This was one of the best books I've read all year. It is a really interesting read covering the food of the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca. Coe uses written sources from around the times of the European encounter, archaeological evidence, and modern botany to discuss the various foods eaten in pre-Columbian America, as well as the time immediately after contact. Foods like chocolate, maize (corn), and potatoes feature heavily. I think that learning food is an amazing way to learn history. It's just an amazing, intimate lens into the real life of people, immediately relatable to any reader. It even works for things that aren't so relatable:
Making chicha cups out of the skulls of defeated rivals must have been a regular and expected practice if one is to take this story of Atahualpa during his captivity seriously.
He was laughing one day, and looking at him the Governor Pizarro asked him what he was laughing about, and he said, “I will tell you, sir, that my brother Huascar said he was going to drink out of my skull. They have brought me his skull to drink out of and I have done so, you will drink out of his skull and out of mine. I thought there were not enough people in the whole world to conquer me, but you with one hundred Spaniards have captured me, and put to death a large part of my people.” (Molina 1943: 46)
A self-righteous shudder by Europe-centered readers is out of place here.
Nicephorus [Emperor of Byzantium] set out for Bulgaria [in A.D. 811] with a formidable array of troops . . . As soon as he saw them Krum [the Bulgarian Khan] sued for peace, but Nicephorus ignored Krum’s offer, easily took possession of Pliska and the Bulgarian palace, and again refused to discuss terms. This time, however, the Bulgarians sealed off the passes leading out of the mountain defile in which the Byzantine army had carelessly encamped . . . They then swooped down upon the trapped Byzantines and butchered the entire force, including the Emperor and many of his chief officers. Krum cut off the Emperor’s head, and after exhibiting it on a stake for several days, had the skull covered with silver and used it as a drinking bowl. (Anastos 1966: 94)
No matter what type of container held the brew, drinking it appears to have been as tightly regulated as everything else was in the Inca empire.
That they be moderate and temperate in their eating, and more so in their drinking, and if somebody gets so drunk that they lose their judgment, if it is the first time they are punished as the judge shall decide, for the second offense exiled, and for the third deprived of their offices if they are magistrates, and sent to the mines. In the beginning this law was rigorously observed, but later it was so relaxed that the ministers of justice were those who drank the most, and got drunk, and there was no punishment. The amautas, who were their scholars and wisemen, interpreted the law as making a distinction between cenca, which is to become heated, and hatun machan, which is to drink until you have lost your judgment. The latter was what usually happened, but they ignored the follies of the madmen, and little or nothing happened to them. (Anon. 1968: 178)
The last word on Inca drinking should be given to Miguel de Estete, who was one of the 168 Spaniards who captured Atahualpa in 1532. His words, those of his companions Pedro Sancho and Francisco de Xerez, Pedro Pizarro and Cristóbal de Molina of Santiago (both of whom wrote many years later), letters written for the illiterate Francisco Pizarro, and a few letters from the religious on the expedition, Vincente de Valverde, are the only eyewitness reports we have.
Everybody placed according to their rank, from eight in the morning until nightfall, they were there without leaving the feast, there they ate and drank . . . because even though what they drank was of roots and maize and like beer, it was enough to make them drunk, because they were people of small capacity. There were so many people, and such good drinkers, both men and women, and they poured so much into their skins, because they are good at drinking rather than eating, that it is certain, without any doubt, that two broad channels, more than half a vara [vara = .84 m] wide, which went under the paving to the river, which must have been made for cleanliness and to drain the rain which fell in the plaza; or possibly for this same purpose, ran all day with urine, from those who urinated in it; in such abundance as if there were fountains playing there; certainly matching the quantity that was drunk. Considering the number of people drinking it was not to be marveled at, but to see it was a thing unique and amazing. (Estete 1924: 55)
I come away from this book more interested in social history than ever. Coe tells an amazing story and stories stewed together in a broth of culinary culture.
The Staple Foods
Domestication is the slow process that is the foundation of all the food discussed in this book. When Europeans arrived, they often called the plants and animals delicious wild foods. But almost nothing they ate, except for hunted game, was wild. It had all been domesticated over thousands of years. Domesticated plants and animals have more visible variety than wild versions, since humans breed them for different flavors, durability, time to grow, etc. However, the wild species can still have hidden genetic reserves that make those variations possible. One way to distinguish domesticated from wild species is to notice which portions are of greatest interest to domesticators--the edible portions--are most increased in size and quantity.
Maize was the most important domesticated crop of all. But the achievement of Native Americans was not just to domesticate maize, but to discover nixtimalization, the process of soaking ripe maize kernels in and cooking them with lime or wood ashes. This allows the pericarp (the transparent skin of the kernel) to slide off and makes the grain easier to grind. It also significantly enhances the protein value for humans. It is still unknown (at least as of 1994) when nixtimalization came about, but evidence of making nixtamal out of maize exists as far back as 1500 B.C. in Guatemala.
