What do people eat in Chile?
Chileans eat bread in the morning, a big late lunch as the main meal, and once in the evening: tea with bread, avocado, ham and cheese. A marraqueta with mashed avocado is about 360 kcal.
Typical dishes and their calories
Breakfast
Breakfast is bread with tea or coffee. The bread is a marraqueta, a crusty roll baked as two halves pressed together, or a hallulla, a flat round roll. It gets butter, jam, ham and cheese, or palta, mashed avocado. A marraqueta with avocado is about 360 kcal. Chileans eat about 90 kg of bread a person a year, second only to Germany.
Lunch
Lunch is the biggest meal of the day and it comes late. Many restaurants open only for lunch. A classic is cazuela, a soup with a piece of beef or chicken, potato and corn on the cob, about 400 kcal a bowl. Pastel de choclo is ground beef with onion and hard boiled egg, baked under a crust of crushed sweet corn, about 600 kcal.
Dinner
Most families do not have a real dinner. They have once, said on-seh, at about 18:00: tea with warm bread, avocado, ham, cheese, scrambled eggs and maybe a cake. It is the evening meal, and often a completo or a sandwich takes the place of the bread. A proper warm dinner is for guests or restaurants.
Starters
Restaurants put bread on the table with pebre, a fresh sauce of tomato, onion, coriander and chilli. Empanadas de pino are the classic opener at a party: a big baked pastry filled with beef, onion, a slice of egg and an olive, about 600 kcal each. Stuffed avocados and tomatoes are the home starters.
Desserts
Manjar, the Chilean name for dulce de leche, goes into cakes, alfajores and pancakes. In the south, German settlers left kuchen, a fruit cake now sold in bakeries everywhere. Mote con huesillo is a drink and a dessert at once: dried peaches in their sweet juice with cooked wheat, about 300 kcal a glass, sold from carts in summer.
Drinks
Tea is the daily drink, at breakfast and again at once. Chile makes wine, and pisco, a grape brandy. A pisco sour, with lemon, sugar and egg white, is about 200 kcal. The everyday mix is the piscola, pisco with cola. The terremoto, earthquake, is sweet pipeño wine with pineapple ice cream and grenadine.
Street food
The completo is the street meal: a hot dog in a soft bun, and the italiano version is topped with tomato, mashed avocado and a thick layer of mayonnaise, about 600 kcal. In winter, carts fry sopaipillas, flat rounds of dough made with pumpkin, about 170 kcal each, eaten with pebre or mustard. Empanadas are everywhere around the national holiday in September.
Normal there, odd elsewhere
Once means eleven, yet it is eaten at six in the evening. Mayonnaise goes on almost everything, and avocado goes on hot dogs. Bread is so central that a lucky child is said to be born with a marraqueta under the arm. And a cocktail called the earthquake has a scoop of pineapple ice cream in it.