Yellow potato, huayro and chuño: a kitchen in Cusco
Potato varieties, chuño and papa a la huancaína in Peru, with preferir, encantar and odiar plus an infinitive. Spanish A2.
Una olla de papas en Cusco: amarilla, huayro y chuño
Reading for practice
Read for free. Create an account to translate words, save progress, and practise.
In Rosa's kitchen in Cusco there is yellow potato, huayro and chuño. The text explains that Peru has more than two thousand native potato varieties, that the potato comes from the Andes and has been grown there for thousands of years, how chuño is dried by the night cold and the daytime sun, what goes into papa a la huancaína, and how Quechua communities near Pisac look after hundreds of varieties. The preference verbs appear with infinitives, next to gerund phrases such as sigue hirviendo. The characters are invented.
La papa viene de los Andes. Aquí se cultiva desde hace miles de años, mucho antes de llegar a Europa. En el Perú se dice «papa»; en España, «patata».
Rosa prefiere cocinar con papa amarilla, porque se deshace y queda suave. Para el sábado compra huayro: a sus hijos les gusta más en el guiso.
En una esquina hay un balde con agua y unas papas duras y oscuras: es chuño. En la sierra las papas se dejan al frío de la noche y al sol del día, y así se secan y se guardan mucho tiempo. Antes de cocinarlo, el chuño pasa horas en agua.
Su sobrino Mateo lleva media hora pelando papas y sigue contando cuántas faltan. Odia pelar, pero le encanta comer.
El domingo Rosa hace papa a la huancaína: papa hervida y fría, con una salsa de queso fresco y ají amarillo. Mientras habla, el agua sigue hirviendo en la olla grande.
Cerca de Pisac, a una hora de la ciudad, varias comunidades quechuas cuidan juntas cientos de variedades en un parque comunal. Allí una papa no es solo comida: también es una semilla que hay que guardar.
El 30 de mayo el Perú celebra el Día Nacional de la Papa, y ese día hay ferias y platos de papa en muchas plazas del país.
¿Cómo se llama la papa en tu lengua? ¿Prefieres las papas hervidas o fritas? ¿Qué plato te encanta comer en casa y cuál odias preparar?
About this article
What you'll learn
Preference verbs with the infinitive (prefiere cocinar, le encanta comer, odia pelar), gustar with les and más, hay que plus infinitive, and the pronoun attached to an infinitive.
In Rosa's kitchen in Cusco there is yellow potato, huayro and chuño. The text explains that Peru has more than two thousand native potato varieties, that the potato comes from the Andes and has been grown there for thousands of years, how chuño is dried by the night cold and the daytime sun, what goes into papa a la huancaína, and how Quechua communities near Pisac look after hundreds of varieties. The preference verbs appear with infinitives, next to gerund phrases such as sigue hirviendo. The characters are invented.
After reading
Article learning block
Phrases, words, grammar, and quick practice from this text.
Phrases for training
Add useful phrases to SRS or mark them as already known.
desde hace miles de años
newfor (a length of time), up to now
Desde hace plus a period says how long something has been true, and the verb goes in the present: se cultiva desde hace miles de años, vivo aquí desde hace un año. Use desde on its own with a starting point: desde 1990, desde mayo.
English uses a perfect tense here (has been grown), so the Spanish present feels wrong until you have met it a few times.
queda suave
newit turns out soft
Quedar with an adjective says how something ends up: queda suave, queda seco, queda bien. It is the kitchen verb for results, and the adjective agrees with the thing: la papa queda suave, las papas quedan suaves.
Recipes and repair jobs lean on it, and the closest English match, turn out, does not cover everything quedar does.
a una hora de la ciudad
newan hour away from
Spanish measures distance in time with a plus the time plus de: a una hora de la ciudad, a diez minutos de casa. It works with distances too: a dos kilómetros del río.
It is how people actually answer how far is it, in any country.
Key words
Vocabulary that carries the school-day topic.
la papa
papa
the potato
La papa is the word across Latin America; la patata is the usual one in Spain. Both are feminine. Watch the accent: el papá is dad and el papa is the Pope, so only la papa is the vegetable.
