(Japanese) What Peruvian cuisine and Japanese cuisine have in common is that they’ve both got many types of food that have evolved from 100 years or so of Chinese and Japanese people interacting with each other. In terms of Western cuisine, you don’t have stir-fried food. It’s been here forever. Finally now the wok and stir-fry are popular around the world, but here we’ve had a stir-fried dish called Lomo Saltado from long ago. Bottom line, this is Asian culture, right? And one more thing…the Peruvian people value the true taste of ingredients. Japanese people do too. In other words, we don’t eat meals where you just taste the sauce; we eat food where you can taste the ingredients. That’s exactly the same as Japanese cuisine.
So, when you get new ingredients, first you taste them and wonder, “Hmmm…This would probably go well with this kind of food…” That’s a real hands-on, local-focused approach. Cooking with cook books…that doesn’t give birth to fusion cuisine. You have to taste it yourself…try it out…that’s how fusion is conceived. So when people ask “How is fusion is created?”, trying it for yourself is the only way. That’s it. End of story. You just have to have good ingredients on hand.
Date: April 18, 2007
Location: Lima, Peru
Interviewer: Ann Kaneko
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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