What does "authentic" mean? And pupusas!

I was still in love with El Cielito Lindo, but on my last day in Ataco I had to obey the part of my Traveler’s Creed that demands to try as many new things and places as possible, so when I found another pupuseria tucked into the porch/courtyard of a house on the other edge of town, I waited until their single table was free, then went in.

A typical pupuseria I went to in San
Salvador. The yellow bowl is curtido.

This place was a contrast to El Cielito. Instead of the solid wood furniture topped with a local burlap sack, they had the sort of one-piece plastic table-and-bench with a chipped yellow plastic top that you’d find in the bargain taqueria/burger/Chinese/kebab/noodle shop across from the bus station.

There was no menu, the large woman with the spatula just asked if I wanted cheese or pork, and the beverage options were coke or beer. She turned to the table opposite the grill, lifted a fly-speckled towel, and continued hacking apart a chicken for her family’s almuerzo. When she finished the bird, she reached down with shiny fingers and grabbed my coke.

An old dog slept under the grill, a toddler wandered around without pants on, and an older man was spreading grout with a trowel for the heavy paving stones stacked next to my table.

This place wouldn’t make it into the guidebooks.

But the people who’d been at the table before me were pure Salvadoreños, two men on their way home who leaned their well-worn machetes against the wall while they ate. Cielito had enough tables to accommodate an entire busload of visitors, while this place had one table next to the grill.

It was scrupulously clean (other than the salmonella) and without any detail or decoration that might smack of deliberate “Salvadoranness”. Suddenly the burlap tablecloths in El Cielito looked a tad contrived. Still local, still recycled/repurposed, and still aesthetically pleasing, but contrived.

“Authentic” is a problematic word. We all go looking for it, but what does it mean? The horchata I had at Cielito is a traditional drink of this area, specific to the region, and beloved of the populace...who normally drink coke.

So which drink is more “authentic”?

Hint: if the menu has "typical Salvadoran food" on it,
for $11 (when the table-groaning load of food in the
first pic was about $2.50) it's probably not authentic

Cielito’s ample menu of options was impressive, and spanned a variety of ingredients that are absolutely used every day by Salvadoran people...but most places offer the Big Three, only. Which is more authentic?

The good thing, the bad thing, the entertaining and eternally interesting thing, is that it’s up to every individual to decide, every individual time they do any individual act. One day, Cielito’s wide breadth of native ingredients might sing true, while the next, only a familiar three-option pupuseria will do.

Where would you like to eat tonight?

A beautiful little heaven. And pupusas!

A Beautiful Little Heaven… What could be better? How about when it has delicious food and drinks.

I spend a disturbingly large portion of my time abroad searching for my next meal. Maybe it’s a consequence of growing up in the bizarre food surplus of the Bay Area (quote from last night: “What, they’re closed? But it’s not even 10:30 yet, and I want gelato! Fine, let’s go to the 24-hour artisanal doughnut shop around the corner.”) or one too many dinners of squished granola bar dug out of the bottom of my bag, but when I find a good place to eat in a foreign town, it tends to anchor my mental map of the place.

So as far as I was concerned, El Cielito Lindo was the hub of Ataco, a small town of whitewash and vivid murals where women carried trays of fresh bread on their heads, in the highlands of El Salvador.

As in much of Latin America, much of the world really, lunch is the main meal in El Salvador, while breakfast and dinner are simpler and smaller. I know that’s healthier, and I know I need to adapt to the culture of the location, but...my day just doesn’t feel complete without a warm dinner. So when I walked the absurdly clean stone streets of Ataco and found the colorful pupuseria, I had to try it, even though it was a little late in the day, the sky already given over to violet and the last bars of birdsong.

The national food of El Salvador, pupusas are kind of a cornmeal pancake/tortilla filled with a variety of ingredients, the most common of which are cheese, refried beans, and shredded pork. They are similar to Colombia’s arepas, except while those use ordinary corn dough (and don’t always have filling), pupusas use nixtamal, which is cornmeal treated with an alkaline solution that helps peel the grains, accessing additional nutrients.

Not impressed yet? That process has been going on in this area for thousands of years. In Joya de Cerén, a village of the Pipil people that was buried by volcanic ash 2,000 years ago, they found the implements for making pupusas. Pompei didn’t have pupusas. I’m just saying.

No, it's not normal to have that many options.

I sat at a solid wood table covered with the burlap sack of a local coffee grower and looked up at Cielito’s menu. Cheese, beans, and pork may be the normal fillings, but Cielito doesn’t stop there. They had every permutation of the three classics, plus jalapeño, prawn, and three things I’d never heard of.

I ordered one each of the unknowns, plus an horchata.

I’ve been drinking horchata for over twenty years, and love the sweet flavor of vanilla and cinnamon, but that was not what arrived in a tall glass. Every horchata I’d ever seen was white, unsurprising since it was made from rice. But this? This was brown. And the flavor…

I am not good at identifying ingredients, comically bad in fact, but something in this drink’s ancestry made sweet love with brown sugar. There was none of the starchy smoothness of rice, instead a deeper, nuttier flavor, with a subtle current of something almost...fruity?

But just like (what I now think of as) “Mexican” horchata, this Salvadoran stuff hit the tongue with so much sweetness you thought you wouldn’t want more. But then a second later...gimme more!

Then the pupusas arrived. The matron of the place, Mauda, left her telenovela to bring me a plate of steaming nixtamal pupusas with queso de loroco, ayote, and papelío. I tried to wait until they wouldn’t burn my fingers, but couldn’t hold back.

