Masamorerias, or a sort of pap-shops, are very common in Lima. Of the sweet pap in vulgar use there are as many varieties as there are of meal and flour,—such as peas, beans, rice, maize flour, arrow-root, starch,—of which they have many varieties. Any of these boiled in water to a very soft consistence, with or without the addition of fruit or some vegetable acid, and sweetened exceedingly with sugar, molasses, or “chancaca,” (the latter, a coarse sort of brown sugar made up into cakes,) is what constitutes the great Limenian dish “masamora,” to which these sweet-mouthed people are as proverbially partial as the English are to roast-beef. However salutary in itself may be the quality of the more substantial food of such Limenians as can afford to live well and generously, yet most of their dishes are so sodden in lard, that the common fowl, the pigeon, turkey, and that excellent family dish the “puchero,” consisting of a variety of fruit and vegetables, with pieces of meat of different kinds and quality, all boiled and presented in one great piece of plate,—are among the comparatively few which a simple palate can relish. Their soups, together with a great variety of vegetable dishes, are so heated with agi-pepper, that the coats of the stomach would indeed require to be well greased to protect them against the piquant effects of this popular condiment. Useful and even necessary as this agi is found to be by those Indians of the valleys who cultivate it around their doors, and whose diet is nearly all vegetable, yet in a climate like that of Lima, and in constitutions so delicate as those of its inhabitants confessedly are, it must prove injurious to the organization of the stomach, and to the health in general, when freely and daily taken with a plentiful allowance of animal food, and a general mode of living sober but not temperate; for though the better classes deal sparingly in wine, yet, by partaking more or less of every dish at table, and these not a few, they usually eat more than the powers of digestion can comfortably apply to the support of the frame, not usually exposed by so indolent a people to great waste from athletic exertion.