Among the tubers, manioc/cassava was another popular staple food, a ground-up tuber made into cakes for dipping in chile sauce, broth, or water. It was later brought to Africa and became very popular there. Potatoes were also popular tubers originating in Peru and Bolivia. The earliest domesticated potato, Solanum tuberosum, dates back to 8000 B.C. and potatoes were well established on the Peruvian highlands by 3800 B.C. and on the coast around 2000 B.C. They varied in taste, color, hardiness, use, and anything else imaginable.
Staple foods were critical to pre-modern life in a way that is hard to appreciate now. Until the 19th century at the earliest, everywhere in the world relied on some staple, like wheat, maize, or rice, which was eaten every single day, if not at every meal. When archaeologists look at the food people ate and left in trash heaps, variety is the marker of wealth, and it is very rare. What is much more common is for people to mostly eat one thing, day in and day out, with other foods as adornments to the staple carbohydrate, of which there were only one or two. When that staple food didn't grow one year, famine was the result.
Customs
According to Coe, we know more about the day-to-day culinary life of the Aztecs than we do about the Maya or the Inca (and maybe even the Romans) because of the intellectual curiosity of the Fransiscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun. Luckily, even though King Philip II of Spain ordered Sahagun's writings destroyed, for fear that they did too good a job memorializing pagan practices, they survive to reach us today. Another great historian of the place and time is Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who wrote the True History of New Spain. One fascinating passage describes a banquet at Motecuhzoma's table, which is actually just a daily meal while he was not in a period of fasting:
He sat on a low, richly worked soft seat, and the table was also low, and made in the same manner as the seat, and there they put the tablecloths of white fabric, and some rather large handkerchiefs of the same, and four very beautiful and clean women gave him water for his hands out of a kind of deep acquamanile, which they call jicales, and to catch the water they put down a kind of plate, and gave him the towels, and two other women brought him the tortillas; and when he began to eat they put in front of him a thing like a door of wood all painted up with gold so that he could not be seen eating; and the four women stood aside, and there came to his side four great lords and elders, who stood, and from time to time Motecuhzoma chatted with them and asked them questions, and as a great favor gave each of those old men a dish of what he had been eating; and they said that those old men were his near relations and councilors and judges, and the plates of food that Motecuhzoma gave them they ate standing, with much reverence, and without looking him in the face....
He sat on a low, richly worked soft seat, and the table was also low, and made in the same manner as the seat, and there they put the tablecloths of white fabric, and some rather large handkerchiefs of the same, and four very beautiful and clean women gave him water for his hands out of a kind of deep acquamanile, which they call jicales, and to catch the water they put down a kind of plate, and gave him the towels, and two other women brought him the tortillas; and when he began to eat they put in front of him a thing like a door of wood all painted up with gold so that he could not be seen eating; and the four women stood aside, and there came to his side four great lords and elders, who stood, and from time to time Motecuhzoma chatted with them and asked them questions, and as a great favor gave each of those old men a dish of what he had been eating; and they said that those old men were his near relations and councilors and judges, and the plates of food that Motecuhzoma gave them they ate standing, with much reverence, and without looking him in the face....
They also put on the table three highly painted and gilt pipes, which contained liquidamber [Liquidambar styraciflua?] mixed with some plants which are called tobacco [Nicotiana sp.], and when he had finished eating, after they had sung and danced for him, and cleared the table, he took the smoke of one of those pipes, just a little, and with this he fell asleep.
Sahagun also gives us examples of some of the rules for table manners at the Aztec court in Tenochtitlan:
You are not to eat excessively of the required food. And when you do something, when you perspire, when you work, it is necessary that you are to break your fast. Furthermore, the courtesy, the prudence [you should show] are in this way: when you are eating, you are not to be hasty, not to be impetuous; you are not to take excessively nor to break up your tortillas. You are not to put a large amount in your mouth; you are not to swallow it unchewed. You are not to gulp like a dog, when you are eating food. . . .
And when you are about to eat, you are to wash your hands, to wash your face, to wash your mouth. And if somewhere you are eating with others, do not quickly seat yourself at the eating place with others. Quickly you will seize the wash water, the washbowl; you will wash another’s hands. And when the eating is over, you are quickly to seize the washbowl, the wash water; you are to wash another’s mouth, another’s hands. And you are to pick up [fallen scraps], you are to sweep the place where there has been eating. And you, when you have eaten, once again you are to wash your hands, to wash your mouth, to clean your teeth.
The Aztecs, Generally
The Aztecs domesticated five animals: the turkey, the Muscovy duck, the dog, the bee, and the cochineal insect. They ate the first three, used honey and other wax products from the bee, and made dye from the little insect (which was used as the dye that made the red coats of the Redcoats red). The Aztecs also ate of human flesh, but not as a daily meal. Sahagun tells us that after the ritual in which a captured victim of the Flower War had his still-beating heart ripped out, was thrown from the top of a pyramid, and chopped up by old men, the limbs were divided up for eating by the warriors who caught the captive. The recipe for tlacatlaolli, human stew, is to first cook the maize, then put a little bit of meat (the best was from the calf) on the maize, and then add salt. The portion of flesh per person was very small, and was something more like a communion than a meal.
