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Ushered in by Coca-Cola, Christmas descended on Bolivia. Strings of Christmas lights festooned the plazas and thoroughfares, all of them toning their own Christmas carols in an arrhythmic mess. In La Cancha, the giant market sprawling out over south Cochabamba, the usual mounds and stalls of crap multiplied as great surges of shoppers pressed through, following closely by great surges of pickpockets.
The volunteer gringo population dispersed back to their various homes for Christmas, leaving only a few entrenched souls to band together for a multicultural Christmas. Elaborate plans and dishes were prepared; Polish cabbage and Swedish meatballs, Australian pavlova and Texan everything. The giant ham defrosting on the kitchen table was dwarfed by the giant turkey, its frozen stumps of legs protruding into the air.
When Christmas hit it did so with a deafening silence. The streets emptied out, lonely cabs trawling in search of fare. At every intersection an urchin in traditional dress held out a grubby hand in hope of spare change. With everyone else sequestered away at family homes the number of homeless people in the city was revealed.
Some people had been up all night baking, and the dessert table of the volunteer Christmas party was presided over by a ginger bread Chrysler building standing more than a metre tall. Around its base the dishes multiplied.
In Bolivia the big family meal is on Christmas eve. More meat and more potatoes than usual are prepared and gorged upon. At midnight little baby Jesuses appear mysteriously to complete the expectant, ubiquitous nativity scenes. Christmas day is a more relaxed affair, with maybe some church, maybe a neighbourhood party, maybe a visit from the extended family.
Our Christmas was, however, a gringo affair, heavy on the sublime southern cooking, heavy on the booze, heavy on the trivial pursuit, heavy on the classic DVDs (Karate Kid – about as Christmasy as the Chrysler building), heavy on the carols by everyone from Charlie Brown to Tom Waits, heavy on the falling asleep early and waking up to polish of the leftovers. The enormous ham and its eclipsing turkey disappeared awfully, awfully quickly.
December is the rainy season and in the north of the city, closer to the mountains, the daily afternoon storm broke over Christmas with avengeance. Streets were reduced to muddy rivers and the water level rose over car tires. The stadium was flooded, cars broke down and were pelted with hail.
By that evening though the waters had disappeared, sweeping another Christmas with them. My third gringo expat Christmas coming and going fast, as they always seem to do. While the volunteers got on with life, the lines of eager families outside of the Coca-Cola Magical House of Santa Claus were undiminished, and the lights continued to trill their awful tunes in the plazas and throughout the city.
Pavlova is clearly not a South American dish, and thus does not really belong in a New World blog, but this recipe does provide some insight into my Christmas in Bolivia…
Another expat Christmas rolled around and as the other gringos made elaborate plans for elaborate dishes, I decided I needed to make a more decent contribution than the usual bachelor offer of “I’ll bring the booze”. My contribution needed to be quintessentially Australian or Australia-New Zealand-Antipodean, so as to avoid impinging on the contributions of others. So I decided to make Pavlova, the perfect light dessert for a hot southern hemisphere Christmas.
Bolivia however is one of the few landlocked countries of the southern hemisphere, and does not enjoy the same hot, dry Christmas as Australia. Bolivian Christmases are wet. They might even be cold. Bolivia is thus not so well suited to cream confections. Nor are Bolivian kitchens always equipped for such endeavours. For this reason I made two pavlovas for my Bolivian Christmas. Here is how I did so…
PAVLOVA #1
Ingredients:
four egg whites
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsps corn starch
Directions:
Find online recipe for pavlova and then once the internet connection fails spend hours waiting in vain for it to reconnect. When it does not, proceed by faltering memory with the recipe.
Pre-heat your tiny oven to a moderate temperature. As your oven has no thermostat or temperature gauge, set it to the only setting you have apart from ‘off’ and ’super-high’.
Separate egg yolks from white. Leave yolks in the fridge in case you ever need them. Mix tiny increments of sugar into egg-white, beating furiously with a fork. Continue doing so for two hours, scrutinising the mix to check whether it is ‘peaking’. Add an extra half cup of sugar (again, gradually), until it finally sort of peaks. Add vanilla, corn starch and lemon juice. When you taste the mixture it should hurt your teeth.
