Comida for Kids: How I Got My Daughter to Eat Chilean Food

When I was growing up, my grandfather, who we called Bobop, only wanted to eat the bland, sterotypical Irish food he grew up with: boiled potatoes, ham, plain white rolls with butter. My mom cooked these things for him with love, but she also made a point of introducing me and my siblings to food from other cultures. She helped an immigrant neighbor learn English in exchange for Greek cooking lessons. Once a month or so we’d cook a meal from a different part of the world and spend the whole week learning about that culture’s foodways.

When I struck out on my own, I didn’t do too much cooking at all. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I caught his infectious passion for cooking. Andrés is from Chile and I met him when he’d been in the United States for just a couple years. He made me empanadas de pino, baked with a slice of boiled egg on one side and a black olive on the other side. On cold Boston nights we made pollo al cognac, a spicy chicken dish served with a mug full of the peppery cooking liquid, rich with cognac, for dipping crispy french fries.

When our daughter came along, we vowed she’d be a “good” eater. For a while it worked (ahem: we got lucky). Isabel (Isa for short) gobbled up just about anything we put in front of her, including Chilean hits like charquicán (a stew with beef, potatoes, pumpkin, green beans, peas and corn), humitas, and chacareros. On one trip to see her grandparents in Chile, she ate all of her abuela’s pulpo with her fingers in hungry slurps. Andrés and I exchanged a smug glance: we’d raised a good eater.

Then Isa turned four. Seemingly overnight, the foods she previously enjoyed reliably were regarded with vile disdain. [pagebreak]

It’s important to me that Isa grows up to appreciate foods common in Chile. First of all, they’re delicious. But on a deeper level, I want to show Andrés, his parents and grandmother, and his brother that this gringa mama values the culture of Isa’s heritage and is doing her part to help Isa grow up with connections to Chile.

So on our latest trip to visit Andrés’ family, I decided to make a concerted effort to help Isa appreciate the food. I asked Andrés what he considered to be good “kid food” for Isa to try in Chile. We devised a list of three target dishes to feed her: an Italiana hot dog, malaya, and lomito tomate.

We used the same ground rules for our little experiment that mirror our approach at home: we would order the foods we wanted Isa to eat and she was expected to give each a try to some degree. Sometimes that means just picking at the bread or shyly putting her tongue on the food without actually eating any. That counts! We try not to force her to eat anything in particular (as if as if we could overcome the will of a 5-year-old with moxy, even if we wanted to!). For this experiment, we stuck to the “just try one bite” edict a little more strictly. We made sure there was something on the table we thought she would choose for herself and enjoy.

First we headed to Dominó, a specialty hotdog restaurant with cult-like popularity. We wanted her to try the Italiana, a hot dog with mashed avocado, freshly diced tomato, and house-made mayonnaise. It’s called Italiana because the colors of the toppings invoke the Italian flag. Isa likes hot dogs, avocado, and tomatoes…separately. Would she go for them all on one bun? Would the mayo be a deal-breaker? [pagebreak]

Isa eyed her plate with great suspicion when it arrived. Her eyes darted from the plate to me with a hint of dread. “It’s ok, Isa,” I said. “Just give it a bite.” She inched her head closer to the plate and, without actually picking up the hot dog (to be fair, it was sort of overflowing with toppings), she nibbled the bun. With a flourish, she gave it the thumbs down.

But all was not lost! As Andrés picked up her hot dog to scrape off some toppings, Isa saw that the hot dog came with the most amazing plastic take-out plate in the world: It had a little U-shaped holder to keep the bun upright on the plate. Now Isa thinks hotdogs from Chile are the best in the world, because they come on a special plate. What could be better?

Next we went to Las Delicias de Quirihue, a barbecue joint where my husband was a regular in college. When he first brought me there years ago, he ordered us a tower of meat, including familiar cuts of beef alongside unusual (to me) offerings like intestine and udder meat. We definitely did not expect Isa to eat udder meat. Instead, we thought she should try malaya, a flank steak taken from between the skin and ribs of the cow. It is thin and cooked tender, then rolled (sometimes stuffed with veggies and boiled egg) and cut into slices.

When Andrés described malaya to me, I envisioned a sort of roll-up, like a slice of cheese rolled into a tube shape. But it is actually shaped like a giant lollipop. It’s as adorable as cooked meat could possibly be.

Unless you’re a five year old. [pagebreak]

Then it’s just confusing and dangerous-looking. The meat tower itself actually is a bit dangerous. It’s a metal plate piled high with protein, sitting atop a metal chamber that contains glowing-red pieces of charcoal to keep the meats warm. Isa stuck her tongue on the malaya as if it really were a lollipop, and gave the thumbs-down. She did, however, thoroughly enjoy the jugo fresco de frutilla, una longanisa, and the bread. 

And she devoured a staple Chilean dessert: torta de merengue con lúcuma. Lúcuma – an Andean fruit with dry flesh and a wonderful maple flavor – is the perfect foil to sweet sheets of meringue in half a dozen layers. Isa held her arm around the plate so everyone knew not to steal a bite.

On one of the last days of our trip, we drove to Fuente Alemana. Target dish: Lomito tomate, a thinly-sliced pork sandwich on pan amasado with slices of tomato. When Andrés was a kid, lomitos were the standard birthday party fare. I had very high hopes for this one because Isa loves pork. I whispered to her as we walked the vibrant streets of Providencia toward the restaurant, “Isa, this place has the best sandwiches!”

“Peanut butter and jelly?” she asked, excited.

Oh boy. [pagebreak]

But we were on a mission. We ordered the lomito tomate. Andrés had the good thought to order hers without the typical mayonnaise (Chileans love their mayo). At first she balked, and only took little pinches of the top of the sandwich, the pan amasado. Then she accidentally dropped the top bun on the floor and I could see the panic start to rise on her face. I quickly grabbed the top off of my sandwich and gave it to her. 

Tomatoes were eventually moved to the side, and with a little prodding from Andrés, Isa tried the pork. It was so tender that she was able to peel away an almost microscopic sliver, and she hesitated as she put it toward her mouth. And then she went back for more. And more again. And then she said, “I want to eat this for the rest of my life!”

It felt like a huge success that Isa embraced one of the foods that we specifically wanted her to try on the trip. But the truth is, even the dishes she didn’t warm up to were successes on the journey to make her enjoy the food of her heritage. I talked to Adina Pearson, a dietician, picky eating expert, and teacher at FeedingBytes.com, about my desire to give Isa the gift of cultural culinary competence. “Just even seeing you eat it counts as an exposure. Seeing the food, smelling the food, all count as exposures to normalize a particular dish,” Pearson says.

She also pointed out the importance of incorporating traditional Chilean food at home. “Kids learn to eat over time and exposure. Both my teaching partner at FeedingBytes and I are originally from other countries (she’s Russian and married to a Spaniard and I’m Romanian) and we both serve our kids a variety of foods we grew up with.  Mostly because we want to eat those foods. So they become ‘normal’ in our households.”

So as it turns out my experiment in shaping Isa’s eating habits has really just begun. The truth is, once Isa started being a more picky eater, we stopped preparing charquicán and chacareros, and we certainly didn’t try new Chilean dishes. It seemed like an awful lot of work to cook complex dishes that would ultimately be passed over in favor of simple raw veggies (making sure none touched anything else on the plate!).

But if I want to make sure Isa is in touch with Chilean cuisine, then bring on the barbeque. I have to learn how to make malaya.