About Uruguay: The Food, Oh, The Food!

This post is a part of a series on Uruguay, and today I'll be talking about the cuisine of Uruguay, a delightful and surprising multicultural mix of Spanish and Italian flavors, French baking, and general European tastiness.

The Cuisine of Uruguay

In Montevideo, you'll find a wide assortment of foods. You'll find Spanish flavors, including tapas, Italian pasta, lots of fish (Montevideo is a harbor town), Italian gelato, French pastries, and pizza by the meter. (you don't ask for a slice, you ask for a measurement!) 

One dish figures prominently on virtually every dessert menu- flan con dulce de leche ("flahn con DOOL-say de LECH-eh," an egg custard with a thick goo that's like caramel, but so, so much better; pictured at right)- and it's almost always prepared entirely from scratch.  

And there's a lot of meat in Uruguay. It's their chief export and they take it very seriously, with copious barbecues where meat figures prominently. An Uruguayan barbecue is usually made of brick, and has a square opening where you build the fire, with a grated shelf over that, and a square opening at the bottom for storing wood.

Generally, the food is in Uruguay is the thoughtful food of a people who love nothing more than whiling away the afternoon in a bar laughing with friends and talking about everything from football (soccer) to politics. In America, as soon as you're done eating in a restaurant, you pay and leave; this seems entirely foreign and abrupt to an Uruguayan (or for that matter, a Spaniard).

In every household and on the streets, you'll find yerba mate. Mate is absolutely everywhere, and it's not uncommon to see people in stores, holding a leather-wrapped thermos under their arm and carrying a mate (a hollowed-out, wrapped-in-leather gourd filled with yerba mate, seen in the photo at left). The gourd is filled with yerba mate leaves, then hot water is added and the tea is drunk with a bombilla (a metal straw with a wide base that has holes in it). As the tea is consumed, more hot water is added, making the bitter drink decidedly more palatable. You can see the typical mate stance modeled by my brother-in-law in the photo to the left. In the photo, he's also sporting a common Uruguayan injury: a burn to the hand sustained while pouring hot water into the mate. :D

In the next post in this series on Uruguay (next Saturday), I'll talk about what Uruguay itself is like - the city of Montevideo, Punta del Este, and more.