Pupusas are El Salvador's national dish. Pupusas are thick corn tortillas stuffed with cheese, cheese and beans, cheese and loroco (the buds and flowers of a common Salvadoran plant), cheese and chiles, cheese and meat, etc.
You always eat pupusas with your hands. Which sounds like no big deal except that they’re served with curtido—cole slaw—and a tomato-sauce condiment. Sounds terrible but the combination of the three elements is not arbitrary—you know that once you’ve tasted the three together.
Here’s how you eat a pupusa; at least this is how they eat them here in Perquín. You break off a piece of the pupusa and you use that small piece to scoop up some of the curtido, on which you’ve squirted the tomato-sauce condiment. Grabbing the bite of food between your thumb and two fingers (your thumb controls the clump of curtido and your index and second fingers control the hunk of pupusa), you shove big bites into your mouth. It’s a two-or-three-napkin undertaking to eat two pupusas, which is the standard order, two for a buck. You want to make sure you wash your hands before you eat pupusas; your fingers spend a lot of time in your mouth as you eat one.
I live in a pupusería so I’ll be eating a lot of pupusas for the next eight months. Imelda, the woman from whom I’m renting a room, opened the first pupusería in Perquín some fifteen years ago. It’s still the best in town judging from the number of clients who show up every night—and I’m one of them.
