Diego de Landa
While the Europeans’ accounts of their earliest encounters with the Maya are useful, they are still the descriptions of special meals. To know what the Maya ate as part of their daily lives we must turn to that famous observer of things Maya, Diego de Landa.
Seldom has there been a more two-faced figure. A Franciscan who was named bishop of Yucatan in 1572, late in his life, he incinerated at least twenty-seven Maya books, yet recorded an “alphabet” which provided a vital clue for the recent decipherment of the Maya writings which had escaped his holocaust. His portrait hangs in the vast religious complex which he built on top of an ancient pyramid in Izamal, Yucatan, and shows him with downcast eyes and an attempt at a meek smile, yet he overstepped the limits of his authority to such an extent that he was sent back to Spain to be tried for breaking ecclesiastical regulations. He subjected his Maya flock to hideous tortures, yet left an exhaustive account of their daily life. It is to him that we must turn to find out what the sixteenth-century Maya ate, and how and when they ate it.
Landa starts out with a description of the process for making maize dough. We will start a step farther back, with the storage and processing of the newly harvested maize. The questions of different degrees of storability were among the many factors which the Maya farmer juggled when selecting the varieties to plant. Once the correct balance of maize strains had been planted and all the work and attendant ritual of clearing the ground, sowing, weeding, and harvesting had been completed, how was the maize to be kept until the next harvest? Landa tells us that it was kept in underground places, but like many of Landa’s statements this has been ignored, or contradicted, by people who thought they knew better.
These underground places that Landa speaks of are probably the bottle-shaped chultuns, or pits, excavated in the soft limestone of the Yucatan plateau. Modern investigators think them unsuitable for maize storage because they have dumped maize, of unspecified varieties, into them, and within a few months the maize was moldy and inedible. Had they done their digging in the archives they would have discovered many better strategies to adopt, for long-term food storage, especially in the tropics, has never been a simple matter.
Many sources speak of the maize as being smoked, sometimes for weeks. The Maya used smoking to preserve many things, including chiles, meat, and fish. Given their intimate knowledge of their environment, they probably knew different plants that gave smoke of different qualities, both for flavor and for preservation. Storability could also have been improved by sprinkling sand or lime between the food to be stored. Finally we have the possibility that herbs with insecticidal qualities were interspersed with the maize, the way that muña was used to help preserve potatoes in Peru. The technique was used in the Maya area by employing a leaf of Luehea speciosa (Maya kazcat), a plant of the Tiliaceae or linden family, to store with chiles, according to Roys (1931: 254), probably to keep Maya chiles free from attacks by chile moths, a fluttering pest that anyone who has ever hung a decorative or culinary ristra of dried chile peppers has probably encountered.
More evidence of such practices among the Maya is shown by the description of the visit by four highland Maya lords to Prince Philip of Spain, then acting as regent for his father, the Emperor Charles V. The four K’ekchi presented many gifts to the Spanish court on February 4, 1545, even though what most struck Philip was the scantiness of their garments, given the rigors of winter in Madrid. The offerings included vessels of beaten chocolate, presumably prepared on the spot, and the earliest documented appearance of chocolate in Spain, many kinds of chiles, beans, and maize, but also fine textiles packed in wooden boxes and layered with herbs. The herbs were thrown out as being just packing material, but the author of the article on this visit, Estrada Monroy (1979:195), claims to have discovered sixteenth-century documents in Guatemala preserved from pests and dampness by what might be the same herbs, although he does not identify them.
Other uses have been suggested for chultuns. They are said to have been wine cellars, one supposes for the storage and maturation of rare vintages of balché and other local brews. All the records that we have speak of balché as being a simple preparation of water, honey, and strips of the bark of Lonchocarpus longistylus, a member of the genus of trees that produces the fish poison barbasco and rotenone. The bark strips are reused, thus making sure that the correct yeast culture finds its way from one batch of balché into the next. The ingredients are mixed in a large wooden trough, or even a canoe, a few days before the balché is required for a ceremony. Recent Lacandon ceremonial practices required every last bit of balché to be consumed before the rite ended, eliminating the need for anything elaborate in the way of storage.
