It is hard to remember exactly why my parents took me on a train to go to San Fernando from Santiago but I think it was on the occasion of my baptism. I was only a few months old. It was also my first trip on a train.

My parents carried my stroller, my playpen and a big blue blanket that I needed surrounding me in order to go to sleep no matter if I was on a bed, a sofa or anywhere else.

Mother and I remembered that I was very thirsty and the water in my “patito” (small curved oval bottle) was gone. So my mother asked my father to go for water.

Father left for the dinner cart on the train and it took quite a while but he did return carrying a bottle of beer. My mother asked what was going on and father explained that he had seen the container where they carried the water and he didn’t think it was clean enough for me. My mother understood and father proceeded to open the dark green beer bottle and very slowly fill up my “patito”.

My mother recalled that I carefully observed the process and then tried the gold liquid and frowned upon a little but then anxiously drank at least half a “patito” without even breathing. My parents recall that I giggled a lot after drinking my first beer and then fell fast asleep.

The first commercial beer made in Chile started in the city of Valdivia in the south of Chile. Karl August Wilhelm Paschen Anwandter Fick, (in other words his last name was Anwandter), started making beer at home for his nostalgic wife. He had pharmaceutical training and apparently he had studied beer making in Germany. In 1851, he founded the Anwandter brewery.

According to my paternal grandfather’s family tradition, I was also slowly introduced to wine starting at 5 years old. (My grandfather’s family came from the south of France.)
At the beginning, at lunch time, my father would pour three parts water and one part red wine, from my grandfather vineyards, into a wine glass. By the time I was 12 years old I was able to drink half a glass of wine, or a small cocktail, without my parents worrying about me feeling the effect of alcohol.

My parents always kept a well-provisioned bar. When father came back from his busy day at the clinic every day, he would carefully wash his hands (a surgeon’s ritual) and then prepared an aperitif for the three of us. He would have a Whisky Sour, a Pisco Sour or a Manhattan and mother and I would have a Pisco Sour, a Screwdriver or a “Vaina” of white wine or port.

However, some days we had a Martini, a Vermouth with Fernet Branca or just a Dry Vermouth with soda. Together with the aperitif we usually had our “onces-comida” which was a “light” meal. Our habit was to have just three meals a day instead of the traditional four meals in Chile.

For breakfast we had “café au lait” and toasted French baguette, croissants or fresh marraqueta (Chilean crispy crunchy texture bread roll, made with wheat flour, salt, water and yeast). The bread was always spread with creamy fresh butter and smashed avocado. We also had choices of marmalade, bitter cherries jam, strawberries jam, apricot jam and “quesillo” (fresh curd cheese) and goat cheese.

For lunch, the main meal of the day, we commonly had the typical chilean lunch consisting of an “entrada” (starter) which usually was lettuce or cabbage salad with cheese, ham or different cold cuts. Then, in winter, the broth of the cazuela was served. The meat of the cazuela, either chicken, lamb or beef was served separately with the rice and potatoes, pumpkin, corn on the cobb and carrots. All these accompanied by the typical Chilean salad of tomatoes and onions cut so fine that they looked like feathers or threads. We also had steak and potatoes or ensalada Rusa (Russian salad) that we made at home with boiled potatoes, beets and mayonnaise.

But my parents like variety so everyday was a very different lunch. The favorite entrada was “palta reina” which is half an avocado stuffed with langostinos in salsa americana. (Langostinos are small, lobster-like crustacean only found in the cold sea of Chile and salsa americana is finely chopped or blended mixture of pickles, pickled carrots and pickled onion with mayonnaise.) We also, and often, had very fresh “ceviche” made from raw fish cured in fresh lemon or lime juice and spiced with “ají“, (hot chili peppers) and chopped onions, salt, black pepper and “cilantro” (coriander).

Mother and I were partial to French cuisine: Soupe à L’oignon, Coq au Vin, Ratatouille, Boeuf Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise and Andouilles which my father also enjoyed very much accompanied by choucroute (sauerkraut) that our cook prepared with red apples.

Since the Chile coast is rich in fish and shellfish, those were very often at our table accompanied with watercress salad.

Another favorite was the pastel de choclo which is a corn casserole with ground beef, chicken, raisins, black olives, onions and slices of hard boiled egg baked and served in Chilean ceramic.

We also liked the humitas that our cook made. She was from Chiloe, like mother, but had learned to cook central Chile classical cuisine and French cuisine from my mother.

Humitas are made of fresh corn, onion, basil, and butter or lard. They are wrapped in fresh corn husks and boiled.

Empanadas are baked or fried turnovers consisting of pastry and filling. In Chile the most common pino (filling) is diced or ground beef sautéed with onions and spices, a hard boiled egg, an olives and raisins. At home we often asked our cook to make baked chicken or seashell empanadas or fried cheese empanadas.

Humitas and empanadas were more a weekend meal for us because we could prepare them in advance so the cook could take a break and we could enjoy more time with our grandparents and relatives who would come for lunch and “onces” on weekends. “Less time cooking and more time talking” my grandfather Emilio use to say in English. He spoke eight languages and his real name was Emile but he Chileanized it.

“Onces” is the equivalent to five o’clock tea in UK but consists of tea or coffee with milk taken together with cakes and pastries, various desserts and varieties of bread with choice of marmalades, jams and smashed avocado, of course. I don’t remember any meal without having avocado.

The name “once” in Chile, meaning literally the number eleven, has a folkloric origin. During colonial times, when social activities were elegant and refined, tea time was celebrated daily. The ladies would drink tea or coffee but the gentleman would go to the game room and have a glass or two of aguardiente (equivalent to moonshine?). Tradition says that to be polite with the ladies, men called the drink the “eleven” or “once” in Spanish. Aguardiente has eleven letters. So the name stuck and Chileans have had daily “onces” for two or three centuries already.

After dinner, the tradition is to have a “agua perra” which consists of a digestive herb and hot water and a small crystal of brown sugar. But to properly end our “onces-comida” at home, we had a “bajativo” which is a digestive after dinner drink that balances the effect of the food. We usually had a liquor like Amaretto, Cointreau, Triple Sec, Irish Cream, Creme de Menthe, Campari, Grand Marnier, Benedictine, Drambuie, Galliano, Chartreuse, Sambuca, Absinthe, Pernod and others and even plain bitter Angostura or Jagermeister, all depending on the kind of food we had for dinner.

Mother particularly liked a type of sweet white wine called “pajarete” which is only produced in Atacama and Coquimbo, but she also liked Sauternes or Barsac from France.

I always thought that to teach children how to drink without becoming an alcoholic was a Chilean tradition but when it came the time to go to malones (parties) when I was around 13 or 14 years old, I realized that my classmates were not holding their drinks well. Ay ay ay!

I was then assigned by the girls in my group to control how much they drink. My mother provided me with a small bottle of olive oil and I would take a spoon full of it before going to a party, and was sure to give some oil from my bottle to my friends before they drank any alcohol. It was not too long before the boys who went to the parties picked up on the oil trick, too.