DE CONSTRUC T CEVICHE While it’s a fairly recent arrival in UK restaurants, this


Peruvian raw fish dish dates back millennia — and has more variations than you might expect


WORDS: REB ECCA SEAL . PHOTOGR APHS: HANNAH HUGHE S FOOD ST Y L I S T: AL I CE OS TAN


If you’d overheard a British restaurant-goer talking about ceviche when it first started appearing on UK menus less than a decade ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a brand-new creation. We knew — or thought we knew — it was a Peruvian dish of cubed raw fish, quickly cured in lime juice, but most of us had no inkling of its millennia-long history. In fact, the concept of ceviche is so old we’ve


no recipes for its earliest incarnations, which were probably made in or near Huanchaco, a town on the northern Pacific coast of Peru. There’s good evidence to suggest that 3,000 years ago, fishermen ate their catch straight from the sea, says Maricel Presilla, author of Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America. Chef and food historian Presilla spent months travelling through Latin America, gathering and testing recipes for her encyclopedic book, for which she won a James Beard Foundation Award. “I was near to the archaeological digs of


Montículo Cupisnique, within the El Brujo Archaeological Complex — one of the most ancient sites in Peru, predating even the Moche [a pre-Inca civilisation, who many scholars believe were the first people to eat raw


fish cured in acid],” she says. “And I watched women catching small fish and seasoning them with a lot of ground, hot [chilli] pepper and seaweed, and eating the fish just like that, with their hands, in their huts on the water. I can imagine the ancients doing the same, and the archaeologists there have found so many remains of seafood and fish in the guts of the mummies, and lots of hot pepper seeds.” Today’s best-known ceviches are served


dressed in a base of lime juice, salt, chilli and onion, with the citrus, in particular, getting to work on the proteins in the fish. As the proteins coagulate, the fish appears to cook, becoming firmer and opaque as the lime mingles with the other ingredients to create a fiery liquor known as leche de tigre (‘tiger’s milk’). The Moche people wouldn’t have had


the citrus fruit we now consider critical for ceviche — only South America’s indigenous chillies, which have been cultivated for around 6,000 years. Onions and citrus (initially in the form of bitter oranges) didn’t appear until after Columbus arrived in 1492, followed shortly by lemons and limes, brought from Asia by Spanish and Portuguese traders. Some historians think ancient cooks might


originally have used the juice of the tumbo, a relative of the passion fruit, with lime being a natural substitute when it arrived. Presilla, however, disagrees. “I tried tumbo in ceviche when I was writing


the book, but it takes a long time to work,” she says. “Some chilli peppers are acidic, so I put a lot of hot pepper with fish and you do see some action. I just can’t see the ancients waiting around for the tumbo to work.” Presilla believes seaweed and chilli peppers probably did the job before limes came ashore. Unlike the Persian limes we mostly use in Europe, Peruvian limes are small and sharp. Today in Huanchaco, cochayuyo, a type of kelp, and locally grown limes are used in the cevicherias dotted along the beach and in town. Mitsuharu Tsumura, chef-owner of Lima’s


renowned Maido restaurant, is a fan of the northern style of ceviche. “People have been fishing in the north [of Peru] in the same way for thousands of years,” he says. “And they’re very into food, too.” His favourite is a northern version made with skin-on, bone-in mackerel, quite unlike the white-fish ceviches we’re most familiar with. “You suck the fish from the bones, and it eat very slowly.”


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