KITCHEN HISPANIZATION

184 CHAPTER 17 KITCHEN HISPANIZATION And I can assure your Majesty that if plants and seeds from Spain were to be had here . . . the natives of these parts show such industry in tilling land and planting trees that in a very short time there would be great abundance. . . . Hernando Cortés (1485–1547) 1 THE SCOPE of the known world doubled for the Europeans over the course of the sixteenth century, but it was only in the New World that the planet’s cuisines as well as foods and peoples were fi rst amalgamated on a vast scale. Had the European conquest occurred without a massive Native American die-off, its history might have been more like that of China or India, where it was only a matter of time before huge native majorities tossed out ruling foreign minorities to reclaim their lands and cultures. But in Mexico, Peru, and in most of the rest of the Americas, shrinking native populations left the door wide open to a fl ood of European and African and Asian peoples and cultures that came to stay. 2 The ensuing blending of New and Old World foods was a giant stride in food globalization, even though it was sometimes hobbled by Latin American tariff rates that were among the highest in the world between 1820 and 1929. 3 During the Hapsburgs stay on Spain’s throne (1516–1700), elites in the Americas, like those in Europe, ate the cosmopolitan foods of the Haps- burg Empire – “roasted kids and hams, quail pies, stuffed fowl and pigeons, blancmange and escabeche of chicken, partridge, and quail” were some of Kitchen Hispanization 185 these foods that Cortéz and the new Viceroy of New Spain served at a feast in 1538. 4 But after 1700, when the French Bourbons took over Spain’s helm from the defunct Hapsburgs, French cuisine became the vogue for the elite of the Americas and remained so until well into the twentieth century. French food and the French language were identity cards for the upper classes who were suffi ciently distanced from Indians and mestizos, blacks and mulattos, even poor and middle-class whites, so that in Mexico, one of its upper class members recently confessed that when she was growing up “we never ate Mexican food.” 5 For most everybody else, however, stews and soups were central to the diet, just as they were for pre-Columbian peoples who, like the Spaniards, used ceramic pots for cooking them. Called puchero in Argentina, cazuela in Chile, chulpe in Peru, and ajiaco in Columbia, such stews blended Old World ingredients – beef, salt pork, sausage, mutton, and cabbage, rice, and peas – with those of the New World – sweet and white potatoes, manioc, maize, annatto, and chilli peppers. 6 With some exceptions, South Americans have not used chilli peppers as enthusiastically as the Mexicans. Fresh coriander has been a favorite in the Andean countries as in Mexico, but avocados were and are underuti- lized in South America. Garlic and onions are universally employed with a heavy hand, but salads of uncooked greens were rare before the twentieth century. Bananas and plantai ns were the most important fruits, especially in lowland locales, although citrus was everywhere. Flan, long the favorite dessert in the Hispanic countries, was a caramelized milk custard straight out of the Spanish heritage. 7 THE ABC COUNTRIES Iberians and Italians were the primary European settlers of Chile, Argentina, and southern Brazil. In the latter two areas the diet has tended to focus on grilled or roasted beef, often sun-dried – hardly the near-vegetarian Medi- terranean diet they left behind. After their early introduction, cattle mul- tiplied on the pampas so that in the 1840s, beef was so plentiful that it was even fed to poultry. Today the Plata region (Argentina and Uruguay) boasts the highest per capita beef consumption in the world, with south- ern Brazil not far behind. Wheat was the most important of Old World cereals to reach the region. As in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, it goes mostly 186 A Movable Feast into white bread, and together meat and wheat transplanted from Europe to Argentina and Uruguay have helped to feed the world. 8 Mutton is another popular meat in Argentina, where seafood is curiously underused. 9 In Chile, however, the long, indented 2,600 miles of coastline yields seafood in abundance, which is consumed in large quantities. Cen- tral Chile also produces olive oil, another southern European staple. 10 The Italians have contributed pasta to the cuisine as well as tomato- processing techniques to sun-dry tomatoes and turn them into sauce, puree, and paste. The Germans, for their part, have played a leading role in the charcuterie industry. In addition to tomatoes, many other American foods are routinely employed. In Brazil, toasted manioc meal ( farofa) is invariably sprinkled over meats and black beans, which constitute the foundation of feijoada, the country’s national dish – a blending of beans, rice, dried meats, and sausage. 