentifiable vegetables – that I will later learn are varieties of corn that the indigenous call choclo. I take a two-finger pinch of blood and rain it over the stew. With childlike amusement, I watch the blood slowly rehydrate, leaving maroon striations along on the surface of the butter-colored liquid. I add the rest of the garnish, and take a spoonful. The onions and tomato added acidity that balances strong liquid’s base-note; the blood expounding on the earthiness with a flavor that is more ferrous than visceral. The avocado give brief moments of respite, adding an ebb to the overwhelming unctuousness of the dish. There are few things as spectacular as finding beautify within something inherently repulsive. If I reach the summit of Cotopaxi with dysentery, I will meet the challenge with a smile.
