#29 Honduras

Grief shared is half grief; joy shared is double joy. - Honduran proverb

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Food here tends to be a mixture of Mesoamerican and Spanish, with some Caribbean vibes thrown in.

A typical meal will involve tortillas, rice and beans and will usually include some salad and meat, such as carne asada, thinly sliced beef, marinated in lemon juice and spices before being seared on the grill.

The national dish is considered to be el plato tipico, a plate with a bit of everything on. There will be sausages, maybe some more meat, beans of course, rice, fried plantain, sour cream, avocado and tortillas. It can also be eaten in the morning as desayuno tipico, where some of the meat is swapped in for scrambled eggs. It’s worth noting that this is a common thing to serve for breakfast in eateries in Latin America. It’s not too dissimilar to a full English in concept.

Hondurans’ favourite snack is pastelitos de carne, which are the Honduran version of an empanada: ground beef stuffed into a pastry case. Find them at parties or sold from street carts.

One top way to get your beans in in Honduras is with sopa de frijoles, a black bean soup flavoured with paprika and tomatoes and often made using pork rind.

Plenty of seafood and coconut is eaten in coastal regions. A few popular seafood dishes are listed below:

- Fried Yojoa fish sounds immense! It is a slightly sweet-tasting fish, usually marinated in a spice mix, deep-fried and served with pickled onions.

- Sopa de caracol / conch soup (and also a famous Latin American song). A conch is a “tropical marine mollusc with a robust spiral shell which may bear long projections and have a flared lip” – dictionary definition. For the soup, the conch is cooked in coconut milk with spices and cassava. It’s a national favourite.

- If you substitute the conch in sopa de caracol for crab or shrimp, you have sopa marinera.

Many of the popular desserts in Honduras are common to their Latin American neighbours. A couple of examples are arroz con leche (rice pudding) and pastel de tres leches, which is so named for being made of three kinds of milk: regular milk, evaporated milk and condensed milk.

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Baleadas

These are the epitome of Honduran street food and Gordon Ramsey once declared them the best dish in Latin America!

The ‘simple’ baleada is a flour tortilla, slathered with refried beans with a dollop of crema (like sour cream) and sprinkled with queso fresco (a hard, salty cheese, similar to feta). A ‘special’ baleada also includes scrambled eggs and avocado and a ‘super special’ baleada contains all of the above with the addition of ground beef or chorizo.

Baleadas should be eaten folded in two with the hands.

The story behind this dish goes back only as far as 1964. A woman known as Doña Tere ran a street food stand selling these in La Ceiba, a city on the Caribbean coast, and gave them the name baleada, meaning the woman who has been shot. So the story goes, the tortilla represents the ammo shell, the beans are the bullets and the cheese the gunpowder. I think she was making some kind of joke but I don’t really get it, but that’s the story. Doña Tere’s stand is still there today and run by her daughters.

Pictured below is my very own ‘super special’ baleada: home-made wheat tortilla, topped with refried kidney beans, scrambled egg, avocado, chorizo, sour cream, feta, coriander and chillies. Fabulous!

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Adios Honduras…hola VANUATA!

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