If you were a muleteer…pinole and other roasted powders
Muleteers were not people I’d thought about much until a few years ago. Yet 14,000 mules worked the silver mines in the eighteenth century in Guanajuato where I now live. That at least was the estimate of Henry George Ward in his book Mexico in 1827.
14,000 mules is a lot of mules. Some were in the mines. Some were blindfolded to drag the heavy wheels that crushed the ore. Some carried the semi-refined ore the hundreds of miles to the coasts. And some carried in the food for the town which doesn’t grow any being in a crack in the mountains. And the food for the town included food for the mules.
OK, I’m backing into this post. Even if only half the mules were in the transport business, even if each muleteer tended to several mules, there were hundreds of muleteers in just this one town.
And they spent most of their life on the road. Transport workers weren’t just a Mexican specialty. There were camel caravans across the Sahara and along the Silk Roads. There were mules over all of Latin America. There were the ox drovers in Europe.
In short there were lots of precursors to the long distance truck driver. And what did they eat? Well in Mexico they ate pinole, the mystery substance of the photo the other day. Here it is again.
It’s maize that has been toasted and then ground on the grindstone (metate). The toasting makes it easier to grind and makes it smell and taste quite delicious. It also turns it into an instant food.
The muleteers could carry along a bag of the stuff and just nibble on it when they wanted. It’s a bit powdery and hard to swallow but it tastes delicious.
They also took toasted and ground beans or so I understand, though I’ve not experimented with those. Or if they were settled for the night they could mix the pinole with water to make a gruel, again no cooking required. It’s has a fine granular texture, not at all unpleasing.
Cheap, tasty, lightweight. What more could you want? Yet in the US apart from outdoorsy types who once asked me to send some so they could experiment with it (and never paid up, grr), you just don’t see these toasted, powdered grains.
In Guanajuato you can still buy pinole outside the markets, sold by poor elderly rural women from plastic buckets. Usually they doctor it up with a bit of ground orange peel and a bit of sugar. Great drink on a cold morning, but how much longer it will survive, goodness knows.
Once you start looking you find little hints of these toasted powdered grains all over the world. I’ll talk about some more of them in the coming days.
So to go back to bread and beer, I can’t help thinking that here’s a whole extra category of foodstuffs that grains would have been good for. Lots of people would have needed lightweight instant foods. This is the jerky of the plant kingdom. More soon.
But what about chia seed? Most of what I’ve read about pinole states that parched chia seed was an important ingredient in pinole. Maybe not now, but in the past. I’ll see if I can send you any references.
http://www.chiativity.org/2009/03/an-historic-article-on-the-use-of-chia-seeds-by-indians-and-mexicans-in-1891.html
I hope you can open this.
At first glance I thought it was Korean roasted soybean powder. http://www.maangchi.com/ingredients/roasted-soy-bean-powder
I love the stuff, so does my daughter. It’s used for making drinks (more extravagant versions add a dozen or so other toasted grains, seeds and nuts. And rice cakes are also sprinkled with toasted soybean powder.
“Once you start looking you find little hints of these toasted powdered grains all over the world. I’ll talk about some more of them in the coming days.”
YES!
WHEAT kernels – one of the most well known greek foods, using whole wheat kernels, consumed from antiquity through to the present day, is the dish served at memorial services, known throughout the christian orthodox world as ‘koliva’: http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2009/12/memorial.html
it definitely doesnt last long in the state that it is served (boiled wheat ferments and grows bacteria), but it needed less processing than the grain you present above – is it a before- or after-bread use of wheat?
I still think that boiling the grains is even easier – saves all that pounding or grinding.