A Pie of Maís

There’s a surprise on the menu in Santiago, Chile

In the taxi from the airport to downtown Santiago, I could communicate where I was going, but I couldn’t chat, ask about life or make a joke. I could understand the driver, but when I went to reply, my Spanish had evaporated from lack of use. But I managed to struggle through my most pressing question. What should I eat?

The answer was immediate. “Pastel de Choclo.”

I looked it up online once he’d dropped me at my hotel. A corn casserole or pie, a Chilean speciality, choclo another word for maís, corn. That night, I sat in the hotel lounge, eavesdropping, absorbing words, letting fragments of conversation swill around me. Tiny bits of vocabulary began to slot back into place as I planned the itinerary for my 24-hour layover — where I’d breakfast, stop for coffee, saunter, neighbourhoods I’d explore, a restaurant where I’d find Pastel de Choclo.

On the other side of the thick brown ooze of the Mapocho River which divides Santiago into north and south, a lanky server ushered me to a table on the patio of Viva la Vida. He handed me a menu and near the top — Pastel de Choclo.

Tables filled — three generations of one family in one corner, a boisterous table of students, three men clustered around empanadas and clear bottles of light yellowy lager.

My pastel arrived — a black casserole dish just out of the oven, a thick lid of golden corn dough, cracks revealing a bubbling ooze of gravy, nuggets of beef. I dug into the oven-browned crust, pleasantly startled by the buttery, sugary sweetness of the corn pudding, by hunks of chicken, paprika-spiked beef, a surprise piece of boiled egg, a burst of something plump and sweet — a raisin. And was that an olive?

At the next table, an English couple took their seats — him in a blue shirt and Panama hat, her fidgety and round-shouldered in pastel hues. He brandished a newspaper, shook it to its fullest and retreated behind it, the crown of his hat peeking over the top. She sat, quiet, mouse-like, eyes darting from the menu to the other tables and back. When the lanky server arrived, the newspaper remained firmly in place.

“Ralph?” the woman whispered.

The newspaper rustled. The server looked expectantly. A finger slid to the top and turned a page.

“Just order something, Jean.”

“But it’s all in Spanish,” she said.

A couple with a herd of small children swarmed around the last empty table. The server clicked his pen.

Jean looked at the dish in front of me. She told the server, “We’ll have what she’s having.”

Ten minutes later, the server set a large casserole on their table. “The Pastel de Choclo!”

Jean looked up. “But what is it?”

“Pastel de Choclo,” he repeated.

She smiled. “Yes, but what is that?”

“A pie,” said the server, “It is a pie of maís.”

Jean’s eyebrows slammed together. Her mouth opened in a perfect O. She batted Ralph’s newspaper, squished it to the table and cried, “He’s given us a pie of mice.”

“Si, yes,” said the server. “A pie of maís.”

Jean’s voice rose — thin, shrill, squeaky. “It’s a pie of mice! Ralph, Ralph, they eat mice here!”

The tables had all fallen silent. Bemused servers gathered from across the restaurant, frowning, confused.

I speared the last shred of chicken from the bottom of my dish and set down my fork before telling Jean that maís is the Spanish word for corn — and telling the server that la palabra mice es la inglesa para ratón.

A rapid discussion and recap in Spanish and the staff guffawed. One slapped his thigh and shook his head as he walked back into the restaurant. The others fanned across the patio, explaining the tale to those outwith earshot. The family with the young children giggled as the story went around and around and around the table. The beer drinkers clinked bottles and grinned. But Jean heard none of it. She lifted a fork and peered under the golden crust of baked corn, transfixed, as if still not entirely convinced that amidst the cumin- and paprika-braised beef and carefully quartered boiled eggs, she wasn’t going to encounter a ratón.

That evening a different taxi driver picked me up from the hotel. I told him that I’d tried Pastel de Choclo. And with my stop-start, present tense Spanish I told him about the lady who thought she’d been served a pie of mice. And all the way to Arturo Merino Benitez Airport, my taxi driver chuckled and muttered “pastel de ratón,” as if it was the best joke anyone had ever told.