Why 1492 is a non-event in culinary history
Ok, what do I mean by culinary history? Culinary (from the Latin culina, kitchen) history traces the history of the (guess) the kitchen or more generally, the techniques used to turn plants and animals into food.
Thesis. 1492 (or the Columbian Exchange) is a complete non-event in culinary history.
Why? Well, the kitchens and techniques that went from Old World to New were imposed on top of older Mesoamerican techniques. The result was a two-tier cuisine. The Spanish kitchen for those of Spanish ancestry, the Mexican kitchen for everyone else.
Or water mills, copper pots, bench stoves, bread ovens for the first lot, grindstones, pottery, three stones round the hearth to balance a griddle, for the latter. Result–a thin layer of Catholic European Cuisine spread over the local cuisines.
More important what about the kitchens and techniques that went from the New World to the Old. Zilch, nada.
Really odd in many ways because Eurasian empires had always seen cuisines as spoils of war, grabbing cooks, serving utensils, kitchen equipment. Alexander raided the Persian Empire’s culinary resources, the Mongols centuries later raided those of Persia, India and China.
But what happens when the Spanish and Portuguese get to the Americas. There’s a bit of inventorying of the resources, reports sent back to Spain on food and medicinal plants for example. Cacao and the way of grinding it come to Europe.
And here, in a can-you-believe-it print is a gentleman in an apron grinding chocolate. No, you can’t believe it. Men didn’t grind, let alone gentlemen. And cacao was transformed in Europe.
Consider three culinary techniques that the Old World could have picked up.
1. Treating maize with an alkali. The culinary advantage. You can make a flexible flatbread with this. Preferred by most people to the porridges and gruels that were the common way of eating maize in the Old World, maize not treated with alkali not lending itself to flat or raised bread preparations.
2. Making a vegetable puree sauce. Eventually the Old World figured out how to do this with tomatoes. But not with chiles, not as thickeners, and not with tomatillos which give a lovely acid taste and great thickening power. Very little use of rehydrated dried chile in this capacity. Where are the tomatillos in Europe? Where are the chiles used as the thickeners and flavorers of sauces (instead of simply as a piquant taste).
3. Turning cacti/agave into really useful foods. The paddle cactus is perfect as a green vegetable and grows in arid regions. The agave yields a drinkable liquid in arid regions and can be turned into a syrup or an alcohol without much trouble. Yet although these now grow all over the arid regions of Eurasia they are used at most as animal food.
But not a one. So far as I know, no cooks were brought over from the New World, no systematic exploitation of processing methods from that part of the world.
I think I know why, but that is for another post.
A couple of years ago, traveling in Sicily, the guide pointed out the fruit of prickly pear cactus as a tasty treat. When I offered that, in Mexico we eat the pads also after trimming the spines, the statement was met with amazement and skeptical incredulity.
Are you getting to potatoes?
Yes, and nopales are so delicious too. Not sure whether or not I’ll be talking about potatoes. Depends on how the discussion goes.
You know what was adopted really quickly and did make a huge difference to both areas in terms of economics & trade? Tobacco. Chilies & chocolate are good, but just couldn’t compare to a nicotine hit.
Not sure about the context of the image, but in the 17th century there is at least one detailed account from a gentleman scientist on cacao and how they have personally experimented with grinding it with a metate etc. This looks like an image from one of these texts.
Paprika is used as a thickening agent in Easten European cookery, although not to the extent of many other agents. Which might be the point, European cookery of the period has many other ways of thickening a sauce.
I’m looking forward to the discussion of potatoes. Your perspective, so far, is provacative. So can we extend the class analysis of food to Europe via potatoes? I wonder….
” But not with chiles, not as thickeners, and not with tomatillos which give a lovely acid taste and great thickening power. Very little use of rehydrated dried chile in this capacity. Where are the tomatillos in Europe? Where are the chiles used as the thickeners and flavorers of sauces (instead of simply as a piquant taste).”
Not Europe, but chiles and tomatoes are used as thickeners in Algerian cuisine. They also use rehydrated chiles in harissa. But it doesn’t seem like a transfer of cooking techniques, rather chiles and tomatoes replaced more expensive ingredients such as saffron, nuts, dried fruits, etc.. that were used to add color, thicken sauces, add sweetness, etc.. In a sense I would describe the use of chiles and tomatoes in this context as a replacement of spices.
I read this article several months ago and have been thinking about it since. Your point about ingredients traveling freely but techniques not so much seems true. In my own cooking, I will experiment with new foods, but learning new ways of cooking them is much harder.
But I did make a paprikash using tons of paprika to thicken it, and wow it was really good.
Thanks for the support. I hope to return to this theme soon. And the paprikash sounds great.
I think that as the ingredients traveled such as cacao, Maize, potato, etc many new foods were adapted, Polenta might be an example. At the time the transfer of medicinal plants and technologies was considered far more valuable. The Spanish learned the techniques, plants etc, and transferred the knowledge rather than the people. Generally priests preferred to be the repositories of knowledge.
Hello Jennifer. Thanks for the comments. I am, though, going to hold out for the lack of transfer of many techniques. Polenta, for example, is ground dry, not nixtamalized and ground wet as in Mexico. What was the culinary knowledge you think was transferred back to Europe?
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