Various beers, mostly maize-based, were also made by the Maya. The foaming substance seen in the Maya trading canoe by Columbus probably fell into this category. If the Rabinal Achí, a highland Maya drama, is correct and not merely metaphorical, there once was an extensive range of alcoholic beverages to choose from:
There are twelve drinks here, twelve liquors to intoxicate, of the ones called Ixtatzunun; sweet, refreshing, cheering, pleasing, tempting; of those which are drunk before going to sleep, here within the vast walls, in the vast fortress; drinks of chiefs. (Anon. 1979: 51)
Admittedly the Maya have undergone considerable cultural impoverishment, and the Spanish priests were especially diligent in trying to eliminate alcoholic drinks and the ritual drunkenness which resulted from their use. They assumed that these drinks led to reversions to idolatry, and smashed the vessels in which they were brewed when they could find them. A tradition of aged fermented drinks may have been lost as a consequence of this destruction.
If there is little to justify identifying chultuns as wine cellars, there is less to support the suggestion that they were cool cellars for the storage of Maya pickles. Given a warm climate, with crops ripening around the year, preservation techniques for fruit and vegetables do not need to be as complex as they are in colder places. There are a very few mentions of pickled fruit; Roys (1931: 223), for instance, speaks of the pickled fruit of Parmentiera edulis, but I suspect this is a postconquest introduction. Certainly there are no words for pickles or pickling in any of the early dictionaries, and none of the early travelers mention seeing, eating, or smelling such things. In fact, pickling, in the dictionary sense of preservation in brine or vinegar, seems not to have existed in the preconquest New World. Many things might have been kept in chultuns, but crocks of pickles were not among them.
Once it was decided to use the maize stored in the chultun or some alternative form of granary, nixtamalization was usually, but not always, employed. There were variations even within the process of nixtamalization. Not all of the lime in the Maya area was suitable for this purpose, and sometimes a substitute had to be made by burning the shells of freshwater Pachychilus snails. Lime could also be replaced by wood ashes, producing a maize drink that had special religious significance in certain Maya communities.
Landa prefaced his description of making maize dough by saying that the dough was made into both food and drink, and “drinking it as they do it serves them for food and drink” (Tozzer 1941: 89). According to Landa, two of the three daily meals were composed of maize drinks made of nixtamalized maize dough. In the morning they were drunk warm, with a little ground chile thrown on top. Leftovers of the morning meal, with cool water added, were the midday meal. Soups and stews were for the evening. “Bread” was made twice a day, which is puzzling because there is no mention of solid breadstuffs being eaten twice a day. Perhaps by making “bread” Landa meant the grinding of maize. In that case it could well have been done twice a day, once early in the morning, to provide the daily gruel, and again in the late afternoon, to make some sort of tortilla or tamale to go with the evening meal.
Gaspar Antonio Xiu gives exactly the same scheme of two liquid meals a day and one solid one (Xiu 1986: 62–63). He specifies the evening bread as tortillas and gives much more humble menus, not mentioning any soups and stews. There was sauce of ground chiles and water to wet the tortillas, and sometimes some black beans, but meat and fish were eaten only on holidays. Archaeological evidence shows us that meat and fish were high-status articles of diet going all the way back to the Classic Maya.
If these two Maya meal schedules are to be trusted, Maya women were considerably freer than women in highland Mexico, where large quantities of labor-intensive tortillas were demanded at every elite meal. Not only did the maize have to be freshly ground, but the tortillas had to be hot off the comal, or at least warm. No wonder that when European bread was introduced to the highlands of Mexico, conservative elderly Aztec men grumbled that without maize grinding the women would be up to who knows what sort of deviltry.
