Solid Maya Breadstuffs
After having described the many maize-based drinks, with and without cacao, Landa gives but a paragraph to “bread.” He tells us that there were many different kinds available and they were all better hot than cold. Modern scholars noticed that tortillas were not mentioned, being unaware that Landa’s use of “bread” could refer to both tamales and tortillas; and from this they invented a confrontation between the two forms of breadstuff which never existed.
The whole issue is a spurious one, because, as we shall see, tortillas and tamales are made of the same dough and intergrade to such an extent that it is sometimes difficult to recognize which of the two has been produced from a particular recipe. The reason for the debate, besides ignorance of matters culinary, is that partisans of the Maya consider tamales to be indigenous and the tortilla to be an import from highland Mexico, along with such unpleasantness as human sacrifice, warfare, and idolatry. However, the old picture of the Classic Maya as peaceful and philosophical agriculturalists, passionately interested in time, the stars, and the calendar, has faded, to be replaced by a new vision of small warring city-states quite capable of savage warfare and bloody sacrifice without outside stimulus. Whoever they were, philosopher farmers or princely warriors, we can only speculate about which maize breadstuffs they consumed when they were not consuming maize as a liquid. It is fair to suppose that they had a great range to choose from, which I will illustrate with examples taken from various periods and places of Maya history.
There are a few indications that tortillas as we define them—thin flat round cakes of dough made of nixtamalized maize toasted on a comal—were not always used in the Maya area. If we take the presence of comales, the flat clay griddles on which the tortillas were toasted, as a diagnostic trait, we find them absent in much of the Maya area, although present on the east coast of Yucatan, at the site of Copan in Honduras, and in the highlands of Guatemala. In the latter area, we have an account of a riot that began when a soldier of a prince of Quiché tried to take the tortillas of a woman who was selling them in the marketplace. It is also said that one Maya group, the Manche Chol, did not know how to make tortillas and had to be taught by the missionaries. Previously they had consumed all their maize in liquid form.
If we define a tortilla as just a round thin cake of maize dough, however toasted, the comal becomes a less significant diagnostic feature. There are many words in Maya dictionaries for tortillas, usually described as rather thick, round cakes toasted directly on or under the coals or ashes of the cooking fire. This must seem impossible to the Western scholar, ensconced in an armchair or in a jungle camp. It also seemed impossible to travelers in colonial North America, who barely disguised a grimace of disgust as they saw their maize bread being put, raw, into the ashes of the fire. But with the next sentence the grimace was wiped off their faces. They describe the hostess retrieving the baked bread a short while later, brushing it off, and presenting it to the guests. And, the guests exclaim, how very clean and nice it was!
The Popul Vuh (Tedlock 1985), the Maya book that is called the “Bible of Mesoamerica,” gives us a clue to another possible method of toasting tortillas without a comal. One of the many tests to which the hero twins are subjected in the underworld is to sit on the hot seat, a heated stone slab for cooking (Tedlock 1985: 136). Archaeologists have not reported on the presence or absence of suitable stone slabs in the way that they have reported on the absence or presence of comal fragments, because it would indeed be difficult to distinguish such a slab from an uncarved stela or a piece of building material. It would have been necessary to have a suitable source of stone within carrying distance, because not all stone behaves properly when subjected to the heat of a cooking fire.
Such slabs were mined, shaped, and meticulously smoothed and seasoned, with accompanying religious observances, during the period that Frank Cushing (1920: 317–343) was observing the Zuñi of New Mexico in the early years of this century. In the case of che Zuñi, the slabs were used for the preparation of the staple piki, a papery thin maize bread. I am not suggesting that the Maya made piki bread because the Zuñi do so, merely that the use of properly prepared stone slabs for cooking maize bread is not unknown on this continent.
However the bread was prepared, whether on a stone slab, on or under the ashes of the cooking fire, on a comal, wrapped in leaves and steamed, wrapped in leaves and toasted on the comal or on the coals, or any other method, it was the composition of the dough which was the most important matter. Here, as in our discussion of maize drinks, we must start with the maize, and first of all with the young green maize. Any sort of bread could be made out of it, although it had to be at the proper degree of ripeness or the mixture would be too watery to hold together. Maize at the right point of ripeness needed no soaking or boiling; it could be ground and prepared immediately. There were maize varieties planted especially for making young maize breadstuffs, but the period during which any sort of maize is at the correct stage of ripeness is limited, and young maize bread must always have been a rare delicacy, available only during a brief season.