It is the single most useful food word on a menu in the Andes, and the accent trap is real.
el chuño
chuño
chuño, freeze-dried potato
A potato dried in the Andes by leaving it out to the night cold and the daytime sun, so that it keeps for a long time. The word comes from Quechua, like papa, cancha and carpa.
It shows how much of Andean Spanish comes from Quechua, and you will see it on menus in Peru and Bolivia.
pelar
pelando
to peel
Pelar is a regular -ar verb for taking the skin off fruit, vegetables or eggs, and also for cutting hair very short. Do not confuse it with pelear, to fight, which is a different verb.
Half of any recipe is pelar, cortar and hervir.
el ají
ají amarillo
the chilli pepper
El ají is the word in Peru and much of South America; Mexico says el chile and Spain la guindilla for the hot ones. The word came into Spanish from Taíno, a Caribbean language. El ají amarillo is the orange one that colours Peruvian sauces.
Menus in the Andes are full of it, and ordering without knowing the word is a gamble.
hervir, hervida
papa hervida
to boil, boiled
Hervir changes its stem: hiervo, hierves, hierve, but hervimos, and the gerund is hirviendo, which you can see later in the text. The participle hervida is regular and agrees like an adjective: papa hervida, huevos hervidos.
Boiling is the first cooking verb you need, and its stem change catches everyone.
el balde
un balde con agua
the bucket
El balde is the everyday word in Peru and much of Latin America; Spain says el cubo. Keep it apart from the fixed phrases de balde, meaning free of charge, and en balde, meaning in vain.
Household object names are among the words that differ most from country to country, and this one hides two idioms.
Grammar in context
Patterns from the text worth noticing after reading.
Odia pelar, pero le encanta comer
Odia pelar, pero le encanta comer
He hates peeling, but he loves eating
Two shapes in six words. Odiar has an ordinary subject, so Mateo odia and there is no pronoun. Encantar puts the person in a pronoun, so le encanta. What they share is the infinitive after them: pelar, comer, and that infinitive is why encanta stays singular here; with a plural thing it would be le encantan las papas.
It is the clearest place in the text to see why one verb needs le and the other does not.
prefiere cocinar: infinitive, not gerund
Rosa prefiere cocinar con papa amarilla
Rosa prefers to cook with yellow potato
When the same person does both things, verbs of liking and preferring (gustar, encantar, preferir, odiar, detestar, interesar) are followed by the infinitive: prefiere cocinar, le encanta comer, odia pelar. English says prefers cooking with -ing, and that pattern does not carry over. The Spanish gerund is correct after other verbs, and this text has three of them: lleva media hora pelando, sigue contando and sigue hirviendo. Llevar, seguir, estar and continuar are its place.
Recipes, tastes and plans all run through these verbs, so the wrong form shows up immediately.
a sus hijos les gusta más
a sus hijos les gusta más
her children like it better
Les is the third-person plural pronoun, and the a phrase in front says who: a sus hijos les gusta. Here the verb is singular because what they like is one thing, the huayro potato; with a plural thing it would be les gustan. Adding más turns the sentence into a comparison, which is how Spanish says like better.
It is the everyday way to compare two foods, two songs or two plans.
hay que guardar
hay que guardar
it has to be kept
Hay que plus an infinitive states a need without naming who has it: hay que guardar, hay que esperar. It never changes person; when you do want to name someone, use tener que: Rosa tiene que guardar la semilla.
Signs, recipes and advice use this impersonal form a lot.
Antes de cocinarlo
Antes de cocinarlo
Before cooking it
When a verb follows a preposition, Spanish puts it in the infinitive, and an object pronoun is written onto the end of it: cocinarlo, guardarla, pelarlas. The lo here stands for el chuño, which is why it is masculine and singular.
Every instruction with antes de, después de, para and sin ends up needing this.
Comments
Log in to leave a comment
LoginNo comments yet. Be the first!