When Landa begins his dish-by-dish description of Maya sustenance, after he speaks of nixtamalization, he speaks of posolli. He does not call it this; in fact he gives no native names at all; but the text makes it clear that that is what he is talking about. We shall call it posolli, not the Maya keyem, although posolli is originally a Nahuatl word which has been used for many different dishes.
Landa says that posolli is made of half-ground maize, which is hard to interpret if the routine of turning the cooked, pericarpless, washed maize into maize dough is not familiar. The prepared maize is ground once, ground again, and then ground for a third time. After the first grinding the maize is fit to be made into posolli, after the second it may be made into tortillas, and after the third grinding it is smooth enough to be made into atolli. Thus we can reinterpret Landa as meaning that the maize for posolli was one-third ground, having had but one of the standard three passes over the metate. This dough could be mixed with water to form one of the seven maize drinks that begin Landa’s Maya menu. He goes on to say that great balls of this dough are given to travelers and that it lasts for months, merely becoming sour. Hernández de Córdoba’s Maya boatman and his ball of dough come immediately to mind. Landa’s statement is a summary dismissal of one of the most interesting food discoveries of the New World, a discovery probably made, and certainly heavily used, in the Maya area.
Landa omitted one vital fact, namely, that this dough was kept in a container set aside for that purpose or wrapped in leaves that had been used for wrapping sour posolli before. This provided a continuous culture, in this case a highly complex one, a whole sequence of bacteria, yeasts, and molds that worked on the maize dough. This soured posolli, which stands in roughly the same relationship to nixtamalized dough as yogurt stands to milk, has been shown to be nutritionally superior to untreated maize (Ulloa and Herrera 1986). Apparently some of the bacteria are nitrogen fixing, and experiments comparing the growth of laboratory rats fed on maize and those fed soured posolli found that the latter did better.
The sour dough, which many early authors did not differentiate from the unsoured, was usually mixed with water and drunk. Following a common New World pattern, plain water was rarely drunk with out additions. Captain Dampier said that the soured kind had a “sharp pleasant taste” and, as a typical Englishman, gave the drink a nickname. We call it “poorsoul,” he said (1906, 2: 209). According to him, when the natives entertained they added honey to it, but their culinary ambitions went no higher. In other places cacao was ground with the dough, which an appreciative imbiber said made the drink into another and higher thing. Other additions were toasted and ground sapayul seeds (Calocarpum mammosum), which were oily and gave a flavor of bitter almonds, or green maize.
Posolli, soured or not, is still very much in use, sometimes to the total exclusion of any other food or drink. It is the food of the very poor, being economical of firewood, on top of its many other virtues. Posolli and greens are today considered Indian food and therefore to be shunned by those who wish to repudiate their Maya ancestry. To fit in with modern ladino society one must shun maize drinks, increase the use of grease, and tomatoize one’s diet.
In the past, this drink was not, as it is at present, something to live down. Among the Huastec, a baby girl was given a bracelet of the bark of the hog plum tree (Spondias mombin) so that her dough for posolli might sour in one day, rather than the usual three. At the other end of the life cycle, the Chamula fill the mouth of the dead person that they are taking to the cemetery with posolli because, they say, in life, when they are tired, they sit by the side of the road and drink posolli. The veneration of posolli reaches a climax among the Lacandon, once supposed to be the direct descendants of the Classic Maya and now, less romantically and more realistically, considered to be the heirs of those Maya who, as Dampier (1906, 2: 211) said, found the impositions of the Europeans past all bearing and marched off into the jungle, whole villages at a time.
The Lacandon, for whom posolli was a food of major importance, offered it to their gods along with balché, sprinkling drops of posolli to the four directions before eating. Their saying was, “If there are no women, there is no posolli; if there is no posolli, there are no gods; if there is no posolli, there is no sun” (Soustelle 1959: 170).
