Chipa!

By Christie Hagerman, Asuncion, Paraguay

Photo by Camille Hagerman

Next week everyone will be eating chipa for Semana Santa ("Holy Week," the few days before Easter). It's a type of bread that gets eaten as breakfast, snack, whatever.
Yesterday I met a 13-year-old boy on the bus who attends school from 6 till 11 a.m. while his mom is making chipa (pronounce it CHEE puh).  Then he takes the bus and a basket full of Mom's chipa to a town 30 miles away--almost two hours on the bus in high traffic--to sell at stop lights.  Every single day.  Well, he stays home on Sunday, but you get the idea. 

Thirteen years old, did I  mention? 


His basket is a round, flat one, about 2 feet in diameter. He stacks it high with chipa and balances it on his head. He told me he's never had it fall off his head, but I'm not sure he'd admit it if he had.  ;)

CHIPA TRIVIA:

Along the main roads of Paraguay, especially where there are bus stops, you'll find folks weaving through traffic, waving cars down or climbing on the buses to sell chipa.  You're driving in the middle of nowhere on a long road to the next town and, out of the blue, there's a chipa gal on the side of the road, flagging you down--like the Paraguayan version of a drive-thru. 
People who sell chipa are called chiperos (men) or chiperas (women).  The chiperas, unfortunately, have a shady reputation, and being a chipera is looked at as the worst sort of job.  I've heard parents using that job to harass their kids about an education, saying something akin to our "What!?  You wanna dig ditches all your life?"


Chiperas on the roadside wear special uniforms to identify them, usually a very short skirt, a white apron, and pantyhose.  They are the only Paraguay women that I ever see in pantyhose/stockings.
Men seem more likely to have the big basket on their heads, balanced on a rolled-up hand towel.  The chiperas usually carry them in a more traditional basket with a handle.


Sometimes chipa is shaped into various things, although I haven't figured out yet why they make the  animal shapes.  During Holy Week, sometimes you find chipa shaped like a palm branch.
At ungodly early hours, small trucks with camper shells make their way through all the  neighborhoods, their beds stacked full of chipa.  They use loudspeakers to announce their arrival.  Many of them blare out that they are selling chipa barrero, supposedly a bigger, better version.  Imagine being woken from sleep before sunrise by a man in a truck just outside your window at about a million decibels of sound, screaming, "CHIPA BAREEEEEEEEERRO!  BAREEEEEEERO!" 

If you are speaking in Guaraní, the word CHEEpuh becomes sheePAH. 

Here's the recipe, although further from the city, I've noticed that people make it without much cheese and form it in the shape of a doughnut, unless it's a roadside stand.  It's harder in the doughnut shape, and the cheese makes it SO yummy, so I prefer this recipe, shaped into dinner rolls or long oval rolls.  Give it a try!

Chipa Recipe:

250 grams of pork fat (or butter, Crisco, etc.)
500 grams of soft cheese (Mexican works well, if you can't find Paraguayan cheese)
8 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tbsp salt
2 tsp anise seed
1 kg mandioca, yuca, or cassava starch
Mix the fat, the cheese, and the eggs.
Dissolve the salt in the milk, then slowly add the starch, followed by the anise seeds.
Knead the whole batch till it's nice and smooth.

Form either ping-pong sized balls or donut shapes and bake 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees (slightly less for the donut-shaped ones), until the outside is browned a bit and kinda crusty.  The inside remains SLIGHTY doughy, so don't try to cook it dry. 

Eat 'em while they're warm because they are gooey and soft inside.  If they get cold, the crust can be quite hard to bite.


It's baked in a brick oven (tatakua) here, but if you don't have one in your backyard, oh well.  Just use your electric oven and pretend it's a tatakua.  I won't tell.