11 And throughout southern South America potatoes, pumpkins, squash, green corn, and other corn dishes such as grits are commonly served. 12 Around São Paulo, the dish “ Cuscuz paulista” may have been inspired by the couscous of North Africa, but cornmeal, not semolina, is used to make it. 13 Coffee, although a nineteeth-century arrival in Brazil, has become South America’s leading hot beverage, although the native yerba maté tea, made from the South American holly ( Ilex paraguayensis), remains popular, espe- cially in Paraguay where Native American males, in particular, suck the brew from straws, preferably silver, inserted into gourd-like containers. Iberian colonization brought viticulture to the Americas so that Europe is very evident in the vineyards that are common in southern Brazil and blanket the Andes foothills on both the Chilean and Argentinean sides. 14 Long ago, Spanish settlers and Jesuit missionaries elaborated a complex, but effi cient, system of irrigation for both countries, using water sent down the mountainsides by melting snowcaps to solve the problem of uncertain rainfall in a hot and arid climate. 15 Chile produces less wine than Argentina or Brazil, for that matter, but its wines are better known, although the Malbec wines of Argentina’s Mendoza region have recently become popular, led by a number of “Super Mendozans.” Without vast pampas, Chileans import most of their beef from Argentina but have many dishes based on pork and mutton as well. Apart from viticulture, Chile’s agricultural efforts are aimed at the production of stone fruits and vegetable crops, many of these for export to the United States. Potatoes are native to the region; other important American foods are beans (foremost among them the cranberry bean), corn, and squash. Kitchen Hispanization 187 Interestingly, one of the ancestors of the hybrid garden strawberry is also a Chilean native. To journey from the coffee country of southern Brazil to the sugar- growing regions of the Northeast is to leave an area settled voluntarily by European immigrants for a region reluctantly peopled by victims of the African slave trade. It is also to seemingly enter Africa because the region centered around Bahia showcases many of West Africa’s contribu- tions to New World cuisine. The American plant manioc is a staple in the Northeast, but major cooking ingredients like palm or dende oil, okra, and melegueta peppers are all African in origin. Bahian cooks lavishly use ingredients such as the meat and milk of coco- nuts, onions, parsley, bananas, plantains, peppers, and peanuts. Their dishes are generally based on fi sh, shrimp, and chicken, with dried cod and dried shrimp both Portuguese contributions to what is otherwise a very tropical cuisine. Even the names of dishes like vatapá or moqueca evoke the exotic – fi sh, shrimp, or chicken stews that, when served with rice, represent a globalizing melding of foods native to the world’s principle continents of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. 16 THE ANDEAN REGION Emphasizing European and African contributions to the American diet is not meant to minimize native input to New World cuisines. After all, Native Americans are the ones who domesticated major league crops like manioc, potatoes, peanuts, and maize, and not surprisingly, today’s diet among the indigenous peoples in the Andes – in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador – remains a traditional one, relatively unchanged by the relative newcomers. Meals rest heavily on a wide variety of potatoes, along with quinoa, maize, and manioc, often laced with chilli peppers and ground annatto. Meat is eaten much less frequently in the highlands than elsewhere in South America, although dishes are sometimes fl avored with the fl esh of chickens as well as that of the guinea pig ( cuy), a universal favorite that is generally roasted. 17 On the coast, where the Humboldt Current rides herd on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of seafood, the diet becomes more tropical, utiliz- ing bananas and plantains, side by side with potatoes but never excluding them. The minorities of European ancestry clustered in the large cities do most of the meat-eating and in the nineteenth century, if not before, European favorites such as beef, mutton, salt pork, and pigs’ feet were all 188 A Movable Feast available in Lima. 18 Nonetheless, in a land where Quechua is spoken more commonly than Spanish, outside culinary infl uences are minimal. 