THREE

New World Produce

The New World offers a veritable cornucopia of fruits and vegetables to the hungry. From this abundance of “produce” (a handy term which avoids the question of what is a fruit and what is a vegetable, a distinction founded on culinary culture and not on botany), the modern world has selected a few and left the rest to languish in their native hills and valleys.

What led certain plant foods to be accepted by the Europeans and the modern world, while others were rejected? Four factors seem to have led to certain plants finding favor, given that they were basically amenable and willing to grow and produce with reasonable ease and speed and could adapt to more than a single specialized environment.

The first class of acceptable plants were those which fit nicely into already established European categories. Maize should be included here, although attaining due respect as the culinary equal of wheat took centuries. Father Serra, the eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary whose encounter with the manioc bread platters of Cartagena we have already quoted, illustrates the difficulties individuals newly arrived in the New World had with nonwheat bread almost three hundred years after Columbus.

At midday they brought us a meal of stewed and roast fowl. They brought arepas [thick maize tortillas], roast plantains, sweet manioc, sweet potatoes, etc. But we did not know how to eat without bread. Then I realized that bread was sustenance to someone who was brought up like me, and I remembered that when I was in Cádiz about to leave, a brother said to me, “Brother John, you are going to the Indies: God keep you from losing sight of bread.” (Serra 1970, 1: 107–108)

Other foods which meshed with preexisting European food categories were the New World beans. They looked, cooked, and tasted like the pulses which were on every Spanish ship’s manifest. The Old World habas, garbanzos, and lentejas translate into English as broad beans, chick-peas, and lentils and into botanical Latin as Vicia faba, Cicer arietinum, and Lens esculenta. The New World Phaseolus beans not only could be used like the Old World ones but also were related to them, all being members of the family Leguminosae, subfamily Papilionoideae.

Two other plants won acceptance because they could replace almonds in marzipan, which was then an elegant and expensive dish and loaded with prestige. Both the peanut (Arachis hypogaea) and the hulled seeds of the genus Cucurbita squashes could be toasted, ground, mixed with sugar or honey and some eggwhite, and then dried in the oven. This dough could be molded into different shapes and then gilded, silvered, or tinted according to the whim of the creator. In the next to last chapter we shall see it appearing on the tables of the great in early colonial Mexico City. The parts of the squash that we eat now, the flowers, the shoots, and the immature or ripe fruit, were scorned as belonging to the category of greens, that is to say poor people’s food.

Even if food plants did not fit into a convenient European niche, some of them possessed unique qualities which led to their enthusiastic embrace by the Europeans. The pineapple (Ananas comosus) was taken back to the Old World very soon after the discovery. The fruit was sufficiently resistant to shipping so that some survived the trip unrotted and astounded the savants with their fragrance. Although avocados were not such good travelers and only spread through the culinary world in the twentieth century, their unctuous oily flesh, a trait shared only with the olive and the coconut in the edible plant world, intrigued the natural history writers enough to be given long chapters in their books on the vegetable wonders of the New World. As a peculiar form of endorsement the avocado was stripped of its perfectly good etymology in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, where the word derives from ahuacatl, or testicle. The OED ignores this completely and claims that the word comes from “advocate,” or lawyer. How lawyers could have become involved with the fruit of Persea americana is nowhere explained (one can only suggest that it is from the tendency of the legal profession to insinuate itself everywhere).

The third category of welcomed foods has already been encountered. These are the plant foods that may not have had instant appeal for reasons of taste but were cheap, efficient, and hugely productive sources of calories. Manioc and potatoes belong to this category. After the discovery of the silver mines of Potosí in Peru in 1545, fortunes were made by Europeans who provided chuño, a pre-Columbian invention of storable freeze-dried potatoes, to feed the Indian miners imprisoned in the dark galleries. The use of manioc to make military stores has already been mentioned.

Finally there is the fourth class of New World foods, which could be referred to as sleepers. The tomato barely received a word in the early writings. If mentioned at all, it was as an ingredient that gave a pleasing sourness to stews. There were fears that it might be poisonous, because of poisonous relatives in the family and the rank odor of the plants. It was also difficult to get it to fruit in places with a short growing season. But with time the tomato surmounted all these impediments and conquered the culinary universe. Today the food of the world is overwhelmed by this red tide.

There are hundreds of New World plants which are basically unknown. It is instructive to look at the attempts now being made to introduce them. Do they follow any of the four tracks outlined earlier in this chapter? Not a bit of it.

We cannot see proteins, vitamins, or minerals. We cannot smell them or taste them, but they are what we are expected to be looking for in new foods. Every little-known grain is guaranteed superior to wheat, rice, and maize, as far as protein content goes, or any vitamin or mineral that you might choose to mention. This is always the first thing that we are told. Yet even if the new foods have the added inducements of high fiber and low cholesterol, we persist in eating the same old ones. Could it be that the advocates of the new edibles are mistaken, and we do not eat wholly in the pursuit of complex nutritional goals but at least partially in search of a little pleasure?

What scanty enjoyment there is to be gotten from these would-be new foods seems to lie in the realm of texture. “Crisp” and “crunchy” are assumed to be the magic words, words that will induce us to take an arracacha between our teeth, or taste a llacón. As far as flavor goes, we are meekly reassured that these things taste “mild” or, at their most thrilling, “nutty.”

The final and most odious inducement to try the novelties is the old “everybody is doing it” routine. See, this fruit is very popular in Japan. Look, this one is profitably cultivated and sold in New Zealand. The only effect this approach can have is to make one dislike the eaters as much as one already dislikes the thought of the substance to be eaten.

Instead of following the carefully researched and considered advice of the modern marketing experts, perhaps the would-be plant introducers should read some of the plant descriptions, many of them essay length, written by the early missionaries and explorers. These record the experiences of hungry men, encountering fruits and vegetables in their native climates, many prepared in the native manner. Some of them welcomed their experiences with the all-devouring curiosity which we now think of as an attribute of Renaissance men, which to a greater or lesser extent most of them were. Fernández de Oviedo, Las Casas, Acosta, Cobo, and Serra all wrote about the new foods they encountered with the exhilaration of discovery, not as some grim nutritional duty to be performed. They probably did not know the Japanese proverb that claims that every new foodstuff sampled adds seventy-five days to one’s lifespan, but that is the spirit in which they wrote, and they make their reader want to rush out and try new foodstuffs too.

BEANS

There were beans in the Old World besides the habas, garbanzos, and lentejas mentioned earlier. Most of them were used in the Orient, including the adzuki bean (Vigna angularis), the mung bean (Vigna radiata), which produces some but not all bean sprouts, and Vigna unguiculata sesquipedalis, the yard-long bean. The soybean, recorded in China since the eleventh century B.C., is unquestionably a different genus, Glycine.

The New World domesticated its own beans, belonging to the American genus Phaseolus. These beans made an early and important contribution to the food of humans in the New World. Their protein profile dovetails nicely with that of maize, so that a diet of properly processed maize and beans provides all the protein requirements of the working males, although it is insufficient for the most protein-sensitive members of the population: lactating mothers and newly weaned infants.

There were four species of Phaseolus domesticated in the New World. The northernmost in origin was the tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius), a fine drought-tolerant crop for the arid southwest of the United States and adjacent Mexico. There were many cultivars that differed in color and taste, but the advent of cash-crop farming in the beginning of this century meant their near extinction. The beans they produced could be soaked and then baked or boiled or made into powdered form. It would seem that there could be nothing more difficult than grinding hard ripe beans to a powder, even with the best of stone grinding tools, but the simple expedient of parching or toasting the beans first made it quite easy to reduce them to a fine flour. The flour could then be used to provide quick bean dishes. The tepary bean has been known since 3000 B.C., and there are attempts being made to revive its cultivation on otherwise unproductive dry land.

The scarlet runner bean produces gorgeous red flowers and is sometimes grown as a decorative. Phaseolus coccineus is unusual in that it is a short-lived perennial, not an annual like the other domesticated beans. If it gets less than thirteen hours of daylight a day, it puts off flowering and fruiting and instead produces a tuberized and edible root. The wild beans were gathered in Oaxaca and Tehuacan at 8750–6750 B.C. and 7050 B.C., respectively, but not cultivated, at any rate in Tehuacan, until shortly before the time of Christ. Clavigero says that they were the biggest beans in Mexico and were called ayacotli, and we are sure that they were this species because he mentions the fine red flowers (Clavigero 1780). But he said these were not the best beans, which were small and black and heavy and so fine that they were eaten as a delicacy by the Spanish nobility. These must have been one of the myriad varieties of Phaseolus vulgaris.

The origins of Phaseolus vulgaris are obscure. It is always difficult to differentiate between wild plants and cultivated plants that have gone back to the wild, but at least some authors have claimed that there is wild Phaseolus vulgaris growing for thousands of miles along the eastern slope of the Andes, as well as in Mexico and Central America (Berglund-Brücher and Brücher 1976). As older notions of single centers of domestication give way to newer views that have domestication as a more decentralized process, going on simultaneously over wide areas, we can imagine various strains of Phaseolus vulgaris being tamed by humans from Mexico to South America. Early dates range from 5000 B.C. in Tehuacan in Mexico, 5680 ± 280 B.C. in the highlands of Peru, and 2550 B.C. on the Peruvian coast.

If the domestication process took place over such a wide area it should not be surprising that different parts and stages of the bean plant were targeted by the domesticators. One possibility was to consume the whole young seed container, in other words, string beans. This was probably originally difficult and unpleasant because the young pod of the wild bean is protected by tough strings and parchment-like membranes. When the bean pod is dry these strings and membranes twist and expel the seeds, which is advantageous for the plant but not for the forager who wants to eat the young bean pods or the beans. The consumption of green beans as such is probably a late development, and indeed the last tiresome strings were removed by the breeders within this author’s lifetime.

