Cuisine

Chilean

Pastel de choclo is a baked casserole that puts seasoned mince under a sweet-savoury mash of fresh corn. The topping is choclo ground with basil, onion and a little sugar or milk, spread thick and baked until the peaks brown. Underneath: beef, onion, a raisin, an olive, a shard of hard-boiled egg — a pino filling that also goes into empanadas. The contrast is the dish: sweet corn lid, salty-savoury meat. Humitas, pebre and a coastal seafood line sit around it. This is not a shepherd's pie with corn, and it is not a Mexican tamal unwrapped into a dish.

Andean maize and Spanish mince fillings met in the Chilean central valley. Pastel de choclo is home and restaurant food in summer when the corn is starchy-sweet. Peruvian and Bolivian corn pies are cousins; the Chilean basil-and-sugar lid is the local accent. Empanadas de pino share the filling logic. The country's other famous plates — cazuela, curanto, seafood stews — do not appear in this catalog yet. The corn bake is still a true national everyday-and-Sunday dish, not a tourist invention.

The corn should be ground, not a creamed-corn shortcut from a tin if you can avoid it. Basil in the lid is distinctive. The mince is cooked first so the bake is only to brown the top. A little sugar in the corn is traditional and argued about; it should not taste like dessert. Chilean cooking overlaps Argentine beef and Peruvian maize and then bakes the two together. It is not Mexican masa cooking.