What's For Dinner (In Ecuador)?

One of the things I like to proclaim louder and prouder than most things in my life is that I have no regrets. Generally speaking, that is completely a true statement. I'm totally a butterfly effect kind of guy; I believe any small change in my past might have had disastrous consequences to my present. And to be honest I wouldn't want to take a chance on changing anything big about my past if it affected my present. I just plain like where I am in life right now. So I feel I cannot regret any past decisions.

But I have a confession to make. I have to admit that I have a very teensy tiny regret or two about the places I've been in the past three plus years and some of them have to do with food. Let me explain. I went out with my friends Mike and Bryan the last night we were in Munich determined to sample some pork knuckles. We chickened out. Not just one of us; all three. Over pork knuckles. Can you believe that? What a total hypocrite. 

But then less than a year later it happened again. That time I avoided the snails in Marrakech's Jemma El Fna after talking about them enough to make it all but impossible to renege. But I did anyway. The snails haunt me more than the pork knuckles.

Fast forward to 2016 and I'm in Ecuador and the dish I've been claiming I'm going to eat without question is Guinea pig. No doubt about it. No turning back. Not backing out this time. Guinea pig is for dinner! For sure! I'm having some. And this time, I didn't back down.

My Guinea pig, whom our new friend Heather named Freddo, maybe to make me feel a bit guilty. It didn't work.

Sound strange? Well, honestly, it might be a bit. And not because I (and everyone else in Ecuador who eats these things) am eating something that looks like your childhood pet named Fluffy.

Long before the Spanish reached South America and started stealing and killing pretty much everything they could find to steal and kill, indigenous peoples in the area were eating Guinea pigs, which are called cuy in the local language Kichwa after the noise the rodents make when they are sitting around doing...well, mostly nothing. The Andes Mountains are a difficult place to raise traditional livestock such as pigs, chickens or cattle, but sustaining a family of these small creatures in the average everyday home is pretty easy. They can eat pretty much anything that is discarded from a meal eaten by people, they don't take up much space and they can multiply like crazy.

All that made them ideal for families to keep a few around for meat when times got tough or in most cases perhaps just for everyday food since I imagine life for folks trying to survive in the mountains of Ecuador under the Incas or whomever else might be in charge was probably pretty rough anyway. Today, the animals are considered a delicacy and people pay top dollar for these things in restaurants whether they be roasted, baked or deep fried. If you are paying $10 (Ecuador uses the American dollar as currency) for a plate of chicken with rice, expect to pay about triple that for a whole cuy. Guinea pigs are so revered in Ecuador that the painting of the Last Supper in Quito's main cathedral has Jesus and his disciples dining on them. Some real poetic license there I think.

My guinea pig experience happened on a Thursday night at Mama Clorinda restaurant at the corner Reina Victoria and José Calama, just one block northwest of Plaza Foch on the northern side of Quito. The restaurant came recommended both by our hotel and by our driver, Javier, who picked us up at the airport upon our initial arrival in Ecuador the previous Saturday night. Two unsolicited recommendations had to mean something good, right?

Mama Clorinda deep fries their Guinea pigs and serves them in the traditional flattened (maybe you could call it butterflied?) style with head and all along with a side of potatoes slathered with some sort of peanut based sauce, avocado, tomato and a couple of slices of hard boiled egg. They also supply you with a pair of thin disposable plastic gloves because honestly there ain't no way you are getting all that flesh off that tiny skeleton with a knife and fork. The only way to get any meat at all off it is to pick up the carcass and start pulling it off the bones with your teeth.

Tucking in to some cuy at Mama Clorinda's. The plastic gloves are an essential accessory.

So here's the part where I tell you these things taste like chicken because that's what all non-traditional meat tastes like, right? Well, yes, that's what I'm doing because honestly they do. I'd describe the taste and texture of the meat of my fried Guinea pig as sort of like fattier chicken thighs. And I don't mean succulent slow cooked chicken, I mean barely just roasted enough chicken thigh meat from the underside of the bird that I usually forget about when I strip a cooked chicken.

The back legs were the best part and I realize there isn't much meat on the legs of a rodent (they aren't rabbits with huge hind legs for leaping) but the leg meat was the easiest to pull off the bone, was actually delicious in spots where it was a little drier and there was more meat than anywhere else. Unfortunately, a Guinea pig has only two back legs and when all is said and done there is no more than a half mouthful of meat per leg.

The most frustrating part to eat was the main body of the animal, which constituted the center four pieces of my dish shown in the picture above. The meat, skin and bones over the ribcage of the cuy were maybe a quarter of an inch thick and the flesh was nothing more than a fatty membrane stretched over the creature's frame. In truth I tried to get nourishment out of this part of the meal and was thwarted each time. The batter or whatever it was on the skin didn't make for any sort of good eating chicharones either. Maybe I'm just not a skilled eater of little animals with tiny skeletons; eating these things is extremely fussy and ultimately I may be a failure at this in life.

After I'd gnawed at the body for maybe 15 minutes or so and devoured all the "succulent" leg meat that my dish would give up to me, I was left with a deep fried head of the animal, complete with ears and its teeth still in its mouth and obviously visible on a quick tete-a-tete inspection. We had a guide, Andres, our last two days in Quito who told us his 96 year old grandmother loves the head of the Guinea pig. He even implied that might have contributed to her long life while admitting he couldn't come to terms with eating a cuy's noggin. I'm with Andres. When I took the gloves off I left the head unbitten. Just too much for me to deal with there.

A couple of days after my meal, I was scolded by a local a little for eating Guinea pig in the city. She claimed these animals need to be eaten in smaller towns where they can be prepared properly. She might be right and I guess if I ever find myself in a small town in Ecuador near someone cooking up some roasted cuy I'll talk myself into giving it another go, although I'm still not sure about the head. If I never get another chance, at least I didn't refuse to partake in this dish. No regrets on this one.

Freddo about 20 minutes after his arrival at our table. No way I was eating the head.