Most beans were and are used mature and dry. Scorned in the sixteenth century and the twentieth, and the centuries in between, as food for the lower classes, as well as for what has bluntly been called the fart factor, one variety nevertheless seemingly began its Old World career under the highest auspices.

Lamon beans are plump middle-sized beans with a background color of light tan, covered with an irregular pattern of reddish-brown speckles. They are sold by weight from sacks in food stores in Italy, the same way that lentils, maize meal for making polenta, and other varieties of beans are sold. Perhaps they only seem tastier because of their supposed history.

Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, sent his emperor Charles V samples of gold, featherwork, jewelry, and textiles from the country he had added to the dominions of Spain. Little or nothing of this survives, although the inventories are enough to make students of New World material culture weep with frustration. Cortés also sent samples of the produce of the country, supposedly including a sack of beans. In his turn, Charles sent some of this tribute to the then pope, Clement VII, who became pope in 1523 and died in 1534. We do not know exactly when this gift was made, but the relationship between the two was hardly consistently cordial. In fact, halfway between the time that troops loyal to Charles destroyed the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, in 1521, and the time they destroyed the capital of the Inca empire, Cuzco, in 1534, they had looted and devastated another capital, which as it happens was Rome, the seat of their own religion. Contemporary humanists considered the sack of Rome in 1527 to be one of the cultural disasters of all time, to be mourned much as present-day scholars mourn the destructions of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco. But the complex demands of European politics being what they were, shortly thereafter Charles may have sent Clement curiosities from the New World and included the sack of beans.

The pope gave the sack of beans to a distinguished scholar who had been a teacher in the Medici household in Florence, one Giovanni Pietro delle Fosse di Bolzano, better known under his literary name of Pierio Valeriano. In 1532 Pierio Valeriano took his beans to his dwelling in Belluno, in northeastern Italy. There he planted them in pots and put some of the pots in his windows and the others up on the roof. The beans did so well that he had a large crop, which he distributed widely, first in the immediate area and then in the whole mainland territory of Venice, including the town of Lamon, which attached its name to the beans and where it is claimed that today the restaurants daily serve the beans. Pierio Valeriano wrote a poem in 1534 celebrating his horticultural triumph in Latin hexameters and mournfully asking himself if this was going to be his only claim to fame. Clement VII, on the other hand, commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.

This story of the introduction of what were to become Lamon beans into Italy was repeated by me once too many times. I told it to a bean expert, and perhaps I should have been alerted by the fact that neither he nor his wife had ever heard of Lamon and its beans. He asked me to describe the beans, which I did, in pretty much the same terms as you see on the preceding page. Lawrence Kaplan shook his head. Most large beans like the ones that I was telling him about came from the Andean area, he said; it was the little ones that came from Mexico. And with this simple statement the entire construction of conquerors, emperors, popes, and scholars came tumbling down. If the original Lamon beans had had the history that has been told, then at some point they were totally replaced by the variety that we see today. Or perhaps there lies waiting to be discovered in some archive an equally picturesque story of the arrival and adoption of the present-day Lamon bean from the Andean area. It is probably too much to ask that the introduction of any food plant be known with such precision.

While some variety of Phaseolus vulgaris was being hymned in Latin hexameters in Italy, the fourth and last species of domesticated American Phaseolus had just been discovered. If Phaseolus vulgaris was domesticated in a strip of mountainside from northwestern Mexico to northwestern Argentina, Phaseolus lunatus, the Lima bean, did it differently, having two or possibly three widely separated centers of domestication. Sporting the rare correctly informative common name, the Lima bean is a plant which likes hot climates and will not germinate if the soil temperature is too low. The large kind, Phaseolus lunatus var. microcarpus, grew only in Peru, where it got its name. It is found in Preceramic sites on the coast of Peru dating from 3000 B.C. and in the highlands from 6000 B.C. These were the beans which Cobo, a Jesuit missionary in Peru between 1609 and 1629, said were the best of all beans, whether eaten in their green pods with oil and vinegar, or mature and stewed, again with oil and vinegar (Cobo 1890–1893). Juan de Velasco, who was among the Jesuits exiled from Spanish possessions in 1767, agreed as to their exquisite taste, saying that with one boiling they dissolved like butter (Velasco 1977).

The smaller sort of Lima beans, sometimes called sieva beans, were independently domesticated in Mexico shortly before the time of Christ and do not seem to have had any particular distinction to make them noticed beyond any other beans by the chroniclers. If there is a third variety it is to be found in a band running from Yucatan, through Venezuela, and into Brazil. All the Lima beans could have pods and leaves used as greens, but some dark-seeded varieties were bitter and required boiling in several waters before they were edible.

PEANUTS

Like the beans, peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) are members of the family Leguminosae, but they have some peculiarities of their own. They produce a white flower at the end of a stalk, and after the flower is fertilized the stalk bends down and pushes into the soil, so that the fruit is produced underground. It is a small plant, rarely more than knee high, so that this maneuver is easy to miss. The Europeans wondered for years how the flower could be in one place and the fruit in another before they discovered the secret.

The peanut suffers from misapprehensions as to its place of origin. It did not originate in West Africa. It was first imported into the United States from West Africa, on the ships that brought the slaves. But the peanut had been brought to West Africa from Brazil by the Portuguese, along with maize and sweet potatoes. While the Portuguese were moving peanuts east, the Spaniards were taking them west across the Pacific from Peru and introducing them to the Far East.

The first Chinese reference to peanuts dates from the 1530s, but there was a flurry among plant historians and archaeologists a few years ago when a few peanut shells were found in excavations at an Early Lungshanoid site dating from 3200 to 2500 B.C. It was the site that was that old, but the peanut shells were contemporary with the excavators, not the site they were excavating.

The true proof of the place of origin of the peanut is the fact that there are no wild peanut species found anywhere outside of South America, and within South America there are fifteen species of wild peanut, mostly in or around lowland Bolivia. From here the domesticated plant ranged east and north into Brazil and the Caribbean, arriving in Tehuacan, Mexico, at about A.D. 500. It was never important in Mexico and had no native name, being called tlalcacahuatl, a compound word meaning earth-cacao, or cacao which grew underground.

Peanuts spread west to Peru from their country of origin. Those that appear in Peruvian highland sites are imported, as the plant does not grow well above 6,000 feet altitude, but by 3100 to 2500 B.C. they were common on the coast of Peru, giving rise to comments by archaeologists about the sites looking like poorly swept baseball stadiums. We do not know how they were eaten in Peru, but the fact that shells were found sounds as if they were being eaten in exactly the way they are eaten today, toasted in the shell.

Contemporary Bolivians have other ways of consuming this native of their country. Toasted, shelled, and ground and mixed with water they become a drink called chicha de maní, which we are told is not alcoholic, although chicha usually refers to fermented drinks. Maní, like maize, is an Antillean word taken up by the Europeans on their arrival and spread by them back to the country where peanuts originated. Green maní fruit can be eaten whole, in which case the inhabitants of the southern United States call them goober peas.

This novel plant got mixed reviews. Fernández de Oviedo (1959, 1: 235) found it mediocre, and several sources said that eaten raw, or in immoderate amounts, it caused headaches. Cobo was among those who accused peanuts of causing headaches, giddiness, and migraine, but he succumbed when his sweet tooth was tempted (Cobo 1890–1893, 1: 359). He recommended peanuts as substitutes for almonds in almond milk; in almendrados, a sweet made of almonds, honey, and flour; and in turrones, which were either hard candies made of the nuts and honey or a softer version which included beaten eggwhite. Clavigero (1780, 1: 53) had simpler tastes and preferred the nuts lightly toasted. If given a darker roast, he found that the taste and odor were so similar to those of coffee that anybody could be fooled by it. He also mentioned an oil that could be made from peanuts which was acceptable in taste but thought to be harmful in some other way. The oil was useful for lighting but was too easy to extinguish.

This question of edible oils comes up over and over again when reading writers on pre-Columbian food. They just cannot believe that these people managed to survive without cooking oil and take every opportunity and every plant that could conceivably be an oil source to persuade themselves and their readers that the natives, despite all the evidence to the contrary, made cooking oil from plants. Not even the lack of any pre-Columbian pottery shapes suitable for frying has any effect on their arguments.

In the Old World things were ground with a rotary motion, whether in a hand-powered quern or in a larger mill powered by slaves, animals, or water. In the Americas things were ground with a to-and-fro motion, be it cassava being ground on sharkskin for the transparently thin cakes of the nobility or lime-treated maize being ground on a three-legged stone metate with a handstone, a mano. There was no technology available in the New World for grinding great heaps of peanuts or any other oily seeds, or for pressing them to extract oil. The only way vegetable oil was obtained on the American continent was by crushing or grinding some oil-bearing seeds and putting them into a vessel with boiling water. Any available oil would then rise to the surface, ready to be skimmed off, but oil so laboriously obtained was more likely to be used as a medicine, a skin salve, or a hair dressing than as a culinary ingredient.

The Europeans sorely missed their olive oil and their lard and assumed that the Indians felt deprived as well. Not at all. They had never used them and therefore did not feel their lack. The only use the inhabitants of the New World could see for the grease that the Europeans so longed for was for illumination. That European invention they all agreed was most excellent, as before the conquest they had only had torches with which to light the night.

