8/6/22
Today I was invited to Rosa's house prepare hallacas, a Venezuelan dish often prepared during christmas.
According to Wikipedia, Hallacas can are a kind of Venezuelan tamal, though some (including Rosa, who is introducing them to me) would consider them too evolved to be classified as a tamal.
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Apparently the kind of masa used can vary by region, with rural areas using a less processed kind, and urban areas using one made form industrially-processed corn. The ingredients also vary by region, with different ingredients used in the Andes, Central, Western, and Eastern regions. Rosa says we're making hallacas the way they are made in Caracas. Rosa commented that "en los andes, las hallacas llevan garbanzos, huevo. A nosotros no nos gustan, pero si necesitamos comerlo lo comemos."
Rosa recommended that I play some music while we cooked. She had me look up gaitas, in particular one called Vigen de Chiquinquirá (link). I found a larger playlist (link) of gaitas. We listened to Los Tuscusitos, and a song called Fuego al Cañón.
My host mom started laughing halfway through one of the songs. I asked what she was laughing about, and she explained that one of her friends married a gringo, and for christmas they would bring the two families together. She was laughing about how all the Venezuelans were very loving and hugs and dancing while the gringo family was all very reserved and calm – they must have thought the Venezuelans were crazy.
Rose later showed me another song: Homenaje a Billo Frómeta, by Rafael Brito (link). We let the youtube recommender system choose the rest of our playlist for a while, and I think the algorithms did a fairly good job.
I chopped vegetables, pulled chicken, and squeezed oranges for the meat sauce
Cleaning the banana leaves
Adding masa and filling
Folding the hallaca (not very well according to Rosa)
I made myself a vegetarian hallaca – Rose said it would taste like nothing, but I thought it was quite good. Rose makes around 100 in a day, to sell the following morning. I had to leave before we got to 50, but I bought four hallacas to bring home (along with white chocolate) for my host father's birthday, which we were celebrating the same evening.
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