The Aztecs were huge lovers of chocolate, something modern people relate too. The Aztec empire received a yearly tribute of 980 loads of cacao, each of which contained 24,000 beans and weighed about fifty pounds. The cacao beans also served as money. Chocolate was not usually consumed in any solid form, but as a drink, mixed with chiles, water, and honey, among other things. But, also like us, they felt guilty about consuming so much chocolate. They came from northern deserts, not knowing about chocolate, and felt a sort of nostalgia for tougher times, when they didn't know the fattening joys of sweets. Indeed, a story was told that some Aztecs made a journey back to their homeland, where they found very old people who were immortal, and had known their recent ancestors who had left Aztlan, their homeland. These old people could change their age at will. But when one of the old men led some Aztec warriors up a hill to meet their goddess, the Aztec warriors sank into the sand and were scolded that they had eaten too much chocolate and become heavy, that it would be difficult to reach the place of their ancestors. But the guilt certainly didn't stop them from consuming more and more chocolate.
The Maya, Generally
Unlike the Aztecs, the Mayans that the Europeans encountered were not united in a centralized empire. They had possessed a great empire centuries earlier, but by 1500, that was long gone. Instead, they were politically organized in city-states, which actually made them more difficult to conquer, since it wasn't as easy as just killing or kidnapping a leader. Indeed, the last independent chief of the Maya, Kanek' of Tayasal, remained independent until 1697.
The Mayans were "expert orchardists," and had a large variety of fruit-bearing trees as well as cacao. Cacao was not really suited to Mayan climates, but the Mayans were able to get the right soil and moisture conditions by planting cacao trees in limestone sinkholes. Unfortunately, the Europeans destroyed basically all of these orchards. The Mayans were also excellent apiarists, and Europeans describe thousands of beehives being cultivated.
Something interesting is that in Mayan language, there are several verbs used to mean "to eat." One is used only for questions, like, "what are you eating?" Another is used for things that are chewed and spit out, like sugar cane and maize stalks. There is another used for bread/staple carbohydrates, and another for consumption of meat, mushrooms, and chile. Then, there are two more categories: one that is mostly used for mushy things, although some mushy things also use the verb that is for discrete, firm objects, like young maize, or beans. Both the Mayans and the Aztecs enjoyed mushrooms, both as a daily food, but also for hallucinogenic properties added to sacred drinks.
The Inca
The Inca made highly systematic conquests and centralized their empire more than the Aztecs. They demanded that those they conquered learn Quechua, accept Inca gods and laws in addition to their own, and send their local gods (idols) to Cuzco. The Inca eliminated pre-existing practices of eating dogs and people. The Inca also had two large domesticated land mammals: the llama and the alpaca, along with two wild large mammals: the vicuña and the guanaco. These are all camelids, and all delicious. The Inca managed the population of llamas, which was especially important when they became diseased. After the fall of the Incan Empire, the culling of llamas infected with caracha ended, and the infection spread unchecked, killing two-thirds of llamas in the 1540s. Incans also ate guinea pigs, known as cuy, which were good eating since they reproduced rapidly. The potato was also critical, however it appears that it was not for the Inca, but for other people who were conquered by the Inca. The Inca forced them off of their potato-growing heights to grow maize in the valleys, which was used to make chicha, the popular Incan beer.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Avocado comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, meaning testicle.
- Tomatoes were sort of a "sleeper" food. They were unpopular because they are related to poisonous plants and their plants give off a bad odor (but not the fruit). It took centuries for the tomato to reach its modern popularity. Tomato comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl, which makes it difficult to determine what ancient people were actually eating, since tomatl technically just means "round and plump" and was used for many different fruits.
- The troops of Charles V sacked three major capitals: Tenochtitlan in 1521, Rome in 1527, and Cuzco in 1534.
- Apparently people think that peanuts originate in West Africa, but Coe corrects this misperception by pointing out that no wild species of peanuts grow outside South America, and the 15 wild species of peanut all grow in and around lowland Bolivia.
- The first printed recipe for spaghetti with tomato sauce was published in a Neapolitan cookbook in 1837.
- The pineapple originates in Brazil and Paraguay, and was spread over South America by Tupi-Guarani tribes.
- When a vanilla bean is picked, it does not smell like vanilla. That only comes after a process of curing, and different curing processes can develop different tastes.
- Traditional fasting all the way from Mexico down to Peru consisted of eating only chile and salt, with many variations. But the base level fast was to eat just chile and salt.
- The Aztecs were originally a nomadic or semi-nomadic tribe from the deserts of northern Mexico who wandered to the valley of Mexico at some time in the fourteenth century.
- Turkeys originate near Rio Balsas in Mexico. Coe calls turkeys "a paradoxical creature, being at the same time wild and tame, wary and stupid." lol
- Passionfruit is named like that because the complex flowers appeared to early explorers to contain the symbols of the passion of Christ, like the crown of thorns, the five wounds, the three nails, etc.