Landa’s statement about atolli (again we use the Nahuatl word) shows that we are correct in our supposition that posolli was made of maize ground once, because he says that atolli was made from the finest ground maize, probably that ground three times. Using the model of the almond milk that he must have known in Spain, Landa says that a milk was extracted from this most finely ground maize, by which he must mean that it was mixed with water and then strained, so as to remove the coarse bits of unground material remaining.
Today these leavings, sometimes called bran, are given to the domestic animals. In a way this was also done in the past. One version of the Maya burial ritual had the dead person buried with atolli for personal sustenance during the trip through the underworld; maize leavings, or bran, to give to the animals that had been killed for meat, so that they would not hurt the dead person; and tortillas for the dogs that had been eaten, so that the deceased would not be bitten by them.
After the bran had been removed, the milky part remaining was cooked until it thickened, when it could be served hot for the morning meal. Landa calls it a sort of porridge, but sometimes it may have been a rather thin porridge, because there is a colloquial expression in that part of the world for deception—to give atolli with your fingers.
Atolli is basically distinguished by the cooking of the maize after it has been ground and diluted with water. It may be made of young maize that does not need to be nixtamalized to be softened to grinding consistency, and subsequently thickened by boiling. This was a great delicacy, and it could be improved by adding whole grains of young maize, so that there would be something to chew on. Young maize atolli was considered sufficiently cooked when a drop of it did not dissolve in cold water. Available only during a brief period of the year, it was often drunk from special vessels or used as an offering.
Like posolli, atolli could be soured, and it could be soured during many points in its preparation. One method was to soak the hard, ripe maize, without adding lime, for many days until it almost dissolved of its own accord. Alternatively it could be soaked, ground, and then left to sour before boiling. Souring could also take place after grinding and dilution. One recipe divides the ground maize dough mixed with water into two equal portions, one of which is boiled and then added to the unboiled portion and left to stand overnight. The next day the mixture is boiled again. The taste of the resulting substance is said not to be noticeably pleasant. Even young maize atolli could be soured.
Of course atolli could also be varied by adding other ingredients. All the American basics were so used. Chile was indispensable, but there were also beans, floated with their broth on top of the atolli, and ground toasted squash seeds to mix in. The marigold species Tagetes lucida, which is said to smell like cinnamon, could be added, as well as other fragrant species of Tagetes. The various root crops, previously cooked and mashed, were stirred in, either to add their distinctive taste or to stretch out the maize supply. Sweet potatoes are especially mentioned for this use.
Another technique used to vary the flavor of Maya maize drinks was to toast the maize at some point. A toasted maize powder used by voyagers will here be called pinolli, again from the Nahuatl. To make it the maize grains were parched, which made them easier to grind, then ground; or maize bread or dough was toasted and then ground. It could be eaten as it was, which made it hard to talk, because the pinolli was so dry, or mixed with water and then boiled, which would make it a form of atolli, by our definition.
Those on the road were unlikely to use much atolli, because to make it one had to carry a clay or metal vessel. At least one Spanish force is recorded as forgetting this item, which condemned them to a severely limited diet until they found some ancient Maya pots buried under a tree. Individuals, to avoid having to carry the heavy and bulky cooking pots, eschewed atolli and mixed their posolli and pinolli with water in their light, almost unbreakable calabash cups, leaving the cooking of atolli for the home fires. The calabash cups, or jícaras, were so much a part of their owners’ lives that they were buried with them.
There were also more complex atollis, which may be derived from European flour- or bread-crumb-thickened soups and stews, or may have been made for ceremonial purposes in Classic Maya times just as they are today. Whole turkeys are cooked in atolli today in the highland Maya villages of Guatemala for confraternity celebrations. We also read of an atolli with little balls of maize dough added to it, and an atolli with fruit in it. Was this what displeased Benzoni so when he saw it for sale in a market in Guatemala? He describes it as cooked “figs” dressed in a thoroughly mixed drink and said that it made him want to vomit (Benzoni 1962:109).
Basically bland and acceptable to the Spaniards because of its kinship with their gruels, atolli did not suffer the banishment to the diet of the Indian poor and lowly that posolli did. The Blessed Pedro Betancourt of Guatemala, who died in 1667, went about his hospital with a vessel of atolli, which he frequently ladled out for the sick. Such was his sanctity that when a malicious devil made the vessel fall, not a drop of the atolli was spilled. Late one night, when an ailing woman in a distant suburb had confessed to a desire for a sip of atolli, he miraculously appeared on her doorstep, carrying his atolli vessel. Neither the lateness of the hour nor the distance had prevented him from coming to satisfy her longing.
Landa does not mention the third class of maize drinks. This may be explained by the fact that today saka or zaka is exclusively consumed during ceremonies. Either the existence of this component of pagan rites was concealed from Landa, or he did not bother to distinguish it from the previously described drinks. What makes this drink unlike the others is that it is made of maize which has not been treated with lime; in other words, it has not undergone the nixtamalization process. Sometimes the maize is barely soft enough to grind, so that the drink is said to be rather sandy in texture, although it keeps better. As usual, there are innumerable local variations, adding cacao, or honey, or other ingredients which would seem to compromise the whiteness that is promised to us by the name saka, or white water. This stress on whiteness is reflected in one of the many Maya food riddles, one which is sometimes translated as applying to atolli as well as to sacab, another name for the white liquid:
“My son, bring me your daughter, she of the white face, so that I may see her. She of the handsome white headdress, of the knotted hair, I desire her.” “It shall be done, oh father!” What he is asking for is a white jícara full of sacab, the water of maize without lime. (Barrera Vásquez 1985:142)
White maize liquid shares with cacao the honor of being the first foodstuffs to have their names read from the hieroglyphs on the Maya vessels that were buried with the noble Maya dead during the Maya Classic. The glyphs for sac-ul have been found on globular vessels, apparently the shape used by the Classic Maya when they wished the liquid enclosed to stay cool. This is translated as white atolli, although sixteenth-century Maya dictionaries specifically say that ul is not any old atolli but that made of young maize. If it was young maize atolli that was being buried with the dead, it would explain why vessels for sac-ul are so much rarer than vessels for chocolate. Only those who were buried at the time of new maize could carry sac-ul on their journey to the underworld, while cacao was available, at a price, at any season.
Chocolate drinks are the last drinks to be mentioned by Landa. But we know that the Maya were consuming chocolate long before Landa, because we can read the inscriptions on the rims of the vessels that they drank it from. Chocolate was obviously of great importance to the Classic Maya, because they took their elegantly painted cylindrical clay chocolate vessels with them into the darkness of the tomb. One of these vessels has a scene of chocolate preparation painted on it, with a buxom young lady pouring the contents of one cylindrical chocolate vessel into another such vessel standing on the ground. We have seen this method of raising a fine head on the chocolate among the Aztecs, and here we see it among the Maya almost a thousand years earlier.
If there are any Maya chocolate recipes in hieroglyphic writing on the vessels, they have yet to be found and translated. We may be sure that there were many ways of consuming it, allowing us to reinterpret the recent analysis of the residue in five Maya vessels found with a burial in Río Azul, Guatemala. Laboratory tests showed that one contained both theobromine and caffeine, alkaloids present in cacao. Three had traces of theobromine, while the last had no trace of any cacao component. This was said to mean that one vessel certainly contained chocolate beverage, three may have, and the last one certainly did not (Hall et al. 1990). It could just as well mean that the dead person had been supplied with three different drinks to take to the other world. He had one container of strong chocolate, three of a milder chocolate, and one which held something else entirely.
To get an idea of the diversity of chocolate recipes which might have filled the Classic Maya chocolate vessels, we must go back to our sixteenth-century sources. Landa says that chocolate could be added to pinolli, the toasted maize powder carried by travelers, as an alternative to chile. He also speaks of a drink of ground maize and chocolate which he says is foamy and used by the Maya to celebrate their feasts. We are granted no further details and are left to wonder if this was atolli with chocolate, posolli with chocolate, or something else. His last drink is made of cacao butter, extracted by beating the ground cacao beans with water. The Spaniards consumed this substance with sugar and cinnamon or added it to their chocolate. That may not have been aboriginal, but the maize drink which Landa mentions that had cacao butter added to it, which he said was highly thought of, probably was. Van Houten’s nineteenth-century discovery that cacao butter could be removed from one set of chocolate preparations and added to another set to enhance flavor and eating qualities was being used on cacao’s native soil several hundred years before the Dutchman thought of it.
Classic Maya chocolate preparation. From a Maya vase in the Princeton Art Museum. Drawing by Diane Griffiths Peck. Courtesy Michael D. Coe.
Landa does not give us the full repertory of chocolate drinks; in fact, he leaves out the principal chocolate drink, which was the one that probably had the most religious significance to the Maya. We must go to another source to find the contents of true Maya chocolate. Notice that it is taken hot.
As well as being currency the cacao is eaten toasted like toasted chick-peas, and it is very good thus. They make many drinks of it, and they are very good, some of them drunk cold, and some hot, and among them is a very common one, called chocolate. It is made of the aforementioned cacao ground, with honey and hot water, other mixtures and hot things being added. This drink is very medicinal and healthy. (Ciudad Real 1976:182–183)
Chocolate drunk with honey, chile peppers, or plain with water may be passed over as standard preparations all over Mesoamerica. Some interesting and uncommon fragrances were added among the Maya. One such addition was achiote, a red paste made from the outside coating of Bixa orellana seeds, growing on a handsome shrub with decorative flowers that is still planted in tropical dooryards. The coloring matter was used to tint butter in northern climates, as well as human bodies in warmer ones. The original “redskins” may have been so called not because of their complexion but for the color of the achiote applied to their skins. The addition of achiote to cacao made it a brick red color and may have been a way of making the chocolate into surrogate blood, blood being a vital component of the Maya state religion. This tie between achiote and chocolate is expressed in a rather cryptic fashion by another Maya food riddle, which also features the cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), a well-known red migratory bird that occurs in the northeastern United States and has a prominent crest which it can raise and lower, a metaphor for the precious chocolate foam.
“My son, bring me four Chac Dzibzib, cardinal birds, those that are at the entrance of the cave, and bring them standing on my precious foodstuff. Let their crests be reddened, and let them be raised on my precious foodstuff when you come before me.” “It shall be done, oh father.” What he asks for is ciui, achiote paste; the crests of which he speaks are the foam of the chocolate, and his precious foodstuff is cacao that has just been ground. (Barrera Vásquez 1985:139)
A chocolate condiment not encountered previously is Quararibea fieldii or funebris. This last, according to Schultes (i956: 249), can taste like slippery elm, curry, or licorice. There was also the ground seed of sapayul (Calocarpum mammosum) that could be added.
The ritual importance of chocolate drinks continues to this day, although we might not recognize them as chocolate. According to Popenoe (1919: 407), one such drink, batido, then used in the highlands of Guatemala, was a murky, oily liquid with only the slightest chocolate taste. The recipe he gives, one teaspoon of chocolate paste to one cup of water, certainly could not be expected to produce full-bodied flavor.
Aside from Theobroma cacao, there was also its relative Theobroma bicolor, known as pataxte. The large flat beans were sometimes eaten raw, and it was claimed that the use of the beans in drinks led to rashes and diseases, at any rate among non-Indians. While cacao was taken up and embraced by the invaders, pataxte remained an Indian drink. Mixed with Theobroma cacao, however, it produced an extra fine head of foam.