19 This is not, however, the case in the Spanish Main countries of Venezuela and Columbia. Their llanos, like the pampas to the south, are fenceless ranges fi lled with cattle and cowboys to tend them. 20 MESOAMERICA In Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), Native American infl uences have also prevailed after the Europeans arrived. The diet centers on corn, eaten as posole (hominy), as a green vegetable in season, and, especially as tortillas. But it also features squash and beans, along with maize, the trinity of the Mesoamerican diet for millennia, and amaranth. In some places that plant is utilized for its greens as well as its grains. Produce includes avocados, tomatoes, tomatillos, chilli peppers, and cacao for a drink and to make mole. Yet, unlike the highlands of South America, even traditional Mesoamerican diets contain at least a modicum of globalizing infl uences. 21 Wheat and rice, introduced by the Spaniards, have had a signifi cant impact on what is eaten, even replacing maize in some cases. Animal pro- tein supplied by pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, and chickens has had an equally profound dietary impact, their fat especially useful in fl avoring dishes such as refried beans and quesadillas , and milk has become central to a fl ourish- ing cheese-making industry. In the cities – especially in Mexico City – the diet has become truly international. Sushi bars, Thai and East Asian restaurants, French-Mexican cuisine (continuing the French tradition established under the Bourbons and reinforced during the reign of Maximillian), and traditional Mexican dishes (although most of these were not prepared before the conquest) such as chicken and turkey in mole , gorditas , infl adas , empanadas , quesa- dillas, enchiladas, and refried beans. These join hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza in competition for consumers pesos although even some of these foreign foods get “Mexicanized.” Chillies and salsas are placed atop ham- burgers and mole and green chilli topping come astride pizza poblanos. 22 Moreover, outlying regions from Puerto Vallarta to Vera Cruz and San Miguel de Allende to Acapulco serve “fusion” specialties to tourists and Mexicans alike. Examples include crepes with huitlacoche (a corn fungus), Caesar salad (said to have been invented in Tijuana), cream of peanut soup, beef fi let with black truffl e sauce and polenta. But even Mexican specialties Kitchen Hispanization 189 like hominy and pork soup or mole poblano require European garlic and onions, and guacamole is often served with sour cream. THE CARIBBEAN AND THE SPANISH MAIN Arguably, the Caribbean region, including lowland Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish Main, has made the greatest advances in food globalization outside of North America. It was here that Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans fi rst mingled their blood and cultures on a massive scale, with yet more mixing taking place after the arrival of immigrants from South Asia and China. The native staples were zamia, manioc, sweet potatoes, malanga (tania, yautía), mamey, and, in places, maize, coupled with beans, chilli peppers, pineapples, guavas, pawpaws, and an assortment of animals and reptiles such as armadillos, dogs, snakes, and fi sh. 23 In most cases these items remained in a Caribbean diet, enhanced after 1492 by the fl esh and milk of Old World animals, chickpeas, garden pro- duce, citrus fruits, plantains, bananas, melons, and, of course, sugar cane. In addition, wheat fl our and salted and pickled fi sh were imported, and the Europeans also introduced rice from Asia. 24 Africa sent yams, cowpeas, black-eyed peas, pigeon peas, okra, and Guinea corn (sorghum), ingredients that are turned into West Indian dishes such as “accara,” or akkra (black-eyed pea fritters), “jug jug” (a haggis-like dish that incorporates pigeon peas and sorghum), “callaloo” (a thick soup of greens and okra), “run down” (salted fi sh, coconut milk, and plantains), and “coo coo” (okra and cornmeal). 25 Later eighteenth-century additions to Caribbean cuisine include mangoes (from South Asia), ackee (from West Africa), breadfruit (from the East Indies and Pacifi c tropics), and coffee (from Arabia). West Indian slaves consumed manioc and eddoes in stews to which they added allotments of rice or cornmeal and a little whole protein in the form of pickled or salted cod, pickled pork and, in the Spanish islands, corned beef from Argentina. But the caloric expenditures of sugar slaves, along with the seasonality of many of the root vegetables, often meant outright malnutrition and a gamut of nutritional diseases. 