The best Latin dish you’ve never heard of

Somewhere back in the dim early history of food science, it was discovered that corn mixed with saturated calcium hydroxide or limewater produced a unique and nutritionally valuable commodity called masa harina. While this may seem like a subject more suitable to a science class than a food article, the discovery had two profound consequences for the modern diet.

First, this process converted the vitamin niacin into a form that humans could digest, and thus dispelled a bevy of pesky diseases and made people considerably more vigorous. In our age of multivitamins, this little boon may seem to pale by comparison to the second benefit: processing the corn in this way gave us tasty, tasty tortillas.

Sunday, Oct. 4, is Baton Rouge’s next chance to savor a delight not widely known outside the Latino community, a beloved Salvadoran dish called a pupusa that’s become a favorite and signature offering of the annual Festival Latino.

The pupusa is essentially a stuffed tortilla, and the fillings for these generous rounds of moist masa harina dough are limitless. But purists will likely call for one of only a few ingredients: beans, roasted pork or a soft, fresh cheese that’s not unlike mozzarella. The little squash known as mirliton in the American South sometimes finds itself among the select group of stuffings.

Skilled palms form balls of the dough into pale cups, press the chosen fillings into the pocket, then roll the rough ovals and work them until they’re about the size of a chubby pancake. They toss the raw pupusas onto an oiled griddle, which awakens the piquant aroma of cooking masa as it wafts up past the hungry and back down the great stream of culture and time to the roadside stalls and home fires of Central America. The scent is utterly transporting. For anyone who has wandered the open markets of Mexico, Peru or Guatemala, this aroma will take you places.

Zoila Andrades, her daughter Cindy, their family and friends have brought this treat from their native El Salvador to Baton Rouge. They make pupusas on the weekends and sell them out of their home along with curtido (a mildly pickled cabbage slaw). A throng of grateful, in-the-know pupusa lovers start queuing up even before the Andrades griddle starts to sizzle.

Fortunately for Baton Rouge, the Andrades share piping-hot pupusas stuffed with cheese and pork at a variety of festivals and fundraisers, including this month’s Festival Latino.

Moist rounds of masa harina are pressed flat, stuffed with beans, roast pork or cheese. and grilled on a griddle.

Much of the social and culinary life of the Salvadoran and other Spanish-speaking populations of Baton Rouge centers around St. George Catholic Church and its two weekend Spanish-language Masses. Zoila and Cindy Andrades sang in the choir for many years. The mother and daughter team will be joined at this month’s festival by several other cooks, all kneading and stuffing pupusas. If past years are any indication, the line at the pupusa stand will stay long all day.

Pupusa is a Nahuatl word of the sort that colors so much of Latin-American Spanish, the birdsong syllables that are whispered along the stone alleys of Oaxaca and Chiapas, the ancestral hymns to a time when corn was deified and stone was carved in homage to the richness of New World plants. Nahuatl was spoken by a large cross-section of western Caribbean Basin peoples. It lent the English language lovely terms like chocolate, chili and tomato. But you do not have to have a stamp from Tegucigalpa in your passport to appreciate the way these people and those places have changed our foodways forever.

The people of Central America have fled civil war and pursued prosperity to our warm shores, and they have brought with them the lilting language of their home. An American suburb may be a long way—at least, geographically speaking—from the volcanic mortars and pestles that once ground the changed and perfected masa harina corn. But the simplicity, purity and charm of the act does not suffer for the distance.

If you want to participate in a special process of opening the home to the world, a process in which the past is remembered, honored and eaten, you should get in line early on Oct. 4. The acrid smell of the cooking masa may take you places, but only the taste will make you wish that you had very recently been.