It was the French who first began large-scale extraction of oil from peanuts in the 1840s, and it was a Frenchman in the previous century who was the most enthusiastic champion of the little seed. Juan de Velasco, who recorded life in Quito, Ecuador, in the 1780s, remembered, “M. Condamine always went with his pockets filled with them, even eating them in the streets, asserting that they were the best treasure that he had seen in America” (Velasco 1977, 1: 143).

SQUASH

Winter squash and summer squash, cushaw and calabash, pumpkins and gourds: what are they all? They are fine examples of how far folk taxonomy can go in confusing one. The only way to get out of this maze is to use Latin names, invented expressly to impose order on such situations. There are some 760 species in the family Cucurbitaceae, which is divided into two subfamilies. The one that concerns us, the subfamily Cucurbitoideae, is in turn divided into eight tribes, three of which included Old World food plants. The tribe Joliffieae provides the Old World with the bitter gourd (Momordica charantia), the fruit and shoots of which are appreciated in the Far East. The tribe Melothrieae includes many common Old World edibles: the gherkins, the cucumbers, and all the melons and cantaloupes, these two last being varieties of Cucumis melo melo. The tribe Benincaseae gave the Orient its winter melon and fuzzy gourd and the rest of the Old World the watermelon, the luffas, which produce not only bathroom sponges but edible young fruit and seeds, and Lagenaria, one of the species of which, siceraria, is among the few domesticated plants common to both the Old World and the New before 1492. This is the white-flowered bottle gourd, one of the earliest cultivated plants in the New World and of respectable antiquity in Egypt as well. Lagenaria was widely eaten in the Old World, being what the Romans consumed as cucurbitas and considered pretty dull stuff. Virtuoso Roman chefs prepared multicourse meals which included cucurbitas in every dish, showing off their technical ability by disguising the neutral, or more honestly tasteless, base with complex and extravagant sauces and garnishes.

The Lagenarias were domesticated in the New World long before the invention of pottery and were probably mostly used for containers. This led to them being called calabash, an English generic term for any hard vegetable shell. There are other calabashes, especially the tree-calabash (Crescentia cujete), no relation to the Cucurbitaceae, although like some of the Lagenarias the young fruit and the seeds of some trees could be eaten. The fruit of the calabash tree was worked into elegant drinking vessels for the Aztec nobility, who took their chocolate from these xicallis and gave the word jícara, small cup or bowl, to contemporary Spanish, and chicchera, meaning cup, to Italian.

Three New World tribes of Cucurbitaceae are of culinary significance. Peru and surrounding countries ate cayua (Cyclanthera pedata of the Cyclanthereae), a small fruit which to European taste could replace cucumbers when young. When ripe the black seeds were removed and the body stuffed. Dried, these stuffed caiguas were among the edible supplies stored by the Inca in their state warehouse system.

The Sicyoeae are another New World tribe of Cucurbitaceae, producing in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean what is called by a swarm of names, including christophine, mirliton, chayote, chocho, vegetable pear, and scientifically and definitively Sechium edule. This plant was domesticated in Mexico and did not appear in South America until after the conquest. A large and aggressive vine, it provides shade as well as myriads of spiny green fruit of a flattened pear shape, each with a large flat soft seed in the center. The massive starchy root is also edible, in fact to some tastes it is superior to the rather insipid and watery fruit, but it must be harvested with caution, lest the vine be killed.

Finally, in the family Cucurbitaceae, subfamily Cucurbitoideae, tribe Cucurbitae, we reach the genus Cucurbita. Not to be confused with the cucurbitas of the Romans, the five domesticated species of the genus Cucurbita were important food plants in the New World. Like many edible New World plants they could be eaten in different stages of development, from the yellow flowers and the shoot-tips to the immature fruit, the ripe fruit fresh or dried in strips, and finally the ripe seeds. The first use was probably either for the hard shells for containers, the domestication taking place before the knowledge of pottery, or else for the protein- and oil-rich seeds. The flesh of wild Cucurbita is scanty, bitter, and stringy and does not sound as if it would attract even the hungriest forager.

Recent authors dealing with Mexico and the Maya area have proposed a Mesoamerican triad of food plants—maize, beans, and squash—and a cult to worship them. Maize was an important feature of Mesoamerican religion, and although we know that maize and beans are a happy nutritional fit, there is no evidence that this connection carried over into religious beliefs. Nor did these two have any sacred tie with the Cucurbita, which we shall call squash from now on. This triad was invented by foreigners and imposed on the high cultures of the New World, and the proof of this is to be found in the omission of chile peppers, which the outsiders viewed as a mere con diment, while the original inhabitants considered them a dietary cornerstone, without which food was a penance.

The squashes are curious plants. Their original distribution in the wild can be traced by the ranges of various species of bees of the genus Peponapis, whose sole sources of nectar and pollen are the squashes, and specific species of squashes for specific species of bees at that. Before the importation of European bees these native bees were the only available pollinators for the squashes. The largest concentration of Peponapis bees is in Mexico and Guatemala, from which we can deduce that the largest concentration of squash species should be found there, as is indeed the case. South America has its own indigenous species of Peponapis bees, dependent on the South American squash species but isolated from North American ones. Insect distributions, unlikely as it may seem, have a contribution to make to culinary history.

Cucurbita pepo is the northernmost species of squash and may have been domesticated twice, once in the eastern United States, where it is found by 2700 B.C., for the long-day-tolerant form, and once in Mexico for the short-day-adapted varieties. It is found in Oaxaca by 8750 to 7840 B.C. and has been in New World gardens ever since. Acorn squash, zucchini, summer squash, and the yellow-flowered decorative gourds are all Cucurbita pepo, as are some but not all pumpkins. It is characteristic of the species Cucurbita pepo that while certain cultivars have thick skins and will keep on the shelf for months, the flesh will lose flavor during this time and become bland and stringy. Therefore they should be eaten shortly after harvest or stored in the form of dried flesh, if that is what is being eaten.

The other exclusively northern hemisphere squash is Cucurbita mixta, the cushaw, found from the southwestern United States down to Costa Rica. A pear-shaped fruit, it can be distinguished by its corky peduncle, the peduncle being that convenient handle which connects the fruit to the vine.

Cucurbita moschata is considered the hinge species between North America and South America. It is adaptable to both hot humid regions and cold dry ones and has been suggested as a traveling companion for maize on the way south from its Mexican domestication, if a separate Peruvian maize domestication is not acceptable. It is earlier on the coast of Peru than maize, which might support the idea of two separate domestications, both for this squash and for maize, the squash being domesticated once in Mexico for the hard-shelled and white-seeded kind, and again in Colombia for those with soft shells and brown seeds. Today this species provides the butternut squash, a good keeper with a rather sweet flesh.

The Peruvian domesticate is Cucurbita maxima, which was known on the cool coast of Peru by 1880 B.C. The peduncle is the only one which is round in cross-section, without any ridges or striations, as among the other squashes. Today it is considered a good keeper, with the sweetest and most fiber-free flesh, but who knows what the original Hubbard squash was like in its homeland amidst the fogs of coastal Peru.

The only perennial of the lot, Cucurbita ficifolia, was domesticated in Mexico but spread to South America before the European conquest. Its main attraction to the cultivator, aside from being perennial, is that it is adapted to high altitudes, growing best above 3,000 feet.

The Europeans writing about the squashes did not fiddle around inspecting peduncles and seeds to tell us which species they were writing about. They used the ground seeds as another substitute for almonds in preparing marzipan or mixed with water to make a cool drink, in the same way that ground melon seeds were used to make horchata in the Old World. They ate squash flesh roasted or boiled, sometimes with oil and vinegar, or they made conservas with it. Conservas were fruits cooked and preserved in sugar syrup or allowed to dry after cooking in syrup. Supposedly this is an Arab invention which was taken up by seafaring nations like the Spaniards and the Genoese to use as shipboard supplies. In those times sugar and sweet things were thought to have medicinal properties. Perhaps the citrus and other fruit in the syrup retained some of their vitamin C, or they tasted good to the hungry sailors. The method was applied to New World fruit and is still in use in the Americas with hard-shelled and firm-fleshed Cucurbita. The mature fruit with its shell is cut up, if necessary with an axe, and the resulting chunks are cooked slowly in a syrup of brown sugar, water, and whole spices.

This method of cooking squash is mentioned by several sources, but it is not clear if it was brought from the Old World or independently invented in the New World. The New World had plenty of sweetening available, including honey and various syrups made by boiling down plant saps and juices. Cobo says flatly that New World Indians did not make conservas because they lacked sugar, equipment, and knowledge, but Cobo wrote about Peru and tended toward broad generalizations (Cobo 1890–1893, 1: 335). If we accept alegria, the candy made in Mexico of popped amaranth seeds held together by boiled-down syrup, as a pre-Columbian dish, then knowledge of the properties of boiled syrups was available in the New World before Columbus. The question as to whether or not squash conservas were among the methods of utilizing squash in America before the conquest must remain an open one.

PINEAPPLES

The pineapple grows best in hot humid climates, as it was originally from Brazil and Paraguay and was later distributed over the South American continent by the Tupi-Guarani tribes as they expanded their territory. By the time of the European conquest it was known in the West Indies, Mexico, and the Maya area, as well as South America. It is hard to think of a less plausible plant to cajole into fruiting under English conditions, but that is what the competitive gardeners of the British nobility succeeded in doing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was an abstruse and expensive business, calling for specialized buildings named pineries, which were built alongside the vineries, where grew the grapes which also would not mature under sullen Northern European skies. Heat was provided by beds of manure and specialized furnaces, and every gardener had a secret formula for soil which would best bring his or her plants of Ananas comosus into fruit. The result of all this was that the pineapple became not just a fruit but the embodiment of everything the nobility liked to think that it stood for—wealth, hospitality, and friendship. Its likeness carved in wood became an architectural motif considered particularly suitable for entrance halls and dining rooms, and it spread to the American colonies in this form. Care needs to be taken, however, that all mentions of pineapples are not automatically considered derived from the New World fruit. The Old World pinecone, which because of a vague similarity in look and shape gave its name to the New World pineapple, was also used as an architectural motif from Roman times on and was often referred to as a pineapple.