26 The fall months were the worst. However, by December the provision crops had matured and the hurricane season ended so that merchant ships from Europe and the United States could safely resume the delivery of supplies to the islands. After months of semi-starvation, the sudden glut of food often produced 190 A Movable Feast a condition Robert Dirks has termed “relief-induced agonism” – a period of revelry for the slaves – characterized by feasting, drinking, and a bold aggressiveness that planters watched with nervous eyes. 27 Another hazard for slaves was lead poisoning. Cheap rum made in stills with lead fi ttings and pipes provoked the symptoms of the dreaded “dry belly-ache” – a tortuous attack of intestinal cramps accompanied by pain- ful constipation. 28 And a fi nal problem was dirt-eating, which signaled serious nutritional defi ciencies. 29 Not surprisingly, in view of such myriad nutritional diffi culties, Caribbean slave populations failed to reproduce themselves which, in turn, perpetuated the slave trade. Caribbean whites worked hard at maintaining the food traditions of their mother countries, not an easy matter in the tropics where wheat had to be imported, fresh meat and cream did not stay fresh for long, and beer and wine did not keep well either. Consequently, like the meat and fi sh destined for the slaves, foods consumed by the planters, although of bet- ter quality, were also salted and pickled, and rum mixed with fruit juices became the beverage of choice. 30 With the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, Asians – mostly Indian and Chinese contract laborers – were imported, and also made culinary contributions to the region. 31 They brought with them masalas (spice, herb, and seasoning combinations) for curries and techniques for making roti, a fl atbread that goes well with the curries. They also introduced ghee, a clarifi ed butter crucial to Hindu cooking, whereas the Chinese brought with them a knack for steaming fi sh, and stir-frying vegetables. 32 Yet, to qualify an earlier assertion about the extent of Caribbean food globalization, we must note that the myriad food introductions to the region along with culinary infl uences remain less than homogenized. In part, this is because of a plantation past that saw huge differences between the food preparation and the diets of whites on the one hand, and blacks and Asians on the other that persist to this day largely because of poverty. If a trans-Caribbean cuisine can be spied, it is with the bean and rice dishes found in both the islands and the mainland. Yet, the real food globalization in the Caribbean today is not found in local dishes but rather in imports: canned ham, Spam, spaghetti, canned and dried soups, and Nescafe, as well as in the plethora of McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Burger King restaurants, and pizza parlors. 33 191 CHAPTER 18 PRODUCING PLENTY IN PARADISE Earth here is so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest. Douglas Jerrold (1803–1857) THE FIRST EUROPEANS to settle in North America survived on Native American staples until Old World favorites began to thrive. 1 As Alfred Crosby has shown, practically all Old World plants, animals, and humans did well in regions with climates similar to those of Europe (he termed them “neo-Europes”) by shoving aside more fragile competitors, when there were any competitors at all. 2 However such “Ecological Imperialism” 3 managed only a faltering start in Florida, and sixteenth-century Spanish soldiers and missionaries had to fi ll their stomachs mostly with native maize, squash, and beans along with sweet potatoes transplanted from the West Indies. 4 Bitter oranges had been planted by early explorers and by the end of the sixteenth century sweet oranges were growing, although no commercial possibilities were fore- seen until the English took Florida in 1763 and, in 1776, began shipping St. Augustine’s oranges back to England. 5 Sugarcane was also placed under cultivation but, as a rule, where sugarcane will grow, wheat will not, and wheat fl our was always an import to Spanish Florida. Old World plant vigor, however, was exhibited by peach trees intro- duced directly from Europe that raced across the American continent well in advance of the Europeans. Native Americans became fond of the fruits, 192 A Movable Feast and, by the time of the American Revolution, peaches were so well estab- lished that many assumed them to be American natives. 6 Carrots constitute another example of Old World plant vigor. They quickly escaped gardens to revert to that wild state in which we recognize them today collectively as “Queen Anne’s Lace.” Carrots were one more new food for Native Americans suddenly inundated with them. Even as early as the sixteenth century they were cultivating watermelons, cucum- bers, and melons from Georgia to Eastern Canada, and from the Great Lakes region to the Southwest. 