This is a book written to celebrate the contribution made by the original inhabitants of the New World, the American Indians, Native Americans, or whatever you wish to call them, to the food of the contemporary world. Their gifts, like this book, can be divided into two parts. The first part of the book deals with the contributions of the New World, the ingredients which the original inhabitants gathered, domesticated, and ate for many millennia before Europeans ever laid eyes on them. This section touches the disciplines of botany and zoology, as it explores the wild flora and fauna from which New World plants and animals were selected for the ultimate benefit of all humanity. There are brief “biographies” of some of the more important New World crop plants, sketching, insofar as is known, the history of their adoption by small groups of ancient gatherers, then tracing their expansion over climatically suitable areas of this continent and their eventual conquest of the entire globe.
The second portion of the American contribution constitutes the second half of the book. This is concerned with the uses to which these ingredients were put, both the major ones that got the biographies in the first part and the vast gamut of minor actors that had only more local distinction. In other words, I move from the ingredients to the menus in which they were employed. Where data are available, I try to expand the scope of investigation to cover the whole constellation of beliefs, manners, and customs with which all human beings surround their nourishment.
To do this I must use the contemporary accounts of the first meetings of the Europeans with the three high cultures of aboriginal America, the Aztec, the Maya, and the Inca, and try to winnow from them something about the food these people ate. The reason for the choice of these three is simple: that is where the information is. For these people there are available descriptions of food preparation techniques, methods of preservation, and even the ever-elusive recipes, as well as the manner of serving the food and the etiquette of eating it. Unfortunately, and probably due in large part to the absence of female writers, this evidence can also be sparse and scattered, although there were luckily some male writers who were sufficiently concerned with food matters to record them for us.
As a conclusion I give a similar description of the food of the Spaniards in the New World, during the first few decades following the conquests. That earliest infancy of the hybrid cuisine of the modern world, with its attendant loss and tragedy as well as victory and profit, will stand for the mixture of good and evil that the discovery of the New World brought to the world.