By the 1820s pineapples could be imported from the West Indies on their plants, so that they became common, and therefore uninteresting to fashion pacesetters. In England it stopped being profitable to rent out pineapples as centerpieces for dinner tables, but in Russia, not reached by West Indian shipments, pineapples in champagne were the last word in luxurious extravagance until the beginning of the twentieth century.

The pineapple moved in the best social circles from the beginning of its European career. Difficult but not impossible to bring fresh from the West Indies in an early sailing ship, it was picked slightly green, and if the ship was favored by the winds and the seas, a few pineapples might arrive unrotted. Peter Martyr records King Ferdinand of Spain, who died in 1516, tasting a pineapple. Only one fruit, the one the king ate, had arrived in edible condition. He said it was the best thing that he had ever tasted. There was not enough left for Peter Martyr to try, but he consoled himself by telling us that in shape and color it was like a pinecone, and that people who had eaten them on their native soil had been amazed at the flavor (Anghera 1912: 262).

By the time Andrea Navagero was in Spain in 1525 as the envoy of the Venetian Republic to the court of Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand, there were enough imported fresh pineapples to go around, and he could have a taste. He thought it a most beautiful fruit, tasting like a highly scented combination of melons and peaches, and very agreeable indeed (Navajero 1879: 274).

Navagero is worth a brief excursion away from the pineapple. It is sometimes said that the idea of the botanical garden came to Europe in the letters of Cortés to Charles V, in one of which he described the botanical gardens of the Aztec emperor Motecuhzoma (Cortés 1986: 196). These letters were published in Latin in 1522 and in Italian in Venice in 1524. Navagero left Venice in October 1524 and when he arrived in Spain wrote to his friend Giovanni Battista Ramusio, promising to send him all the written material he could find on the New World if Ramusio would see to tending his two gardens, one on the mainland at La Selva and the other on the island of Murano. This last, supposedly the first private botanical garden in Europe, had been planted in 1522. The earliest public botanical gardens in Europe were in Pisa and Padua, founded respectively in 1544 and 1545. If Ermolao Barbaro really founded, or even thought of founding, a private botanical garden in Padua in 1484 this of course predates any possible New World influence. The last decade of the fifteenth century saw the republication in Venice of many of the botanical works of antiquity—interest in the world of plants was part of the Renaissance ferment. The best conclusion about the origin of the botanical garden is to consider it a joint effort, with the Old World and the New cooperating to add this weapon to the armament of science.

If Navagero, the Venetian envoy to the emperor, had tasted a pineapple, we can be sure that it had been offered to the emperor himself. Acosta, who was not a contemporary, tells us that it had cost a pretty penny to bring a potted pineapple plant bearing a pineapple to Charles V from the West Indies, but that when it arrived the emperor praised the odor of the fruit but did not wish to taste it (Acosta 1954: 113). Charles was considered to have an incomparably handsome leg, which he was suitably proud of, but he also had a Hapsburg jaw, a hereditary malformation which resulted in his lower jaw jutting far beyond his upper jaw, making chewing difficult. Perhaps because of this he suffered from digestive difficulties, and while the pineapple soon got a reputation for stimulating the appetite and aiding digestion, it was considered bad for the teeth. Whatever caused Charles to refuse to taste that particular pineapple, we are left to wonder if he did ever try the fruit which aroused such enthusiasm among his subjects.

Columbus was the first European to eat a pineapple, which he did on November 4, 1493, when he landed on the island of Guadeloupe on his second voyage (Colón 1749, 1: 43). He gave a straightforward description of it, saying that cultivated pineapples were better than wild ones, which is not true, because there are no wild pineapples. All pineapples are seedless and propagated either from their crowns or from sprouts which appear around the base of the pineapple. A sprout tossed aside might have rooted in poor conditions and produced a scrawny sour fruit, or Columbus may have sampled one of the pineapple’s poor wild relations.

Fernández de Oviedo was the great publicist of the pineapple (Fernández de Oviedo 1959, 1: 239–243). He wrote pages in its praise, giving a rather contrived description of how it appealed to every sense but that of hearing, and how it was the most beautiful fruit he had ever seen, not excepting the fruits which King Fernando of Naples had planted in his three gardens, or those grown for the duke of Ferrara on an island in the Po, or even those from the portable garden of Lodovico Il Moro, the duke of Milan, who had the fruit-laden trees brought to his table. No wonder his rivals accused him of being a great self-advertiser, as well as a great liar. The only drawback that he could see was that neither wine nor any other liquid tasted good after eating pineapples, and he managed to turn even that fault into a virtue by suggesting them as a cure for drunkenness.

This fruit, so successfully competing with the Old World peaches, quinces, melons, and muscat grapes, to which it was constantly being compared, reached its culinary apotheosis at the hands of the nuns of Huánuco, Peru, in the eighteenth century.

The nuns of Huánuco have a singular method of preparing pineapple sweets, which they do in the following manner: first they clean them, then they cook them in water to rid them of their sourness and stickiness; in this condition they remove the core, which is about half of the flesh, which they grind with almonds, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon, forming a smooth filling, with which they fill the hollow of the fruit which has been previously cooked in sugar, and afterwards they give this two or three baths of sugar; which results in the most delicate pineapple sweets, weighing three to six pounds each. (Ruiz López 1952: 297)

AVOCADOS

If the pineapple had to go abroad to attain status, the avocado rested on its laurels at home. A happy chance turn of phrase, because the avocado is a member of the laurel family and therefore related to such fragrant plants as cinnamon, the Old World bay tree, and the sassafras of the New World. Certain avocado varieties have strongly anise-scented leaves and fruit and are used as a condiment in Mexico, as well as being flavor-adding wrappers for foods to be steamed or baked in pit ovens.

The small, nearly spherical seeds of wild avocados are found in archaeological sites in Oaxaca and the Tehuacan valley of Mexico at dates of 8000 to 7000 B.C. They are seeds of the cold and drought-tolerant upland avocado (Persea americana var. drymifolia) trees, which have anise-scented foliage and produce small, thin-skinned, loose-seeded fruit. By 6000 to 5000 B.C. they were being cultivated in Tehuacan, as shown by the increasing size of the fruit and the change in seed shape from the round wild type to egg-shaped.

The other two races are the Guatemalan, distinguished by its thick woody skin and a relatively small clingstone seed, and the misnamed West Indian race, which was not found in the West Indies until after the arrival of the Europeans. This race was adapted to low country, growing from sea level to 3,000 feet in Mexico and Central America and Peru, where the seeds have been found in coastal sites dating to 2400–2000 B.C.

There was a good reason for the popularity of the avocado. The diet of pre-Columbian America was what we would consider low fat. The avocado is one of three fruits that contain large amounts of oil in their flesh, up to 30 percent in the case of the avocado. (The other two fruits, by the way, are the coconut and the olive, both mightily important where they are grown.) In addition to fat, avocados also contain two or three times as much protein as other fruits, and many vitamins as well.

We know little about how avocados, or paltas, as they are called in Peru, were eaten in pre-Columbian America. The one recipe that we may be sure of is the Aztec ahuaca-mulli, or avocado sauce, familiar to all of us today as guacamole. This combination of mashed avocados, with or without a few chopped tomatoes and onions, because the Aztecs used New World onions, and with perhaps some coriander leaves to replace New World coriander, Eryngium foetidum, is the pre-Columbian dish most easily accessible to us. Wrapped in a maize tortilla, preferably freshly made, or even on a tortilla chip, it might ever so distantly evoke the'taste of Tenochtitlan.

If few pre-Columbian recipes for the avocado survive, the European writers more than made up for the lack. The Europeans fell into three camps. There were those who ate their avocados with salt, those who ate them with sugar, and those who liked them both ways. Fernández de Oviedo allowed himself to be led astray by the avocado’s superficial resemblance to a pear and ate it with cheese, like a European dessert pear, but this did not find favor with later authors. Acosta liked sugar with his avocado. To eat it thus, he said, was to eat a very delicate sweetmeat. He said it was delicate and buttery plain and complained of lacking the vocabulary to describe all the subtle new tastes that he encountered (Acosta 1954: 119). Two eighteenth-century commentators, Serra and Velasco, liked it with salt, and Serra also added pepper. He said he hadn’t cared for the fruit at first but had been told that it would grow on him. He ended up eating avocados twice a day when he could get them (Serra 1970, 2: 118–119). Juan de Velasco described the many varieties which were distinguished by the color of their skins (green, black, or purple) and their flesh (green, white, or egg-yolk yellow). All of them, he said, could be eaten with salt or without, but always with a spoon (Velasco 1977: 146–147).

Cobo reported that oil good for cooking and lighting had been extracted from avocado pits. He ate the flesh with sugar, or with salt, or plain. The resemblance of the oily flesh to that Spanish staple the olive did not escape him, and he suggested making mock olives by brining pieces of avocado (Cobo 1890–1893, 2: 19–20).

All the sources quoted so far give the impression that the Spaniards had a monopoly on the news from the New World. Not so. The discovery of the New World attracted fortune hunters from most of the world. The Spaniards tried to keep them off the mainland but could not prevent them from attempting to get a share of the booty on the high seas. These privateers, pirates, or just plain thieves, depending on your nationality and point of view, could fill their pockets by publishing accounts of their adventures if they had not come across enough Spanish galleons. William Dampier, an Englishman, was one such adventurer who realized that not all wealth came in the shape of gold bars and pieces of eight and that books could bring in the cash as well.

This Fruit [the avocado] hath no taste of itself, and therefore it is usually mixt with sugar & lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate, and this is an excellent dish. The ordinary way is to eat it with a little salt and a roasted Plantain; and thus a Man that’s hungry, may make a good meal of it. It is very wholesome eaten any way. It is reported that this Fruit provokes to Lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards. (Dampier 1906, 1: 223)

TOMATOES

The Aztecs, we are told, ate tomatoes. Well and good, but what were they eating when they ate tomatoes? Were they eating what we eat when we eat tomatoes? Not necessarily.

The word tomatl, in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, means something round and plump, and they used it for many fruits, mostly members of the Solanaceae family. The Solanaceae provide many edibles in both the Old World and the New. The eggplant (Solanum melongena) is an Old World member of the family. We have already met some of the New World members like the potato (Solanum tuberosum) and will shortly meet others like the chile peppers, genus Capsicum. Unfortunately the Aztecs called several genera of the Solanaceae family tomatl, or plump fruit. Nahuatl is an agglutinating language, which means that the root words were modified by adding prefixes and suffixes. To find out exactly which plump fruit was being eaten one must distinguish between a miltomatl, a xitomatl, a coyotomatl, and many another kind of tomatl. Some Europeans, who did not understand the structure of the language they were dealing with, thought they were simplifying things by shortening the name of the larger fruit which we know as the tomato from xitomatl, meaning plump thing with a navel, to plain tomate. European settlers in central Mexico also shortened a word, in this case miltomatl, to tomate, but the fruit that word referred to was the most common tomatl in the valley of Mexico, which was not the same as the red tomato, or xitomatl. It was not Solanum lycopersicon at all. This fruit, the husk tomato, genus Physalis, was a small, green, plump fruit that nestles in, or bulges out of, a papery husk. When we hear of the inhabitants of Mexico eating tomatoes we need to ask who is eating, where, and when.

Of these two tomates—there are more, but the situation is complicated enough—the Physalis, miltomatl, or husk tomato, was domesticated in Mexico. They were found in late levels of the Tehuacan caves, dating to A.D. 825–1225, and something vaguely described as tomato tissue was found in dried human feces from the same caves, which dated to 800 B.C. One cannot expect an extensive archaeological record from something so lacking in hard parts and producing such small and inconspicuous seeds.

Today, in the highlands of Mexico, Physalis grows better than Solanum lycopersicon and is preferred for cooking. The cultivated Physalis is called tomate in contemporary Mexican markets, and the wild Physalis, which is sought after for its superior flavor, is called miltomate. Our common tomato is a jitomate.

The common tomato (Solanum lycopersicon) originated in South America. There are seven species of tomatoes growing wild from Ecuador south into Chile and one on the Galápagos Islands. The ancestral form of our edible tomato is the currant tomato (Solanum pimpinellifolium), which bears a long spray of tiny red fruit which when ripe split on the plant. With or without human intervention, a tomato diverged from its miniature relative and spread north, probably carried by birds. Desiccated tomato flesh has been found in the stomach of a Peruvian mummy, but it was not commonly used in Peru. When it arrived in Mexico, the already existing tradition of Physalis cultivation made it a logical candidate for horticultural attention. The two plants fill different ecological niches, meaning that the tomatoes could grow successfully where Physalis did not do well.

Tomatoes, who knows whether Solanum or Physalis, make a fleeting appearance on the pre-Conquest Aztec tribute lists. They do not appear among the tribute given to the Cortés establishment in Cuernavaca in 1532 unless they are hidden in some general category like “fruit.” Around 1550 Don Juan de Guzmán, the governor of Coyoacán in the Valley of Mexico, received daily 3 fowl, 2 baskets of shelled maize, 400 cacao beans, 200 chiles, 1 piece of salt, tomatoes, squash seeds, and the services of 8 women to grind the maize. Another list has this same Don Juan getting 700 chiles and 700 tomates a week. Presumably these tribute tomatoes were highland Physalis, green husk tomatoes, and not lowland Solanum lycopersicon, our modern red tomato.

Don Juan’s tribute list illustrates the consistent linkage between chiles and tomatoes. Sometimes the lists give a combined total, and it seems probable that they went together for culinary as well as accounting purposes. Cervantes de Salazar said that tomatoes were added to sauces and stews to temper the heat of the chiles but also agrees with other sources that they added a pleasing tartness to the food (Cervantes de Salazar 1914: 18).

The further history of the tomato (Solanum lycopersicon, because Physalis barely got beyond its native shores until recently) is well known. As one would expect from its climatic requirements, it successfully adapted to Mediterranean conditions although its welcome was not immediate or unanimous. The first printed recipe for spaghetti with tomato sauce was published in a Neapolitan cookbook in 1837, although we do not know how long the dish had been eaten before that. It must have been late in the nineteenth century before “as easy as spaghetti with tomato sauce” became the Italian equivalent for our “as easy as pie.” And then it was hardly welcomed all over Italy. Even today the Genoese have reservations about the compatibility of tomatoes with fish, thinking them too sour and aggressive to go with the delicate flavors of the sea. In fact the myth of tomato-soaked Italian cuisine is a product of American perception of Italo-American food, which is not at all a realistic assessment of Italian food as it is or ever was.

Queasiness about the tomato increases as you go farther north, in both Europe and North America. Modern authors snicker at the herbalists speaking of the rank smell of tomato plants, but they should go out into the garden and stake and tie a hundred plants, and they will find that tomato plants do indeed have a powerful and distinctive odor which is totally absent from the fruit. A. T. Bolotov, whom we met experimenting with potatoes in eighteenth-century Russia, also tried growing tomatoes and developed a routine for cultivating them in his cold climate: starting them indoors, transplanting them outside, and then bringing them back inside, just before the first frosts, to ripen. The Decembrists introduced the plant to Siberia during their exile there during the late 1820s and the 1830s, but much of Northern Europe and North America still looked askance on this relative of the deadly nightshade. As always, there were the innovators, people like Thomas Jefferson, who grew tomatoes in the 1780s, and conservatives who had their doubts about them a hundred years later. Dio Lewis, who published a guide to good health called Our Digestion; or My Jolly Friend’s Secret in 1872, considered tomatoes medicinal and recommended their use in small doses, a teaspoonful or two at a time, as a sauce. According to him, excessive indulgence in tomatoes led to the loosening, and eventual loss, of the teeth (Lewis 1872: 183). A few decades later Montagu Allwood, who grew up to be a distinguished British horticulturalist specializing in carnations, was introduced to the tomato, which obviously had not been encountered in even singleteaspoon quantities in his circles.

The great event during tea was to be the introduction to this wonderful new fruit—or was it a vegetable? About halfway through the meal, a parlour-maid, of course, a tall elegant girl, dressed in black, and with a white apron and cap with streamers, came in carrying a small dish of cooked tomatoes, which looked and smelled—oh so good! . . . Those wonderful tomatoes were not handed round, but the few grownups tasted them, adding salt and pepper to taste . . . After tea, we all went to see the plants growing in the conservatory, and the head gardener gave a brief discourse upon the tomato. (Allwood n.d., 2: 392–393)

One can laugh at the hesitation with which Northern Europe and the United States accepted the tomato, but there may have been a reason for it. The tomato is a plant adapted to warm climates, and it is quite possible that older varieties, grown in unfavorable conditions, were not in fact very palatable. The taste of a tomato depends on many things, first of all the cultivar planted, but also the growing conditions: the amounts of sunlight, warmth, and moisture. It takes precisely the right conditions to produce the perfect balance between the sugars, the acids, and the more than three hundred volatile compounds that combine to make a flavorful tomato, and poor conditions will make a poor tomato.

Today the pursuit of richly savory tomatoes is made even more difficult by the fact that the tomato is the most studied and genetically manipulated New World plant after maize. Most tomatoes available today grow on plants bred to give fruits that are impervious to machine harvesting and shipping and that also possess a startlingly long shelf life. The savor and acidity which made the Europeans add the fruit to their stews has been replaced by a monotonous and uninteresting sweetness, more suitable to the palate of a three-year-old than that of an adult capable of appreciating complexity. What do you suppose the deeply lobed tomatoes pictured by sixteenth-century herbalists and seventeenth-century still life painters tasted like?

FLAVORS

Chocolate

Trying to boil the history of chocolate down to a few pages is like trying to put the ocean into a walnut shell. This New World foodstuff, the prerogative of the Mesoamerican aristocracy, established itself firmly among the royalty, courtiers, and prelates of Europe; no other substance from the New World appears so often in the letters and diaries of the nobility and men of letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the fall of the absolute monarchies, drinking chocolate went into an eclipse, but cacao returned in the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in a role more suited to the egalitarian nature of the times.

The words “chocolate,” “cacao,” and “cocoa” need definition. This product must not be confused with sound-alikes like coconuts, produced by the now circumtropical palm Cocos nucifera, the universal symbol of tropical island paradises; coca, the leaf of Erythroxylum coca and the source of cocaine, of great importance to the Inca of Peru, who neither consumed cacao nor knew of the plant Theobroma cacao; and coco, cocoyam or cocoa-fingers (Colocasia esculenta), an Old World starchy root much used in the West Indies. “Cacao” is used to refer to the tree and its products before processing, and “cocoa” used to be the product after processing had begun. “Chocolate,” before the end of the eighteenth century, referred to the drink, usually made of water and “cocoa” with the addition of flavorings. Nowadays chocolate means any manufactured cacao product, and cocoa is the defatted powder invented by Van Houten in 1828.

The word “cacao” has provisionally been traced back to the Olmec, the mother culture of Mesoamerica during the first and part of the second millennia before Christ. Mesoamerica is the high culture area of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, much of it hot and humid lowland country eminently suited for cacao cultivation. The Olmec may have given the word and the substance to the Maya, who succeeded them in a large part of the territory. The Maya in their turn introduced the word and the substance to the Aztecs or their predecessors in the valley of Mexico, all of whom had to import every cacao bean they used, because the valley of Mexico is much too high, dry, and chilly to suit Theobroma cacao. One explanation of how we got the word “chocolate” is that the Aztecs called one of the many drinks they made out of the prized imported cacao cacaoatl, or cacao water, atl meaning water in Nahuatl. How did this become our word chocolate? The simplest explanation is that the Spaniards did not care enough to transcribe the language of the conquered with any precision, or perhaps first met with the word in some aberrant dialect.

If that explanation seems feeble one can always accept the folk etymology that the “choco” was really onomatopoeic, imitating the noise made when the chocolate was being beaten, “choco, choco, choco.” This story goes back to Thomas Gage, an Englishman who traveled in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1620s and had a great deal to say about chocolate (Gage 1958: 151). The chocolate was beaten to raise the foam, which was considered the best part of the drink and the sign of quality. After the conquest chocolate was beaten in a deep cylindrical pot, twirling a more or less elaborately carved stick between the hands as a beater. Chocolate pots of materials from copper, through porcelain, to silver by the greatest masters may be seen in museums, with holes in their lids for the introduction of the beater. There are no pre-Columbian depictions of chocolate being beaten with a beater, or molinillo as it is called in Spanish, although spoons for chocolate appear in conquest period inventories. In the first Maya dictionaries the word for beater is the same as that for any stirring stick, as if the beater was not an indigenous object. All pre-Columbian illustrations of chocolate preparation show the foam being raised by pouring the liquid from one cylindrical vessel into another. Sahagún mentions a beater in one of his passages on chocolate, but his descrip tion of the seller of fine chocolate in book 10 has the chocolate being aerated, filtered, strained, poured back and forth, made to form a head, and made to foam, in other words every possible manipulation except beating (Sahagún 1950–1982, 10: 93). If beating the chocolate with a beater was a postconquest introduction it seems unlikely that the drink would be named for the noise made by beating.

The third explanation, which also has unsatisfactory aspects, is that the word chocolate came from the Nahuatl xoco, meaning “sour,” added to atl, water. Our immediate reaction, to say that chocolate is not sour, only shows our cultural limitations. The Aztecs had myriads of chocolate drinks, some sweetened with honey, some stepped up with chile peppers, and many with spices and ingredients unfamiliar to us. It is we who have relegated chocolate dishes to the department of sweets. The objection to this derivation of the word chocolate lies in the fact that xoco-atl was used to refer to another, very common drink. This was made of maize dough soured by a continuing yeast, bacterial, and fungal culture, a sort of maize dough tempeh or yogurt if you will, with the dough then being mixed with water for consumption. There is, of course, no reason why the same name might not have been applied to different drinks in different places. All we can conclude is that the origin of the word chocolate has yet to be pinned down.

The origin of the word is a mystery, and so is the origin of the tree. The cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), of the same family (Sterculiaceae) as the cola nut (Cola acuminata), also caffeine containing, of tropical Africa, is rather small and impressed all the early writers with its fragility. It requires shade, shelter from the wind, a hot humid climate, and a well-drained soil. It is easy to tell which of the early illustrators of cacao had not seen the actual tree, because they persist in showing the cacao fruit hanging from the branches, in the way that normal temperate fruit—apples, or pears, or peaches—grow In reality the cacao bears its flowers and its fruit on the trunk, or on the larger limbs, in a manner common to tropical trees, but not, for some reason, to trees growing in temperate climates.

Most of the wild species of cacao grow in South America, in the drainages of the Amazon and the Orinoco, and if we accept the classic theory of plant domestication, cacao should have been domesticated there. However, the aborigines of this area never used the seeds in the cacao pods, only sucking off the sweet white pulp that covers the seeds and discarding the source of chocolate, the seeds. The seeds retain their ability to sprout for but a few weeks, so that it is hard to imagine these objects of no known use being traded northward until they finally found appreciative cultivators and consumers in Mesoamerica. For the same reason it is improbable that cacao seedlings made the trip.

The alternative theory, recently bolstered by the apparent discovery of populations of wild Theobroma cacao trees in Mesoamerica, is that the plant was domesticated there, despite the scanty inventory of wild trees and wild species. The difficulty of distinguishing genuine wild populations from cultivated trees that have gone back to the wild and the offspring of such trees makes it hard to expect certainty in such discussions.

Whether domesticated in South America or in Mesoamerica, it was probably in Mesoamerica that someone hit upon the proper processing of cacao beans. It is no easy thing to transform the beans, wrapped in their white flesh inside the pod, into something that tastes and smells like chocolate. The first step is to gather the ripe pods and allow them to ferment for a few days, which causes many chemical changes in the seeds. After this the seeds are removed from their pods and from their flesh and allowed to dry; then they are carefully toasted and peeled. The peeled nut is ground, and reground, and reground again on the metate, preferably heated by a small fire or a pan of hot coals under it. The metate is the same three-legged stone used to grind the maize. Indeed, the heavy, humble, bulky, stone metate was imported into Europe at the height of the chocolate craze so that the precious substance could be prepared in the manner to which it was accustomed. After grinding the chocolate would be formed into small storable cakes or immediately made into a drink.

Drinks made of processed cacao beans were the first stimulating drinks, meaning beverages containing caffeine and theobromine, alkaloids which affect the human body, to be encountered by Europeans. At that time tea and coffee were Oriental exotics, and their dissemination and widespread popularity did not begin until the middle of the seventeenth century. Before the discovery of the New World the only things there were to drink were water, flavored waters, wines, milk products, cider, berry and other fruit-based drinks, meads, beers, and a wide range of gruels and starchy liquids that intergraded with soups and stews. Distilled liquors were the province of the alchemists and medical men. When we think of the huge meaning tea, coffee, and chocolate drinking have for our social lives as well as for our liquid balance, it is obvious that the impact of this first drink to contain psychoactive agents other than alcohol was enormous.

Columbus was the first European to lay eyes on cacao beans. On his last voyage, in 1502, he came across a great Maya trading canoe in the Gulf of Honduras, an encounter which pleased him very much, because it allowed him to sample the resources of the country without the possible risks of military action. He saw some almondlike objects dropped and everybody scrambling to pick them up “as if their eyes had fallen out of their heads” (Morison 1963: 327). The text adds that these were the almonds used as coins in New Spain, that is to say Mexico, but that is clearly a later addition, as Mexico had not yet been discovered.

Cacao beans were used as small change in Mexico, and it was suggested that they be introduced to Spain in this capacity, the idea of a coin that could rot and decay pleasing the moralizing friars. But the triumph of cacao was not to come about by means of earnest monks, and its adoption took place in the salons of the nobility, not the merchants’ counting houses.

The idea of this new and different kind of drink was a difficult one to get across to the Spanish public. Peter Martyr, who was probably relaying information rather than speaking from personal experience, wrote of chocolate as being a kind of wine, drunk by the Aztec aristocracy and intoxicating if taken in large quantities (Anghera 1912: 355). Fernández de Oviedo, who had had personal experience in the New World, was told by the natives that if he drank chocolate in the morning he would be immune to attack by poisonous snakes during the day (Fernández de Oviedo 1959, 1: 270). He found that interesting, but less interesting than the fact that cacao beans could be a source of fat, which he obviously sorely missed.

The . . . cacao ground, and cooked with a bit of water, makes excellent fat for cooking, and other things; and I remember that in a place called Mambacho, there was an Italian, a good fellow, and a friend of mine, named Nicolá, . . . and he gave me and my people a very fine dinner of much fish, and many eggs, cooked in this fat. When I asked him where he had gotten the lard, he said it was not lard but cacao fat, and that he had tried it a couple of times when he was wounded, or had pains and ills . . . and it helped everything. (Fernández de Oviedo 1959, 1: 272)

An Italian, Girolamo Benzoni, expresses the final conversion of Europeans to the use of chocolate, not as a coin, or a snake-bite preventive, or a healing ointment, but as a drink. The first sentence is usually misleadingly quoted alone, to make him a denigrator of chocolate, but he is nothing of the sort.

It [chocolate] seemed more a drink for pigs, than a drink for humanity. I was in this country for more than a year, and never wanted to taste it, and whenever I passed a settlement, some Indian would offer me a drink of it, and would be much amazed when I would not accept, going away laughing. But then as there was a shortage of wine, and so as not to be always drinking water, I did like the others. The taste is somewhat bitter, it satisfies and refreshes the body, but does not inebriate, and it is their best and most expensive merchandise, according to the Indians of that country. (Benzoni 1962: 103–104)

It was necessary for all the new foodstuffs from the New World to be incorporated into European schemes of thought about food, especially those having to do with religiously required fasting and abstinence. Abstinence meant abstaining from meat, and fasting meant that but one solid meal a day could be consumed. The question of how to classify chocolate, as food or drink, had to be referred to Rome for decision. Gregory XIII, who was pope from 1572 to 1585, was twice consulted by the residents of Chiapas on this question and both times responded that chocolate did not break the fast because it was a drink. Other authorities were less decisive and wrote long tomes on the question, in which they made a distinction between chocolate mixed with substantial things like milk, eggs, and broth, which might break the fast, and simple chocolate made with water and honey, which would not.

While the ecclesiastical authorities were splitting hairs, chocolate was spreading over Europe. A Florentine, Francesco d’Antonio Carletti, went around the world between 1594 and 1606 and is supposed to have brought the art of chocolate making back to Florence. His account of the journey, not published until 1701, speaks of the Spaniards of Mexico as being so addicted to the drink that their strength failed them if they did not have their chocolate at their accustomed hour (Carletti 1701: 91). Spanish princesses who married into the French royal family took their morning chocolate habit with them and introduced it to the French court. Even the pirates off the Spanish Main were drinking chocolate for breakfast by the end of the seventeenth century. Esquemeling tells us of a successful raid after which the pirates had “each morning a dish of that pleasant liquor, containing almost a pint” (Esquemeling 1684, 4: 99).

The pirates’ morning drink was probably nothing very elaborate, but some of the chocolate consumed at this time was distinctly complex. Cosimo III Medici, who was grand duke of Tuscany from 1670 to 1723, practiced international diplomacy by plying other European rulers with gifts of Tuscan wine and chocolate, especially chocolate scented with jasmine flowers, made from a special recipe. His physician, Francesco Redi, was asked for the list of ingredients by a friend and had to reply in his most courtly style that he was sorry, he had specific orders that the secret not be divulged (Redi 1811: 345). He would talk about chocolate flavored with citron peel, chocolate flavored with lemon peel, with ambergris and with musk, but the recipe for jasmine chocolate he could not part with, by order of the grand duke himself.

Most sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century cacao was for drinking, but its consumption in solid form was not unheard of. To make a drink out of processed cacao beans they must be ground, and then, unless they are immediately made into a drink, the mass congeals. In 1591 Cárdenas credited some Guatemalan ladies with the invention of storable chocolate tablets that could later be dissolved in sweetened hot water (Cárdenas 1913: 105). From this it was easy to move on to adding sugar and spices to the cacao while it was being ground. A tablet of this nature could be dissolved in hot water to make the breakfast chocolate, but it could also be nibbled. There is no way of exactly dating the birth of the chocolate confection, but by 1685 Dufour was writing that “The Ladies also, and Gentlewomen of Mexico, make little delicate Cakes of Chocolate for daintiness, which are sold likewise in the Shops, to be eaten just as Sweet Meats” (Dufour 1685: 73). A century later Buc’hoz could give recipes for chocolate biscuits, chocolate pastilles, chocolate mousse, chocolate marzipan, chocolate ice cream, chocolate olives, which were like chocolate truffles but baked in a slow oven, chocolate dragées, and chocolate diablotins, which were a sort of small flat wafer (Buc’hoz 1787: 46–56).

In 1828 Conrad Van Houten developed his process for removing the excess fat from cacao beans. This left him with cocoa to make into drinks and a supply of cacao butter. This could be added to other chocolate, giving it more than the allowance of cacao butter that it was born with. With the addition of sugar this began the production of what are called modern chocolates. Many people take it to mean that solid chocolate was not eaten before Van Houten’s time, but as the preceding paragraph has shown, this is not so.

This is running ahead of the story. The decline of European royalty, begun by the French revolution, led to the decline of chocolate, an aristocratic drink. Chocolate was tainted by its association with courtiers and the clergy, especially the Jesuits, who had been accused of trying to monopolize the trade in cacao, for the greater glory of God and their own profit. Coffee: middle-class, Protestant, businesslike, that was the coming drink of the common people. No longer did the viceroys of New Spain send the Spanish court shipments of the finest Soconusco cacao from the south coast of Guatemala, a rarity by then and almost extinct now. No longer could the Spanish court present this delicate, buttery, and flavorful cacao to the other royal houses of Europe. The fine Soconusco Criollo varieties, even more subject to disease than the rest of the species, were replaced by more robust Forastero types from the Amazon, or by Trinitario trees, hybrids between Criollo and Forastero.

The story of chocolate in the last 150 years is one of industrialization and changing patterns of consumption. Chocolate drinks became something fit only for children, but eating chocolate blossomed into thousands of expensive and exotic forms. In 1874 the invention of “conching,” which makes the chocolate mass infinitely smoother, gave another impetus to the consumption of solid chocolate, as did the coming of milk chocolate. This last, dismissed as something Swiss cows had found to do with their surplus milk, is now far more popular than the more vivid-tasting dark chocolate. The invention of the chocolate chip by Ruth Wakefield in 1939 added another dimension to chocolate use. Today our supermarket shelves hold miniature chocolate chips, gigantic chocolate chips, and milk chocolate chips, as well as the old original chocolate chips. There are even chocolateless chocolate chips containing no cacao but a cheaper artificial flavor.

The view expressed by Jean-Paul Aron, that the Aztec chocolate of the Emperor Motecuhzoma, bitter, spiced, and “rendered more savage yet by chile” (Bernachon 1985: 7), was tamed and made drinkable by the Europeans is a typical piece of Europe-centered thinking. Cacao in the Old World has undergone a complex evolution, moving from being the nectar of the elite to becoming a gamut of sweets ranging from the plebeian chocolate bar to the most luxurious and expensive of confections. All foodstuffs change their uses through time, and there is no need to single out the American ones as being in special need of defanging. In fact we would do well to return to the kitchens of the Emperor Motecuhzoma and see what we could learn there. Hot chocolate with chile is quite delicious!

Vanilla

Vanilla logically follows chocolate. Vanilla went to the Old World as an accompaniment to chocolate, and now that it has expanded its field beyond chocolate has become such a common and all-pervasive flavor in the United States as to be a synonym for the humdrum—plain vanilla.

Vanilla planifolia is one of the few members of the enormous orchid family that is valued for anything besides cut flowers. There are about a hundred species of the genus Vanilla, all tropical vining orchids which look rather like green garden hoses scrambling through the supporting trees, if garden hoses had occasional nodes with occasional leaves sprouting from them. The flower of Vanilla planifolia is recognizably an orchid flower, yellowish green and fertilized, not very efficiently, by Meliponid bees. The product of fertilization, the vanilla bean, looks like a string bean, but instead of containing a few beans it contains millions of tiny seeds. Orchid seeds are minuscule because they store little but genetic information, leaving the job of providing the nourishment for the new plant to a fungus which a few fortunate seeds are lucky enough to come across. These seeds are the black specks that enable us to identify a vanilla ice cream as the genuine article.

The bean when picked does not smell like vanilla. To do that, it must be cured, and there are many curing regimens, each providing different nuances of taste. Brief scalding, “sweating” in heat generated by their own enzymes, sun drying, drying over wood fires, and months of “conditioning” are all employed. The secrets of curing and the special requirements of orchid cultivation made vanilla a mystery plant to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The 1779 edition of Diderot’s Encyclopedia hints that blood-curdling oaths were sworn by the native inhabitants of Veracruz, Mexico, to prevent the dissemination of their knowledge of this subject. Raynal, a contemporary, blamed his ignorance on the indolence of the Spaniards, whom he accused of being content to enjoy their ill-gotten riches and equally unwilling to apply themselves to the study of natural history, or honor those who did (Raynal 1774: 79).

Vanilla was known to the Aztecs as tlilxochitl, which means black flower, although the flower is not black. This has been explained by assuming that the Aztecs did not know the difference between the flower and the black cured pod, which is absurd considering their great skill as horticulturalists. It is far more likely that the name is a complex metaphor, something the Aztecs were very fond of, for which we may never know the explanation. The word vanilla comes from the diminutive of the Spanish vaina, or pod.

Vanilla arrived in the Old World as one of a flock of spices that were used in the preparation of chocolate drinks. A basic Baroque recipe for chocolate contained cacao, achiote (a red coloring and flavoring derived from the greasy coating on the seeds of Bixa orellana), vanilla, cinnamon, and sugar. During the eighteenth century a great change of taste took place in Europe, with the complex and highly spiced flavors favored during the Baroque giving way to the simpler and lighter tastes of the Enlightenment. Chocolate shed some of its ingredients during the eighteenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the link between cinnamon and vanilla in drinking chocolate was broken.

When chocolate scented with vanilla alone was first drunk is uncertain. A century before Diderot, Lorenzo Magalotti, a friend of Francesco Redi and like him a passionate amateur of things scented, described a strong and inexplicable odor of vanilla in his room. “Only last fall, in the two rooms where I live in the wintertime, I began to smell a smell of vanilla so vivid . . . especially in the heat of the day, that nobody who entered could think otherwise than that I had a box of vanilla with which to make chocolate” (Magalotti 1924: 142). Unfortunately he does not explain this sensory hallucination or tell us whether vanilla was the only thing that he was going to put in his chocolate.

The French were certainly involved in the expansion of vanilla cultivation. There were French colonists in the state of Veracruz in Mexico in the eighteenth century, growing vanilla. The first commercial plantations were there, on vanilla’s native territory, but they suffered from the inadequacy of the natural pollinators until a series of experiments on greenhouse plants in the Old World showed how to do it better than the bees. The French colonists had to share the technique, developed by Charles Morren in Liège Belgium in 1836, with the neighboring Totonac Indians, who also raised vanilla, because the Totonacs, seeing the vastly increased crops of the French, accused them of thievery. In 1841 a former slave, Edmond Albius, on the island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, discovered an even quicker and easier method of pollinating the flowers. This raised the productivity of the vines by a factor of five and encouraged the French to expand vanilla cultivation on their tropical island possessions.

The invention of vanilla extract by Joseph Burnett in the United States in 1847 also aided the emancipation of vanilla from chocolate. It was produced by forcing a mixture of water and alcohol through chopped-up vanilla beans. Although there is nothing terribly difficult in splitting a vanilla bean and letting it stew in the milk for a custard, or kneading the split bean with the dough for sweet bread, the dominant opinion of the age that cooking was some sort of scientific endeavor led many to find it more acceptable to measure a precise teaspoonful of vanilla extract or throw in a standard packet of vanilla sugar.

In 1874 German chemists synthesized vanillin. It is the dominant contributor to the flavor of vanilla beans, but the real thing contains some two hundred other substances for added nuances. Today the world is overwhelmed with vanillas. There are pure natural vanillas, combinations of natural and artificial vanillas, vanilla extenders, and artificial vanillas, all available in liquid or powder form.

Recently an effort has been made to lessen the preeminence of Vanilla planifolia by promoting a rival, Vanilla tahitensis. As the species name suggests, it grows in French Polynesia, where it produces a very small percentage of the world vanilla crop. It has a different flavor, which is praised by admirers as being reminiscent of heliotrope and damned by detractors as smelling like prunes.

There is room for many different kinds of vanilla. The hundred species give visions of a host of flavors waiting to be discovered. But there is also a sinister prospect before us, the appearance of a virus which is attacking the vanilla plantations. The prospect of life without plain vanilla, or with only artificial vanilla, is a desolate one.

Chile

The fruits of Capsicum species seem to have a magnetic attraction for confusing colloquial names. It began with Columbus discovering them on his first voyage and calling them peppers of the Indies, initiating a mix-up which has lasted to this day. We will call all the fruit of Capsicum plants chiles. Cayenne is the ground pungent fruit, usually misleadingly called “hot” in English. The British call the nonpungent ones capsicums, but we will ignore that distinction, because pungency is a relative matter. Chilli is the Aztec and British term for the pungent varieties. Chili should be reserved for the dish known as “a bowl of red,” or chili con carne, bitingly dismissed by Santamaría (1959: 385) in his Diccionario de Mejicanismos as “a detestable dish which under the false title of Mexican is sold in the United States of North America, from Texas to New York.” Detestable it may be, but there are people who wish to make it the national dish of the United States. In its original form it was a stew of chiles and meat; nowadays just about anything else can be, and is, added.

This fruit with the many names grows on plants of the genus Capsicum, members of the Solanaceae family like the tomatoes and the potatoes and another New World domesticate, tobacco, which we shall not discuss. There were three species, or species groups, of cultivated chiles in ancient America. The most aberrant species is Capsicum pubescens, unique in having purple flowers, dark seeds, slightly fuzzy leaves and stems, and a great tolerance for cold. It was probably domesticated in the highlands of Bolivia, from which it spread to the highlands of Peru. The taste is quite different from that of our daily pungent chiles, mostly the fruit of Capsicum annuum. Possessed of a piquancy quite their own, Peruvians consider them much superior.

The white-flowered and white-seeded Capsicum annuum, chinense, and frutescens complex originated in tropical South America, but Capsicum annuum was in Mexico to be found, wild, in cultural deposits in the Tehuacan valley dating from 7200 to 5200 B.C. Capsicum frutescens produces the chile that makes Tabasco sauce, and Capsicum chinense gives us the so-called Scotch bonnet, or Habañero chile, which is found in lowland South America, the West Indies, and Central America. Capsicum annuum provides most of the chiles which we know today. They come in nearly all colors, shapes, sizes, and degrees of pungency. There is no point in worrying about their common names, as they change from one side of the street to the other.

The third species, practically indistinguishable as far as fruit appearance goes, is Capsicum baccatum, white seeded like the preceding group, but with brown or yellow spots at the base of its white flower petals. Probably domesticated in lowland Bolivia, it is used in tropical South America.

Why do people grow the things and eat them? Archaeologists tend to be rather dismissive of chiles, considering them mere seasonings because they do not provide proteins and calories. Presumably these same archaeologists would deny the spice trade any role in European history because spices, like chile, do not add calories to the human diet. Had they read the writings of the early soldiers, missionaries, and travelers in the New World they would have discovered that chiles were omnipresent, that the natives ate nothing without them, and that they would eat the bitterest and wildest herbs with them. Chiles were as significant when they were absent as when they were present. The concepts, familiar to the Europeans, of fasting and penance were widespread in Mesoamerica and South America, and without exception the basic penance was to deny oneself salt and chile. Perhaps it did not provide proteins and calories, but the chile still had a mighty significance in the culinary culture of the New World.

Chiles provide quantities of vitamins A and C, but so do plenty of other vegetables. What chiles have that is absolutely unique is capsaicin. Capsaicin is, unexpectedly, colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It is a powerful irritant, noticeable when diluted to one part in eleven million. It is produced by glands where the seed-bearing part, the placenta, meets the wall of the chile fruit. The capsaicin spreads to the placenta and sometimes to the seeds. Cooks, who for years have recommended removing the placenta and the seeds if mildness is desired, are correct. Water will not wash it off, as capsaicin is not soluble in water, but it does dissolve in fat or in alcohol, as chile oil and chile vodka prove.

There have been efforts made to measure pungency scientifically, mainly by manufacturers who want to produce a uniform product. The pungency of chiles can change even within varieties, so that without some sort of a test the manufacturers would not know if the same plants in the same chile field were producing chiles making mild chile sauce one week and three-alarm-fire chile sauce the next. The Scoville test was invented in 1912 and consisted of a tasting panel that came up with a consensus score, but depending on human tasters is risky, because they get accustomed to the capsaicin and tolerate higher concentrations. More recently high-pressure liquid chromatography has been used, not entirely to everyone’s satisfaction, as pungency seems to consist of more than just the amount of capsaicin.

Antidotes to the effects of capsaicin depend on the individual addressed and the school of folk medicine he or she subscribes to. Milk products are prescribed by many, and there are believers in the efficacy of bread or rice. Capsaicin the irritant does not confine its action to the mouth and tongue but also attacks the hands that cut, pick, and chop the chiles and any body parts those hands touch. Washing with vinegar is advised by some but doesn’t seem to do much good. This irritating property of capsaicin is the basis of many liniments, ointments, and devices to keep hunters’ hands and feet warm in winter.

The uses of chiles in the New World were not confined to food. When the Indians attacked the fort that Columbus had built on the island of Santo Domingo they lobbed calabashes full of wood ashes and ground chiles into the enclosure. Chile smoke was used as a fumigant, as well as a means of chemical warfare, and the Aztecs disciplined their recalcitrant offspring with it.

Early European writers agreed that chiles could replace expensive black pepper imported from the East and suggested that they be chopped into pieces and added to the dishes being prepared in just the same way that black pepper was added. The decorative aspects of the plant and fruit appealed to them too, and it was universally agreed that in small quantities chiles aided digestion. In fact, the descriptions tend to be truncated because it was assumed that everybody in Spain knew all about these useful plants. There is, however, one use in the early texts that strikes the modern reader as a novelty, and that is the use of chile leaves as greens, cooked in stews or chopped and put in sauces like parsley. It works.

One important feature of the chile plant may have contributed to the disappearance of the powerfully spiced status dishes of the Renaissance and Baroque. The chile was cheap and easy to grow. It did not have to be imported from across the seas, passing from rapacious middleman to rapacious middleman and increasing in price every time it changed hands. Not being expensive, it could not be a status symbol. Peasants in a decent Mediterranean climate could grow it and feast on flavors their ancestors could not have afforded to dream of. The old saw about spices being imported to disguise the taste of tainted meat in medieval times was buried long ago, when people realized that what one person considers tainted another considers well hung. With chile available to every peasant strong spices and high flavors could no longer be the prerogative of the tables of the prominent. It was not only the availability of cheap chile which led to the decline of heavy spicing in the centuries following the conquest, but it may have contributed to the change.

Girl of eleven being threatened with chile smoke as a punishment. From Cooper-Clark 1938, 3: 60 recto.

Northern Europe seems to have always had doubts about chile. John Evelyn, writing to the Earl of Sandwich, ambassador extraordinary to the court of Spain in 1668, says that he has raised many plants of chile and praises the beauty of the fruit, which he compares to polished coral. But he goes on to warn that “a very little will set ye throat in such a flame, as has ben [sic] sometimes deadly” (Evelyn 1818, 2: 184). Who it was that had expired after eating chiles is not identified. Diderot had heard that the Indians ate the ripe fruit without cooking but did not believe it. “No amount of habit would seem to be capable of making an innocent food out of such an active material” (Diderot 1779, 25: 917).

The division of the world into chile-users and chile-avoiders almost became a moral issue in the nineteenth century. Chiles were said to have no nutritive qualities whatsoever; they were a bad habit, like using tobacco. Not only were they physically bad for you, they were bad for you morally. As proof of this one Professor La Fayette said all you had to do was to study the habits of the average Mexican who ate what La Fayette calls cayenne every meal of every day (La Fayette 1885: 15). He did not elaborate; presumably it was self-evident. If anybody was persuaded by statements like these, the feeling did not last, because one of the most notable recent changes in the cuisine of the United States has been the revival and spread of chile use.

These plant biographies have provided us with a convenient bridge from our world into the culinary world of the original domesticators and users of these substances, the Aztecs, the Maya, the Inca, and their predecessors. Using native and European sources, I will attempt to recount what is known about the food eaten by these peoples before the conquest, before European influence, at the time when indigenous American cuisine had probably reached its highest level.