QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, III: INTERNATIONAL CUISINE IN URUGUAY MEANS WHAT THEY EAT IN ARGENTINA

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            I’ve mentioned before that in general, Uruguayans don’t like spicy foods.  Meat is salted, but not marinated, before roasting or broiling over the fire.  When we lived in Montevideo in 1999, one obvious manifestation of this generalization was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants in this city of almost 3 million inhabitants.  According to a Google search on the Internet, there are at least two Mexican restaurants in town now.  Roma-Tijuana seems to serve Italian-Mexican fusion cuisine according to a review (2009) I found.  Apparently, the fusion is heavily biased to the Italian-Uruguayan palate.  The salsa was described as “slightly spicy ketchup” and the enchiladas did not include enchilada sauce < http://www.exploringuruguay.com/2009/07/07/mexican-food-in-uruguay/>.  La Lupita in Punta Carretas had real Mexican food with real, if mild, salsa. “Salsa mas picante” can be requested, and it tasted like the real thing for the native San Diegans who wrote this review on the same web site as the previous restaurant review.

            After Elaine and I spent a couple of months on a steady diet of beef with more or less salt, with a tiny portion of chimichurri as a side dish if we were very lucky, the craving for a Tex-Mex dinner was becoming overwhelming.  Fortunately we had by then made friends with several USA expatriates living and working in 1999 Montevideo.   One of them, Luke, burst out laughing when we admitted to craving Mexican food.  When he finally stopped laughing, he invited us for dinner on Saturday at his apartment, which turned out to be the local Mexican food outlet for gringos with palates that craved more than the bland local cuisine.  “Yes,” he told us, “I've smuggled chilis, enchilada sauce, and other goodies into Uruguay”.  He hosted weekly home-cooked Mexican dinners as his contribution to spice-starved gringos living in Montevideo, which earned him pride of place at the top of the list of who you wanted to cultivate as a friend in the large expatriate community.

GIVING A CHARACTER THEIR VOICE

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            When writing dialogue, how can you keep your characters from all sounding the same?  If you’re good at this task you can use regional dialects as a distinguishing characteristic, like my friend Wayne Zurl [http://www.waynezurlbooks.net] does so well in his Sam Jenkins series.  If you do it well enough, and Wayne does, before you know it you have books that will sell well as audiobooks where differences in speech usage and patterns are the essential clue in individuating the characters as you listen to the story.  At least for me, this is hard to do as you need a very nuanced ear and a very good memory for what they said and how they said it to make people sound different based only on word choice.  According to The Guinness Book of Records [http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-2000/most-character-voices-for-an-audio-book-individual] the greatest number of characters given distinct and distinguishable voices by an actor in an audiobook is 224.   This amazing record was accomplished in 2004.

What can the aspiring author do to make their characters different from one another?  If the educational level of the characters varies (college educated P.I. versus high school dropout thug), you have another way to make their voices quite different.  The thug can use a lot of slang and slur his word endings, maybe even say a few bad words here and there.  You can make a character stutter or misuse certain words, or even have an accent.  One of my characters slips a Spanish word into his English every now and then.  The perfect word for Vincent to be overusing for this particular idiosyncrasy is the classic parsley word used promiscuously in conversational Spanish, “claro”.  Vincent could make a chimichurri with all of the claro parsley he sprinkles into his conversation [check out a previous recent post on this blog on “Salsas” if this doesn’t make sense to you, or go directly to the recipe at http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chimichurri].

SOUTH AMERICAN SALSA

The familiar tomato-cilantro-Serrano or Jalapeno chile mix called salsa we dip our chips into on the Mexican lunch/dinner table is a regional variant of a ubiquitous sauce in Latin America.  In Argentina, Uruguay, or Chile there aren’t chips to dip and there isn’t tomato-based salsa.  So what will you meet on these tables?  I’ll give you a hint---food is pretty bland in most of Argentina and Uruguay, and the prevalent “seasoning” is too much salt on the beef.