Why didn’t Mexico abandon the metate?
Third or fourth pass grinding barley on a metate
Lots more questions than I can take up. But one that several commentators have raised is “Why did the simple grindstone survive until now in Mexico when in many parts of Eurasia it was abandoned about two or three centuries BC?”
First, the Mexicans did take up the rotary grindstone at the time of the Conquest. Water mills were constructed at great expense wherever there was water sufficient to run them. So it was in no way ignorance of rotary grinding. Rotary grinding was for wheat though.
Which raises a point that I think has to be borne in mind all the time we are talking about early grain techniques. To most of us, grains are things in bins in the whole food store, pretty much of a muchness. In the past, what now appear to be small differences among grains made huge differences in how you processed them and what you turned them into.
And, thus second, the differences between wheat and maize were big differences. You can of course grind maize with a rotary grindstone. That’s how it was done by the American colonists, by Europeans and by most of the others who accepted maize. That gives you corn meal. And unless you add other ingredients that is most easily eaten as a gruel or porridge.
But Mexicans had at least five hundred years of eating tortillas (and many more of eating other maize products). And the maize for tortillas is treated with alkali, brought to boiling, cooled and drained before grinding. That is it is wet ground (a technique also used in South India).
I believe that it is impossible to wet grind on horizontal rotary stone mills. I have been trying for years to get a rotary mill to test this hypothesis but no luck thus far. Any ideas gratefully received. But it is my belief that instead of flowing out through the grooves cut in the lower stone, it would simply gum up.
Since tortillas are so central to Mexican ways of eating, they kept using the metate.
Third, the “simple” grindstone or metate has lots of advantages over rotary grindstones more or less whatever you are grinding. It is cheaper. It does not require a highly skilled professional (a professional nonetheless) to make it and keep it in good condition. It’s best made with basalt of which there’s lots in Mexico. It produces a better product I am almost certain. And it can be used for lots of things.
It’s really only in efficiency that the rotary mill wins. A big consideration of course but mainly if you highly value the labor of the grinders. Otherwise it produced a product thought of as cheap and nasty.
_____
As an aside, many, many thanks to the many Mexican women who have shown me what they can do with a metate and patiently watched my fumbling efforts to imitate them.
Small rotary querns which started appearing in Iron Age England, don’t have grooves, but yes I think that you are correct a wet masa would not work all that well. But quite small communities, family groups had these querns in the Iron Age, so I don’t thing that you need a professional group of people to maintain them. The advantage of them over the saddle quern is that they can be scaled up and be powered by animals, wind or water energy. Which frees up your workforce.
I’ve never eaten tortilla made from masa, only masa de harina. I imagine that the former products are delicious, but also think that is irrelevant. Lots of things that were delicious are transformed or stop all together. I’ve spent the last couple of months making pre-chemical raising agent cakes and while these are delicious I know why they dissapeared in a generation once chemical raising agents were introduced, too much work and expense.
Masa de harina isn’t the same as ground cornmeal, I’m sure that tortilla can’t be made from cornmeal easily. To use non-nixtamalized dry ground cornmeal to produce a tortilla I think that you would have to make a pancake type product, which doesn’t seem to have occured in Mexico, along with fermented batters. Not to mention the health advantage of Masa over cornmeal. Also, until the old world Maize doesn’t seem to have had much competition. Much of the change in milling technology in the old world seems to be a reponse to the uptake of bread wheat (in earlier periods club wheat).
So lots of contributing factors, but I pretty sure that personal taste isn’t a huge factor.
In small “pueblos” where a tv is something you go to the local, and sometimes only store in town to watch, where water is still from a well or local spring, where community is definitely the sum of all its parts, the use of traditional utensils and local customs is alive and well.
What we sometimes view as a lack of progress has thankfully kept for us a living history like no other in the world. Let us hope that “progress” does not end with these beautiful customs.
Such grinding stones are still in regular use in India. I have seen video on YouTube and television. Now to find one of my own!
Good luck. It’s lots of work but, my goodness, you have a new appreciation for the work that people had to do in the past.
How do the industrial corn grinders work today? I mean the big machines they use in tortillerias etc.
Many use dehydrated corn meal. Those that grind wet use vertical wheels that the masa moves down through and then out, not horizontal wheels as in traditional gristmills. Hope this helps.