Loroco is an edible flower, and the cheese made with it had a much stronger flavor than most of the savory white cheeses of Latin America. Kinda like a gamey feta? It made for an interesting change of pace.

Ayote is a type of squash similar to a pumpkin, and they use the whole plant: flowers, stems, and shoots in addition to the fruit. It was a fairly subtle flavor, which I prefered to the loroco.

My hands were full of food, not camera
 but this dude I met in Guatemala
could have been his brother.

Papelío. I had no idea what this was, and l’internet now informs me that it’s a type of butterfly. Odds I ate butterfly? Not good, I’m guessing it’s a more poetic naming, but I have no idea what it was. But it was, unsurprisingly, delicious.

The pupusas were, of course, served with curtido, the customary tangy cabbage slaw made with vinegar and chili peppers, that is lightly fermented. Pupusas steaming on the plate, horchata in hand, I was smiling when the youngster walked by, saw me, and stopped mid-sentence to stare at me, somehow shyly.

I wasn’t the first tourist he’d seen, not by a longshot, but there are still not so many of us there as to be boring, and he giggled when I made a face at him and winked.

Delicious pupusas burning my fingers, new drink cooling my tongue, telenovelas and animated conversations bouncing around my ears, beautiful Salvadoran town to explore, and now this little dude’s laughter to top it all off?

This is why I love travel.

The angel's a jerk, the dog is proud, and the plane landed backwards. Time to fly.

I'm no stranger to the jet-lagged delirium of a trans-oceanic red-eye flight.

I dropped a class in college because the professor's preposterously long, slow, erudite sentences were verbal valium.

And I've seen The Talented Mr. Ripley.

But I have never been quite so asleep on my feet as I was in Apaneca. Three consecutive nights of inadequate sleep, bracketing a day of endlessly pacing the pavement of voting centers, had left me rather tired. Add to that the sultry Salvadoran heat. And to that an almuerzo lunch special of chicken, rice, and thick french fries, carbohydrates with a side of starch, and my eyelids weighed 17 kilograms each.

(For my American brethren, 17 kg = entertaining hyperbole for an eyelid.)

But I had an appointment at 3:00 PM (I'll skip the 24-hour clock, in case y'all Americans are still touchy after the kilogram incident) with the zip-line people. My bleary eyes took a minute to focus on my cheap watch. 1:43.

These murals are getting weirder. They know...

I walked another block. Saw the same mural I'd seen the last time. The dog that barked at me before had given up on life and gone to sleep. My feet felt soaked in cement. Was I accidentally wearing two pairs of shoes? Looking down would be too much work. So sleeeepy .

Shuffled past the bus stop, where a past mayor claimed credit by plastering his name on the shelter. A few years of rough weather later, and it's not really something one would want to be associated with. This rusty piece of junk was brought to you by the administration of...

Silly politicians, no vision in those people. I looked at the watch again. 1:44.

The church! Churches are interesting. The entrance was locked, but I'd seen the other door open. Back around the block. Past the same mural, still weird, same dog, still sleeping. Inside the church:

nothing.

Renovation. 

One statue. An angel stomping on a grumpy devil's head. Made the angel look like kind of a dick.

Maybe...just...lie down...here.

No! I walked some more, searching for something to find. Said “buenas” at varying volumes when I passed people. I wonder if they think I'm drunk? Looked at the watch. 1:44. Is that possible?

To the market across the street, where three old women with bulging bellies and sagging cheeks didn't bother to chase the flies off the sticky table any more, but greeted me with smiles as I sat at a trestle table littered with mostly eaten pupusas.

Un cafecito, por favor. Coffee would keep me awake.

She placed the styrofoam cup in front of me. Who the hell invented that stuff? Their descendants should be punished. One of my earliest memories is of the horrible texture of those white bricks, rasping out of a cardboard box on the playground at my pre-school. Baby's first goosebumps.

The table where I drank my cafecito

I've been at this table forever. A scrappy little dog gets up and barks at three schoolboys walking past. I can barely lift my head to watch. It comes over afterwards and stares at me, tail wagging with pride. Too fast for my eyes to follow. Go fetch me a nap, Fido. Pick a fight with me and I'll kick your butt. Maybe. 

I try to write something down and eventually realize that I've made a scribble, and the last thing I remember was riding backwards in a plane that was landing on a highway somewhere in China, and wondering if that was normal behavior. 

Coffee: ineffective.

I pay my quarter for the coffee and concentrate on lifting my feet high enough for locomotion. Head towards the zip-line office.

Two experiental hours later, two clock minutes, and I verify that they are still closed. Wander to the intersection, out of sheer inertia. Oh. 

To my right I see something interesting. The entire town. All the people. Walking towards me in a wide front. Zombie movie? Como se dice Soylent Green?

 A hearse. It's a funeral. With the entire town in attendance. I stand to the side, trying to look respectful. No sleeping at the funeral. Three men see me, detach from the procession, and approach. Uh oh.

“Are you ready?” They ask me. I don't know. Have I made peace with myself? With my gods? Can I send a couple goodbye emails before you cook me?

Then I notice their shirts. Apaneca Canopy Tour. These are my zip-liners. 

“Si” I answer, looking forward to cable-assisted flight. My eyelids weigh only 14 kg now. With luck, I won't fall asleep while zipping...

(Read more about zip-lining with Apaneca Canopy Tour on my last El Salvador dispatch on the Ethical Traveler website here. And "like" it on facebook, just because you're nice.)