Chicha (Inca Fermented Corn Beverage)

History

Chicha is not one drink but a family of maize beverages, some fermented and some not, made across the Andes for millennia; the word itself descends from an Indigenous term for maize. Two poles of that family stand side by side in this book. Chicha de jora is a true corn beer, and its defining step is malting: yellow maize is soaked and left to sprout, and the germinated grain — jora — is dried, ground, steeped, boiled to a wort, and set to ferment. Sprouting converts the grain's starch to fermentable sugar, and the finished drink carries only a light alcohol, on the order of a weak beer. This is among the oldest prepared drinks of the region. Under the Inca it was brewed in quantity for religious festivals and poured in ritual, and the craft was formally taught to women in dedicated houses — a beverage woven into the ceremonial and social fabric of the highland world, not a passing refreshment. The version here, contributed from Lima by Clorinda Matto de Turner — who shares her name with the Peruvian writer of Gorriti's Lima literary circle — sets that malting down step by step: three days' soak, a week or two sprouting under straw and cabbage leaves, sun-drying, then a boil and a three-day ferment kept warm under a wool blanket and started with a glass of dregs from an earlier batch as leaven.

The purple-corn chicha at the other pole is a different creature. Chicha morada is built on maiz morado, a deeply pigmented Andean corn, and in its documented modern form it is non-fermented: the corn, often boiled with its cobs, is simmered with pineapple rind, cinnamon, and cloves, then sweetened and cooled into a fragrant purple drink whose roots also reach back before the Inca state. Francisca Herrera's version here, likewise from Lima, follows that outline — purple corn boiled until the kernels burst open like a flower, with sour cherries, pineapple, lemon, cinnamon, and clove — but then, unlike the drink as it is usually made now, sets the whole to ferment for three days, a reminder that the line between a fermented and a fresh chicha was not always drawn where it sits today.

One passage in the source has to be read as its own period rather than as fact. The book's anonymous opening note frames chicha through 'the Indian of the sierras' of Bolivia and Peru and claims he drinks it, at times, 'to forget his miseries.' That is the 1890 compiler's editorializing — a colonial-era attitude toward Andean people — and not a description of what chicha is or means. The documented reality runs the other way: chicha was, and remains, both a nourishing staple and a ceremonial drink of deep standing across the Andes. What the source does not preserve is anything more of that anonymous first contributor; the other two recipes are signed by named women writing from Lima, and how far each household's practice differed from the versions set down here is not recoverable.

Ingredients

• corn flour (harina de maíz)
• water
• sugar or chancaca

Instructions

1. Boil corn flour in plenty of water, skimming off the oil that rises to the surface.
2. After each skimming, draw off two glasses of broth into a clay vessel and replace with two jugs of hot water.
3. When the flour has dissolved from the bottom of the pot, take off the heat, combine the broths, and cool.
4. Place in a well-covered clay jar to ferment.
5. Drink young for sweetness, or sweeten with sugar or chancaca; it grows strongly alcoholic with time.