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AREPA
HISTORY
Christopher Columbus was the first one who presented to the Europeans
the first golden grains of corn. From his hasty search for the Indies
he found a continent from which brought a grain that together with rice
and wheat is the basis for the triad of the world’s food consumption.
The corn’s scientific name is “Zea Mays” and it has
been established in America for centuries. Today, in Latin American
corn is widely used since it is the basis of the regional cuisine. Corn
is used to make bread, sweet corn torticas, tortillas, gorditas, tamales,
pupusas, empanadas, buñuelos and arepas, as well as to prepare
drinks such as atole, champurriada, guarapo, mazato, champus and chicha.
It is also used in soups, ajiaco, guisos, mazamorra and polenta. It
can be consumed on the cob, broiled and baked. The arepa is a corn-based
dish from the northern Andes in South America. It is a flat cake of
cornmeal that can be grilled, baked or fried. Colombian and Venezuelan
migration to the U.S.A. and elsewhere has made arepas available almost
worldwide. Venezuelans eat ther arepa split in half and filled with
cheese or deli meats and is known as arepa rellena. On the Caribbean
coast of South America, the cornmeal cake is often deep-fried and, in
one variation, where a raw egg is added midway through the frying process,
it becomes the arepa'e huevo. For Colombians arepas is eaten unadorned
just with butter, cheese or meats in top mainly as the regional form
of bread.
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