Leap frogging the Pacific: Chocolate and the Acapulco Galleon
The Pacific is a terrifying ocean. It’s not so much the storms. The Indian Ocean and the north Atlantic, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn trump it there. It’s the sheer size. Flying to Hawaii, when we lived there, and looking out the plane window every hour or so for the six hour flight from the West Coast scared the heck out of me. There was nothing down below. Ever. Just the swells looking like they were etched into the ocean.
So I’m fascinated by early Pacific voyages, the early Hawaiians or the galleons that every year from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century sailed between between Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico and Manila in the Philippines.
Just a few ships, tiny by modern standards, stinking of bilge, with crews that barely had enough food and drink to make the journey (or sometimes didn’t) , laden to capacity and beyond with silks and porcelain, silver and spices, that linked Asia and America. So fragile, so stark the juxtapostion of luxury and squalor.
So what made it across these thousands of miles and what didn’t?
Well cacao was one thing. Perhaps it was taken as seeds. We don’t know. But the Mexican way of grinding it, mixing with sugar and shaping it into tablets to be dissolved in hot water went. Please Burnt Lumpia, tell us that they grind it on the metate.
In Mexico though from the colonial period to the present it was just as often mixed with wet ground maize (or now cornflour) to make a rich food-drink called champurrado, wonderful on a cold winter morning or evening.
What I love is this description of how in the Philippines chocolate tablets are mixed with glutinous rice and evaporated milk to make ‘champorado.’ Burnt Lumpia’s photos make it look like a pudding rather than a drink, I suspect there was a bit of cross-fertilization with American cornflour and milk chocolate pudding at the time when the evaporated milk snuck into the recipe.
Be that as it may, sticky rice, chocolate, and evaporated milk sounds pretty good to me, that unctuous chewiness. A sweet end to that terrifying journey.
Thanks to Susan Ji-Young Park for the link.
It is quite extraordinary how far and wide the Portuguese went at this early period and how much New World food items that they spread about Globe. At the end of the 16th century Van Linschoten (who also descibes the Indian curry in English for the first time) says that the Pineapple is “one of the best fruites, and of the best taste in all India”. By the middle of the 17th century the very first European book on the native flora of China describes the pineapple under cultivation.
I hope one day that the question to how that Sweet Potato of the New World was transported throughout the Pacific in the Pre-Columbian period.
Do you know Doug Yen’s book on the sweet potato. We know so little about the dispersal of food plants. But what always strikes me is that even when food plants were dispersed, unless native users went with them, the techniques for exploiting the plants were left behind (maize, nopales).
Food movements across oceans and continents really are extraordinary.
Your blog reminds me of a little book that I have downloaded to my Kindle (the only one in Burundi!!) about chocolate, written in 1652, which you may already know about. A great read:
Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke
By the wise and Moderate use whereof, Health is preserved, Sicknesse Diverted, and Cured, especially the Plague of the Guts; vulgarly called The New Disease; Fluxes, Consumptions, & Coughs of the Lungs, with sundry other desperate Diseases. By it also, Conception is Caused, the Birth Hastened and facilitated, Beauty Gain’d and continued.
Written Originally in Spanish, by Antonio Colmenero
of Ledesma, Doctor in Physicke, and faithfully rendred in the English,
By Capt. James Wadsworth.
LONDON,
Printed by J. G. for Iohn Dakins, dwelling
neare the Vine Taverne in Holborne,
where this Tract, together with the
Chocolate it selfe, may be had at
reasonable rates. 1652
Url =
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21271/21271-h/21271-h.htm
I didn’t know that one though I have a couple of others on my shelves. Off to download it now to my computer. Is the kindle worth it to you?
Is maize in Mexico ever eaten as a mush? Seems to be the major way it is consumed outwith Mexico.
In general absolutely not. The only equivalent would be atole, wet ground but usually notnixtamalized maize, which makes a thick drink/soup. Very popular in these cold mornings and evenings. But the complex techniques for maize have never left the Americas.
Such a small thing really with bit effects. Imagine the food history of Europe and Africa if the technology had been brought across. No pellagra and likely a large increase in population.
Huge thing. Must post on why the Columbian Exchange Wasn’t.
Rachel, don’t know of Dong Yen’s book but will search for it.
On dispersal of food plants, I do agree – and also that unless locally suitable, folks just don’t ‘buy in’ – a fundamental aspect of agricultural R&D that many simply haven’t yet cottoned onto. Points that I want to do some blogging about in the future…
As for the Kindle – it is great for Africa! So many books can be downloaded and put on it, and read separate from a computer or hard copy.
Look forward to haring what you have to say about the Columbian Exchange.