"For millennia, communities throughout Peru’s Andes Mountains have gathered around a pachamanca (the name of the earthen oven and the resulting dish) to bury ingredients in the ground and cook them with fire-heated stones. Today, a wooden cross on the top mound of dirt is intended to protect the meats, tubers, and vegetables below, while wild herbs like chincho and huacatay infuse them with a mintlike aroma. Before uncovering the earthen oven, usually after at least an hour of cooking, community elders make offerings of food, chicha (an Andean corn beer), and coca leaves to Pachamama—Mother Earth—in gratitude for the harvest that made the meal possible. On special occasions like weddings, joyful huayno music, drinking, and dancing follow the meal’s unearthing. Now migrant Andean families preserve this ancestral tradition in other parts of Peru."
