IT'S F***ING RAW!: EP.3 Ceviche

Last weekend has further convinced me that British summer is not an actual season, but rather a collective name for lukewarm days that are randomly scattered throughout the year and that could appear even in March. These days that bringing with them a nation-wide urge to grab their picnic baskets and bask in pale British sun that couldn’t possibly burn even the most Irish amongst us, less so give anyone a slightest tan. Such days fool you into feeling that everything is going to be alright, thinking that maybe this is going to be the month when you finally start using that gym membership you have been spending forty five quid on monthly since New Year; maybe your life doesn’t suck because you are surrounded by people who love and support you; and who knows, maybe, just maybe, much like your favourite show from 2002, Brexit will be cancelled. This vitamin-D induced delusion can also force one to do strange things, like attempt making ones own “fermented corn beer” or buying 5 different types of fish and spending twice as many hours digging through history of Moorish immigration, researching Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire and trying to figure out molecular biology… or maybe it’s just me. Either way, my point is: I made ceviche and would like to tell you all about it.

You probably heard about ceviche as this Peruvian fish dish that is cooked in lime juice, but this is not entirely true because it isn’t really cooked and maybe not even Peruvian. Let’s start with geography, history and other optional GCSE subjects first and move on to science later.

The Peruvians claim to have come up with ceviche in 1st century AD, i.e. around the same time as lions went extinct in Europe and a bunch of Jews in Rome decided to start this hip-new religion called Christianity. Back then, Peru was populated by a group of independent polities that shared the same culture called Moche. Moche people were very busy making staff out of gold, dancing and throwing anal-sex orgies (seriously) with occasional human sacrifice. Such lifestyle doesn’t leave much time or energy for cooking, so instead Moche just marinated their food, that was mostly fish, in fermented banana-passionfruit juice. However, most of costal South America (i.e. Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina) lead alike lifestyles and shared similar fish and fruit-based diet, that lead to similar dishes.

By around 1450s, the people of west coast of South America bonded over their love of gold and blood orgies so much that they decided to establish the Inca Empire. The Incas did not have wheeled vehicles, beasts of burden, iron weapons, and not even a system of writing or money-based economy. But who needs all that, when you have a kick-ass Sun God, coca leaves and alcohol? Definitely not Incas, as despite a serious technological handicap they managed to establish one of the greatest empires in human history, as well as to produce some of the most architecturally impressive structures. Sun God & Coca – 1 : Science – 0, take that atheists! (although the History Channel will probably tell you it was thanks to aliens). Anyway, that alcohol I mentioned is a fermented-corn based “beer” called Chicha, and it was not only for drinking, but also for cooking and at some-point, replaced fermented banana-passionfruit used by Moche as a marinade for raw fish.

At this point you might be rightly thinking: “Wait a second, this doesn’t sound a lot like ceviche! Sure, there is uncooked fish, but where are the onions, chillies, tomatoes and most importantly citrus fruit?”. Good question, for that lets skip good 40 years from establishment of the Inca Empire to 1492 to the Spanish Port of Palos. There, a young man called Cristopher Columbus, decided to set on a journey and prove all flat-earthers of the time wrong by sailing around the world to India and hence demonstrating that Earth is indeed pear-shaped. So, he sailed off and landed at what he thought was a previously un-described part of Asia (yeah, he wasn’t very smart). Once there, he started enslaving a bunch of natives, as well as some crew members who were mean to him and started buying land for pretty stones, truly a man to be annually celebrated! However, ten years later a much smarter Italian dude called Amerigo Vespucci figured out that Columbus didn’t go to Asia but actually landed in a New World. This idea of new and un-claimed land got Spanish and Portuguese so excited that they even designed new appropriately phallically-shaped helmets (morions) to reflect their excitement, strapped them on and sailed off to Americas for some quality conquistador-time. Some Moorish people also came with them to see what the big deal was. Those are the guys who established Andalucía, build some awesome staff like Medina Azahara or the Alhambra, and brought cool things like dark curly hair, limes, onions and secular social structure to Spain. They also brought some of said staff with them to South America, mainly limes and onions. Some claim that the Moors and Spanish also brought with them the recipe for ceviche, or at least something closer to it than what the Incas had.

Now, here is where things get speculative. You see, Spain, North Africa and Middle East all have their own version of uncooked fish. For example, Moors had something close to lakerda which is a popular fish mezze made with salted fish, that they brought along to Spain. The Spanish, specifically Catalonians, adapted this recipe and created dishes such as xató and esqueixada (although the latter one is made with tomatoes, so it wasn’t around until the conquest of Aztec Empire that started in 1519, about 12 years before Francisco Pizarro invaded the Incan Empire). It would also be safe to assume that Spanish brought salted fish with them since it could last for ages and is perfect snack on any long genocide-driven adventure. So, it is possible that ceviche is something that Spanish cooks came up with in attempt to somehow overcome the monotony of naval diet, by combining scurvy medicine and freshly caught fish. This would also ensure that sailors didn’t get too thirsty from eating salty fish, as there is not much fresh water out in the middle of the sea. Perhaps ceviche was invented by Spanish out of necessity and consequently did not pick-up back home as they had better alternatives. Meanwhile, it was popularised in South America, due to a simple fact that limes go well with tropical fruit and fit well into local cuisine. But this is only a speculation.

To be completely fair, most costal cultures have some sort of salted/fermented or marinated fish dish in their cuisine that was developed independently and not copied from someone else. For example, Italians have crudo, which literally translates to “raw”, while the Nords have gravlax (raw salmon) or kokoda (raw white bate) from Fiji, just to name a few.  This “convergent culinary evolution” is to be expected, as raw fish has been a part of human diet since before discovery of fire. But ceviche is unique in a sense that it is the only dish that uses chemical properties of acid to “cook”.

I will not go deeply in to science of ceviche, since you are probably already asleep (and defiantly not because I, myself, am too dumb to understand molecular biology well enough to explain it in detail). Fish (as most meat) is made up almost entirely of protein. Not unlike a 3rd year university student a week before dissertation deadline, proteins start falling apart under stress (i.e. when interacting with heat or acid). Atoms that make up the protein get rearranged, expose some of its areas and in case of fish allowing the long chains of amino acids to find their way out and react with other things. This is  process is called “denaturing” and it is responsible for change in texture, it could both tenderise or toughen food. However, there are several differences between denaturing proteins with heat and with acid. For one, heating is an energy-exchange interaction causes a much more violent process that expends liquids inside cells causing them to explode, meanwhile “cooking“ with acid is a result of electrical exchange that dissolves the membranes causing more of a slow leak rather than a burst, resulting in less textural change. Heat also enables and accommodates for the formation of new polymer chains, while acid prevents that formation, and the result is a very different structure. This lack of new polymer-chains is why acid doesn’t truly cook food in a traditional sense, but it still changes its texture making food appear cooked and, more importantly, kills off any pathogens.

I have never tried this method of cooking before and never even had ceviche at a restaurant, so I was a little bit lost and overwhelmed when I started researching it. Turns out, not only almost every country, but also most cities in costal South America have their own recipe for ceviche. There are variations in everything: marinating time, type of seafood used, accompanying ingredients and serving garnishes. A lot of recipes noted the Incas’ use of banana-passionfruit and Chicha, the fermented corn drink I mentioned before, but none of them actually used it. This made me slightly disappointed as I like historical recipes and 16th century wasn’t quite historical enough for me. So, as anyone else would, I decided to make four different types of ceviche with 5 kinds of fish.

For the first one I tried to find a recipe that was at least close enough to what Moche had. The one I settled is a recipe by Tom Colicchio, an American celebrity chef you might know from watching Top Chef. The reason I chose it is because it used passionfruit, that isn’t exactly banana-passionfruit, but close enough and it also used red snapper from the Caribbean, that is once again close enough to Peru and Ecuador. Now, I must admit that lime was also a part of the recipe and I didn’t feel like eating completely raw fish.

I picked the second recipe simply because it sounded great and used all the ingredients I love: swordfish, prawns, pineapple and mangos. This recipe also stood out because it required to marinade fish overnight, instead of the usual couple of hours. I liked this recipe so much that I used it as basis for my own creation.

For the third variant I stuck with swordfish & shrimp formula but instead of using just lime juice, I added passionfruit and Chicha to the marinade formula, in order to recreate something similar to what Incas had in terms of flavour. Also, I made my own Chicha, that didn’t turn out perfect since I went a little cheap on fruits and sugar, but it is definably something I would like to have another go because I think it has great potential as a summer soft drink.

Finally, my last concoction was based on seabass and halibut, just because most recipes insisted that I had to use white fish, or maybe because I just needed an excuse to buy halibut half of which I cooked following a recipe from NOPI cookbook, since my girlfriend refused to eat “raw” fish and I didn’t really feel like eating alone.

Honestly my favourite from above was my own variant of swordfish and prawn recipe, although it didn’t taste all that different from the source material. The close second/third place (and perhaps first place if I didn’t have a soft spot for prawns) unsurprisingly went to, Tom Colicchios’ recipe. Meanwhile, the white fish one was relatively “meh” and made me wish I was eating the halibut NOPI-style instead.

In conclusion, ceviche is delicious and is definably worth trying. It is nothing like sushi or any other raw fish recipe. Its inclusion of fruits and entourage of sweet corn and avocados make it a perfect summer-time lunch or a starter at a BBQ. Unfortunately, we in UK have run out of summer for a while; and similarly to mojitos and bikinis, ceviche doesn’t feel quite appropriate to me on a rainy afternoon. However, if you need a vitamin boost and would like to try something new but easy, go ahead and make some yourself. Just don’t be afraid to use loads of chills as most of recipes would tell you as the acid would also neutralise the heat, this is something I learned from my mistake.