At a table on a street corner in Oruro in western Bolivia, night owls get ready to dig into a favorite dish touted as a hangover cure: roasted lamb’s head.
Late-night diners savor every part of the head, using their fingers to pull off bits of meat and brain.
Doris Cuba is “continuing the tradition” started by her grandmother in serving the dish every Friday to Sunday from 5pm to 6am.
Photo: AFP
“You will not find it anywhere else, even less so in a chic restaurant,” the 48-year-old said, with a smile.
Once they have been cleaned and seasoned with salt, the lamb’s heads are baked in a wood-fired oven for seven to eight hours, then eaten with bread and chili pepper.
“My grandmother sold them wrapped in newspaper, with the skin, the wool and everything,” said Cuba, who peels the baked skull while it is still hot and then breaks it open to make it easier to eat.
In her grandmother’s era, customers would split the skulls themselves “on the ground or against a wall.”
The sisters serve a steady stream of customers through the brisk nights of the Bolivian altiplano, which at 3,700m sees summer temperatures of 6°C to 19°C.
On a recent evening, a dozen diners lined up in front of a steaming container full of cooked heads, eager to dig into meat tenderized by the long cooking time.
Customers use forks to pierce the lamb eyeballs, sending black liquid squirting from the pupils.
When bitten into, the texture resembles sweetbread.
The creamy consistency of the brain is “like butter,” said Cuba’s sister, 40-year-old Claudia Arispe.
The tongue is most coveted and is known as the “dessert” of the head.
“It’s a sheep’s head, but I had to try it,” said student Angel Pacheco, 25, of his first taste of the dish.
Not just a Bolivian tradition, sheep’s head is known as “smiley” in South Africa, so dubbed because of the way the animal’s teeth are exposed as it is cooked.
“There’s not much meat, but the truth is that it’s quite exquisite,” telecoms employee Ivan Nino de Guzman, 46, said.
It is important to eat the dish quickly so the meat does not go cold, he added.
On public holidays, such as the Carnival of Oruro, Cuba said they can sell up to 200 roasted heads, at the equivalent of about US$7 each.
It is enough to support two families and pay the business overheads.
The sisters refuse to reveal how they cook the heads — a family secret handed down by their grandmother.
“It must be tender. You need a little lamb,” said Cuba, whose daughters also work in the family business.
“They will sell when I can’t ... so we don’t lose the family tradition,” she said.
The new generation also handles promotion on social media of the restaurant, Rostro Asado Dona Chavelita, or Mrs Chavelita’s roasted head, in tribute to the sisters’ grandmother.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS