An American in Lima

Sr. Mostazo

El Fotografo can’t kick this chest cold he’s been suffering with for three weeks. Not even the schlep to Santa Eulalia last weekend could knock it out of his system.  So I decided to try a home remedy on him that I read about in Suite 101.

Now EF’s lying in bed swathed in poultices and blankets, just four feet away from me, and the room reeks of Indian food.

Let me explain.

Earlier this morning I read about this great mustard plaster (also known as a “poultice”) you can make to get rid of lingering chest congestion. That home remedy sounded right for what’s ailing EF: For three weeks he’s been taking Robitussin and Paltomiel (a Peruvian homeopathic cough syrup), drinking hot tea with honey and popping vitamin Cs to no effect. Something stronger (stranger?) was in order.

The mustard plaster recipe caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing a movie in which some orphaned kids who live in the country subject their sick landlord (played by Harry Dean Stanton) to an intense cure involving a poultice of hot cooked onions. The film is based on the classic children’s novel Where the Lilies Bloom, by Bill and Vera Cleaver, and that onion scene has always stayed with me.

In that scene Stanton’s character, whose name is Kaiser Pease, is on his deathbed wearing these tragic-looking long-johns, and the orphans give him a bath in the onions, long-johns and all.

Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)

The treatment works, Kaiser lives, and I think he marries the oldest girl (the one with the brown hair in the film still).

EF isn’t as sick as Kaiser Pease, but I figured a stinky poultice might have a transformative effect on him.

Now comes the part of the story where it gets that Lima twist.

The recipe for a mustard plaster calls for mustard powder. You mix it with flour and hot water, and the hot water activates the mustard’s chemical compounds, creating a thick paste that heats up on its own.

You can’t use prepared mustard out of a squeeze bottle. (I searched that on Google too.) It has to be dried mustard powder or mustard seeds that you grind yourself.

Supermarkets in the United States carry mustard powder, but this being Peru, I wasn’t sure Wong would have it. As I found out this morning, they don’t.

“Ah,” one employee told me, “Cordon Bleu makes polvo de mostaza.” He smiled. “Sorry, we don’t carry that brand.”

After searching ten more minutes among the spices, I found a jar of Badia curry powder, which contains powdered mustard.  That was the closest I’d come, I decided.

“Why not aji?” the Wong employee asked.

I bought a packet of that for good measure.

So now EF’s been lying here for half an hour with a towelful of curry/aji paste tucked under his t-shirt. The curry mixture didn’t get extremely hot like the mustard paste is supposed to, but it did warm his chest.

Prior to applying the poultice, I smeared him with olive oil so the spices wouldn’t irritate his skin. The instructions said to do that.

EF is hacking up mucus. “It’s working,” he says. “I wasn’t coughing up anything before.”

We just peeled off the poultice. I wiped off the oil on his chest with a napkin. It came away bright yellow, the color of mustard and tumeric and aji.

Yikes.

He’s been curried.

Update on EF’s grippe (Sat.): The curry plaster helped a bit, but not enough. The next day I hauled EF to the reliable cevicheria Punto Azul to get him some chupe pescado (fish soup) with aji and lime juice added. That helped open things up. Later that night, he steamed his head over a bowl of hot water and eucalyptus oil, which made him feel a lot better. He’s been doing that regularly and was well enough today to have a meeting in San Isidro.

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