Line the only (very small) baking tray in your house with wax paper. Pour mixture into tray, spreading it as much as space will allow, without allowing mix to touch the edges. This will form a large quivering mound of white.
Remove your cold room mate from before the oven. Bake mound in the oven, exercising high paranoia for fear of burning it.
Between 33 and 38 minutes become distracted watching ‘The Office’. After 38 minutes check on mound and find the top browning. Turn the oven off and allow mound to cool in oven over night.
Wake up on Christmas Eve morning to find your mound has collapsed, is burnt on one side, brown on the outside and undercooked on the inside, and cannot be separated from the paper. Despair.
PAVLOVA #2
Ingredients: As above
Directions:
Having abandoned your first effort, relocate to your friends’ house to admit failure and offer to help them with their own Christmas concoctions.
Be convinced by friends to try again with better utensils, and a larger oven with a proper dial. The ingredients are, after all, very cheap.
Pre-heat the large oven to about 170 degrees (Celsius). Line a large, flat tray with no encroaching sides with crumpled wax paper.
Have your friend use an ancient Peruvian technique to remove the egg white from the yolks with none of the mess of your primitive, 9th grade cooking class methods. Beat eggs with an egg whisk, not a fork, until they are stiff. Sieve sugar into mix and beat well, your forearm bulging and burning. After less than an hour the mix will be peaking. Add corn starch, vanill and lemon juice. Taste the mixture and find it not instantly tooth-rotting.
Spread mix on tray, forming a neat, low, cake-shaped circle of white. Bake this in the oven for a full hour. Check occassionally on it to find it not burning or cracking or browning or collapsing. After the hour turn off oven and allow cake to cool until your other friend needs the oven to cook the monstrous turkey.
Whip cream in blender until it is thick. Pour into onto the base, smoothing it over so that it settles thick and sleek. Add strawberries and blackberries. Grate dark chocolate over the confection. Be very very pleased with yourself and also relieved. Be too full to eat it on Christmas Eve. Eat it a day later. Lose yourself admiring the cake in cross-section form. Take pictures. Write extensively about your success.
Arriving in Bolivia I thought I was coming to an anti-American country, a country that was suspicious of outside powers and that was seeking to throw off the yankee imperialists in favour of all things native and local. It thus came as a surprise to realise just how many Coca-Cola endorsements there are on the streets of Cochabamba.
Now granted, it’s possible the prolific advertisement reflect the difficulty Coca-Cola is having cracking the intransigent Bolivian market, but the amount of Coca-Cola in supermarkets and refrigerators and on tables and menus leads me to suspect otherwise.
At this time of year Coca-Cola has an even larger presence than usual. At all times shops, bars, street stalls, shoe-shine booths, international supermarkets, sports venues, pools and apparently prisons bear Coca-Cola enndorsements. And now every Christmas display in Cochabamba seems to be sponsored by the drink too.
Coca-Cola of course derives its name in part from the coca plant, native to Bolivia and part of an ongoing controversy between Bolivia and the U.S. Coca is no longer an ingredient of the cola, but the name has stuck. In earlier times coca was a luxury item reserved for the exclusive use of the Inca aristocracy. Perhaps the appeal of Coca-Cola lies here; it is seen as the beverage of the elite, drinking it may be a way to improve one’s status.
Every night in the wealthy north of the city families line up to be admitted into the Magical House of Santa Claus, heavily bedecked in lights and advertisements. They arrive long before it gets dark, before the staff arrive, before the high gates open to admit the patient crowds to the mysteries and marvels within. Outside the supermarkets enormous bottle-shaped trees have been erected. In plazas and at intersections lights and reindeer twinkle, all emblazoned with the distinctive red and white insignia. Christmas in Bolivia would be a badly-decorated, poorly-illuminated event without the patronage of Coca-Cola.
The American ambassador was recently thrown out of Bolivia. Likewise the Drug Enforcement Agency, and now even the Peace Corp has been pulled out. Somehow from the list of foreign influences in Bolivia, it is capitalist, American Coca-Cola that has and seems set to survive the longest. Maybe it is just a question of taking whatever cash is available to ensure the Christmas lights burn brightly throughout the wet season. Or maybe Yankee-Bolivian relations aren’t so bad after all. Maybe the U.S. just needs to know who its most successful ambassadors are.