7 In 1539, Hernando de Soto planted orang- es in Florida, and in 1542 he introduced pigs to the peninsula. The fi rst cat- tle were landed around 1550 and spread out across the southeast. Virginia Indians fattened the cattle with corn and fed peanuts to the hogs, antici- pating the Smithfi eld hams which eighty years later were being shipped to London from that colony to be sold at the city’s Smithfi eld Market. 8 Yet, while the eastern North American natives had earlier managed to adopt a wide variety of tropical American plants and now embraced many of the European foods, other tribes to the north and west stayed with hunt- ing and gathering, although for many a traditional lifestyle was not all that nomadic. Around the Great Lakes, Native Americans did not stray very far from the stands of wild rice and fi sh-fi lled lakes, streams, and rivers. And along the coastline of the Northwest, a well-developed marine fi shery encouraged a sedentary lifestyle without horticulture. Deer and other animals, of course, were also harvested, and many wild plants were exploited, including a variety of berries necessary to make pemmican. 9 To their north in the Sub-Arctic and Arctic regions, native Alaskan populations continued a semi-nomadic hunt- ing and gathering way of life until the turn of the twentieth century. 10 COLONIAL TIMES IN NORTH AMERICA Eurasian diseases reached northeastern America in the seventeenth century to rage there with deadly intensity – long after the devastating epidemics that had swept the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Andean region sub- sided. Conveniently for the European settlers, such epidemics helped to soften up Indian opposition. 11 When the English dissenters, for example, who “knew they were pilgrims” to quote William Bradford, came ashore on the Massachusetts coast in December of 1620, they encountered no resistance, just an abandoned Wampanoag Indian village called Pawtuxet, which they occupied and named Plymouth. 12 It was apparently smallpox Producing Plenty in Paradise 193 that had emptied the village and, 14 years later in May 1634, the fi rst governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony could exuberantly note the end of any Indian threat when he wrote: “For the natives, they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.” 13 Cleared titles or not, until the nineteenth century, Europeans found many aspects of their new homeland decidedly confusing. Rhode Island, on the same parallel as Rome, was considerably colder and, consequently, the early colonists of New England and eastern Canada were caught unaware by blustery winters. 14 They were also in the dark about what would and would not grow. Like the Spanish in Florida, the English colonists who had expected to plant wheat had to import it, and this included those who settled along the Chesapeake at the turn of the seventeenth century and the Pilgrims who followed them but accidentally wound up in Massachusetts. Mostly, however, the settlers depended on native foods for survival, like maize, which provided cornbread, and “Msicksquatash” (succotash or boiled corn and bean stew) for themselves and dried corn for their animals. 15 They were British people with British tastes, no matter how disenchant- ed they were with British government and society (after all, the northern settlements were called “New England”). Yet there were no pigs, cattle, or chickens, no cheese, milk, butter, or wheat and so they initially subsisted on wild animals and corn, not because they liked it, but because they had no alternative. At least this was the case until other grains arrived. Rye did well enough in New England but, it has been hypothesized, so did ergot, a fungus espe- cially partial to rye which makes the disease it causes – ergotism – a suspect for the strange behavior of the Salem “witches.” Buckwheat was brought to North America in the seventeenth century by the Dutch – its name deriv- ing from the Dutch word bochweit – which means “beech wheat” – because its triangular seeds resemble beechnuts. 16 But save for rye and buckwheat in New England, other grains were slow to adapt to new climates so people kept on eating corn, especially in Virginia and parts south until, fi nally, they did like it. Yet, unlike New England, where the Puritans became farmers out of necessity, it took the Virginians a longer time to achieve dietary self-suffi ciency. This was because tobacco sales gave them the wherewithal to continue importing British foodstuffs. Nonetheless, they utilized corn long enough to establish it as a southern staple while making good use of other American offerings, like the abun- dant sturgeon found at the mouth of the James River. 17 . 184 CHAPTER 17 KITCHEN HISPANIZATION And I can assure your Majesty that if plants and seeds from. blancmange and escabeche of chicken, partridge, and quail” were some of Kitchen Hispanization 185 these foods that Cortéz and the new Viceroy of New Spain