Api Morado

Purple corn (maíz morado, called culli in Quechua) is a pre-Columbian Andean cultivar prized for its intense anthocyanin pigment, and drinking it as a simmered maize gruel goes back to Inca times and earlier — the chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega recorded in his early-17th-century Comentarios reales that the people "made porridges they call api, and ate them with great rejoicing." The drink survives today across Bolivia, Peru, and northwest Argentina, and within Bolivia is generally traced to the mining city of Oruro. The Spanish-colonial additions of cinnamon, clove, and cane sugar gave it the sweetened, spiced modern form; before that the Inca cooked it from purple corn and water alone.

Deep-purple, sweet, and thick like a loose porridge — thick enough at times to spoon. Cinnamon-warm up front, clove-aromatic behind it, with a thread of orange peel. Eat it hot, alternating sips with a salty cheese pastel or a fried buñuelo; the sweet, starchy drink against the salty, crisp pastry is the heart of an altiplano breakfast.

The corn starch swells and gelatinizes during the slow simmer, thickening the drink to a loose-porridge consistency; the corn flour is whisked into the hot liquid gradually and stirred constantly to keep it from going lumpy. The deep purple comes from anthocyanins — chiefly cyanidin-3-glucoside, roughly half the pigment load — which concentrate most heavily in the cob and are also a well-known natural antioxidant. Anthocyanin color is pH-sensitive (redder and more stable in acid, shifting blue-purple but less stable as it turns alkaline), and long high-heat cooking cleaves the pigment's glycosidic bonds, so the color fades a little but holds. Cinnamon and clove provide warming sweetness, and the salty pastry pairing balances the sugar.