Paraneña Food & Traditional Cuisine

Paraguayan cooking is a genuine blend of Guarani staples and Spanish technique, and it is heavier on starch than anywhere else in South America.

Cassava and maize are the foundations, inherited from the Guarani and turned into an unusually large family of breads and cakes — boiled, baked on a griddle, baked in a tray, fried, and made into flour.

Beef is the main protein, grilled as asado over wood, and the cattle are grass-fed and good.

River fish from the Parana and Paraguay — surubi, pacu, dorado — are a genuine speciality, grilled or in a thick soup.

Cheese, a fresh salty curd called queso Paraguay, goes into most of the breads.

And terere, cold mate with medicinal herbs pounded into the water, is drunk continuously from mid-morning onward.

Sopa paraguaya is the national dish and the national joke: despite the name it is a solid cornbread with cheese, onion, milk and egg, baked in a tray and cut into slabs. The story is that a cook of one of the nineteenth-century presidents added too much maize flour to a soup and served it anyway.

Chipa, a ring of cassava starch, cheese, egg and anise, baked in a clay oven and sold at every bus stop and street corner — best warm, and traditionally made in quantity for Holy Week.

Mbeju, a griddle cake of cassava starch and cheese, crisp outside and chewy within, eaten for breakfast.

Asado, beef ribs and flank over wood coals, with cassava and salad.

Surubi, the big catfish of the Parana, grilled or in chupin, a tomato and onion fish stew.

Also: vori vori, cornmeal dumplings in chicken broth; bori bori variants; and dulce de mamon, candied papaya.

Mercado 4 in Asuncion is the city’s vast, chaotic central market — produce, herbs, contraband electronics, cooked food and the herb sellers who pound yuyos for your terere to order.

Terere is the country’s central social ritual. A thermos of iced water, a guampa of yerba and a metal bombilla, passed around a circle by one server who refills and hands it to each person in turn. You drink the whole serving and hand it back. Wiping the bombilla is an insult. Being invited to join is an ordinary friendly gesture and should be accepted.

Chipa vendors board long-distance buses at stops calling the name; the chipa is usually warm and usually good.

Lunch is the main meal, from around midday, followed by a long pause.

Asado at the weekend is a social occasion lasting most of an afternoon.

Paraguay makes very little wine, and its drinking culture runs on cane, yerba and cold beer.

Caña paraguaya is the national spirit: rum distilled from sugarcane grown in the east, aged in oak by the better producers and drunk neat, over ice, or in a caipirina. Several distilleries around Guaira and the sugar districts have been working for over a century, and the aged expressions are a genuine and little-known category.

Terere and mate: yerba is grown commercially in the eastern departments, which lie at the southern edge of the plant’s natural range in the Atlantic Forest. Terere is drunk cold through the day with medicinal yuyos crushed into the water, and hot mate cocido at breakfast.

Beer is drunk extremely cold; Pilsen is the national brand and an ice bucket at the table is standard.

Mosto, fresh cane juice pressed at the roadside, is the ubiquitous soft drink.

Argentine and Chilean wines are widely available and inexpensive.