If you want to follow Paraguayan tradition, make up a whole slew of these and take them to all your neighbors for Holy Week.  Just do it after the sun rises, and refrain from yelling, "CHIPAAAAA!" please.
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Our thanks to Christie Hagerman for allowing us to reproduce her great insight into life in Paraguay. If you are interested in knowing more about the Hagerman family, Ken, Christie, Camille and Caroline are missionaries in Paraguay. Their web site is Hagermans On a Mission, http://hagermans.blogspot.com.ar/p/about-us.html. And if you try the Chipa! recipe I hope you'll let us know.
All right reserved 04/01/2012 Christie Hagerman

Welcome to Paraguay

Lake Ypacarai near San Bernardino, Paraguay 

We arrived in Ascunsion at 10 a.m. one Friday in August, 2010, on a connecting flight from Buenos Aires. From the plane window, my first impression of Paraguay was red. There was red soil and palm trees as far as I could see.

From this vantage point it reminded me of India, a good impression. We like India. We had never been to South America before, but had decided to make it our home. We were newly retired and knew that we could not have a comfortable lifestyle on our pensions in the UK. Our pension provider had gone bust and future prospects were looking grim, so we decided that it was time to go.

We had done extensive research online and chosen Paraguay because of the availability of water, farmland, and a small, young population for a big space. We had already decided that we wished to seek permanent residency, so had come with all the required documents legalised by the Paraguayan consulate in the UK. We had arranged a lawyer to assist us from a contact in the UK. The permanent residency process began immediately and we are now just waiting for the final signatures to be granted permanent residency in this beautiful country.

I struggled with trying to decide where Paraguay reminded me of in the first few weeks here. The traffic was noisy and the buses belch fumes. This reminded me of India and some Mediterranean cities. But that wasn’t quite right as it didn’t look like that. Central Asuncion is quite elegant and built up like any other major city. There were vendors of this and that on the buses, shoe shine boys, things that I didn’t see anymore in the UK. Then the penny dropped. Asuncion is itself, familiar enough to be comfortable but different enough to be interesting.

Everyone, including the Paraguayans, describes Paraguay as a third-world country. There are major arteries of asphalt roads from city to city and larger towns, while other routes still have dirt roads. There is no railway. Much cargo still arrives on the river.

Has my lifestyle suffered? Certainly not. My food is fresher and frequently grown in Paraguay. It is vine ripened and not flown halfway across the world in a gas-filled container. This results in food that tastes like it should. And it is seasonal; if it is not strawberry time, there are no strawberries.

I prefer this to year round accessibility to fruit with no taste. Any food imported is usually from Argentina or Brazil.

Eating out is also good. There are good quality restaurants that are expensive for people here but do not break a western budget. There are some international brands such as Burger King and McDonalds but these are not on every corner. Most places to eat are still small and privately owned. Around the corner from where we live the bar owner can be seen at around 6 p.m. happily making his own burgers.

The lack of imposed health and safety regulation is refreshing, returning me to an age where people were allowed and expected to take some responsibility for their own safety, even if this raises the occasional eyebrow when bits of masonry fly off a roof.

The fixed-line telephone network is expensive and tired; so this has resulted in 85% of the population having mobile phones. We have wifi internet that is a bit more expensive than in the UK, but a connection that is fast enough to use VOIP and allows us to bypass the expensive overseas costs of the phone provider.

We have not yet seen every season in Paraguay, but there is sun--lots of it--resulting in a profusion of beautiful plants and trees. Occasionally something will catch our eye, familiar but strange. Then the realisation that a temperamental little houseplant in the UK is in it’s natural home here and six feet tall.

Every month there are new flowers and colours in the trees, leading us to wait in excitement for what will come next. In January the mangoes ripened and have been dropping off the trees, people gather them and leave spares on a wall for passers by. We don’t know the names of most of the trees here, but it doesn’t matter, they are still beautiful and we know that the chance we took going to a different place is going to give us years to learn.

Jean

Jean is a contributing reader who recently moved from England to Ascunsion, Paraguay. She has  promised to send more information in the future, so if you are interested in knowing more about Paraguay, stay tuned!