The main crop maize, the hard, ripe dry grain that was stored to carry the Maya through to the next harvest, was usually made into dough by the nixtamal method. English and American writers commonly write of this dough as being composed of “corn meal,” which it is not. Corn or maize meal, however familiar it may be to us, barely existed in Mesoamerica, and it is not hard to see why. Unparched, unpopped dry maize would have been next to impossible to reduce to flour or meal by pounding. Softening it up with lime soaking and boiling was a much easier way to make it into a manageable dough, as well as a more nutritious one.
Once the nixtamal was ground, the bread maker had many choices. Seasonings could be applied to the dough or mixed into it. Maya cooks mixed chiles with their maize dough, as well as ground toasted squash seeds, honey, and achiote. Especially common, and often used for ceremonies, were bread doughs that incorporated beans. The beans, usually the small black Maya beans, could be added cooked whole, cooked and then ground to a paste, or used partially ripe and whole, like shell beans. In the last case the dough could only be used to form tamales, because they had to be cooked for a long time—otherwise the beans remained uncooked.
All these recipes, except the last, produced a dough that was suitable for tamales, tortillas, or intermediate forms. Some recent ethnographic descriptions and recipes for making tamales have the dough being re cooked at this point, with the addition of water or broth. Other modern variations on tamale dough include adding up to half the weight of the dough of lard, the mixture then being beaten until a small blob floats on water. The latter elaboration and probably the former as well are demonstrations of the influence of the European cuisine on the indigenous one.
Plain or with additions, we have arrived at a dough which is suitable for making a great variety of edible objects. If we choose to go the tamale route, the dough, plain or with a filling, can be wrapped in leaves preparatory to cooking. Today the choice tends to be between the leaves of bananas or plantains, or maize husks. In earlier times many other leaves were used, some of which, like the leaves of some kinds of avocados and the leaves of Piper species, contributed their own flavor to the finished product. Gathering leaves in the forest was a male task. If he came back with suitable leaves, then tamales were made; if not, another form of breadstuff was substituted. In the highlands tamalewrapping leaves were mostly available during the rainy season, thus adding another dimension to the maize consumption question. Discarded tamale wrappings form a conspicuous part of street and roadside scenery in Mexico and Guatemala today, but their grease-soaked and tomato-stained appearance shows how far the contents have departed from the original.
A plain tamale could be wrapped and tied with no further ado. If different kinds of tamales were being steamed in the same pot they could be identified by distinctive manners of wrapping and tying. Filled tamales were constructed in at least two ways. The filling could be simply placed in a depression in the dough, which was then sealed with more dough, or the dough could be spread on a piece of fabric, the filling spread on the dough, and then the whole thing rolled up like a jelly roll, using the fabric to help in the process. Sections of the roll could then be cut off, wrapped in leaves, tied, and cooked. Paintings on Classic Maya vases show us plates of round objects with dark spirals on their upper surfaces, exactly the pattern one would expect on the cut top of a tamale filled in this fashion. Other possible breadstuffs shown in Classic Maya vase paintings include a dish of oval objects, some white and some yellow, which are roughly the same size as the attendant servant’s hand. Today tamales are always served with their wrappers, but this may be because postconquest additions like lard and broth make them too sloppy to be served conveniently without them. Perhaps the white and yellow objects are firm tamales, made of white and yellow maize dough. It is not likely that they are tortillas, because they are not depicted the way a stack of flat objects would be shown.
The choice of tamale fillings was endless. The same bean preparations that were mixed with the dough could be used to fill it, as could ground toasted squash seeds, meat, fish, and fowl stews, squash flowers, the fragrant white flowers of the loroco (Urechites karwinskii), and all the many greens used by the Maya, especially chaya (Jatropha aconitifolia) and chipilín (Crotalaria vitellina). Landa mentions special breads for offerings made with egg yolks, deer hearts, or quail, and some made in the shape of a heart. Other sources describe a tamale filled with egg covered with squash seed sauce, which was then wrapped in a chaya leaf, and a tamale filled with a dove breast. They could also be stuffed with squash seeds and black beans, or chaya and black beans, or beans and the leaves of one of the many Piper species. Whole birds were covered with dough, wrapped in a mat, and cooked in a pib, or pit oven. This dish had a sinister significance, according to Cogolludo’s description of a seventeenth-century missionary expedition.
This chief was called Don Pedro Noh, and he spoke our Spanish tongue very well. He seemed to have good intentions toward the religious, to whom he brought some food, among which was a fowl covered with dough. This turkey so treated our Indians took for a bad omen, saying that it was a sign of war, and that they did not wish peace. (Cogolludo 1954–1955, 3: 267–268)
Once the tamale was filled, if it was going to be filled, and securely wrapped and tied, it had to be cooked. Today in some parts of the Maya area there are globular vessels called tamaleros, with a small top opening and a tightly fitting lid. They come in different sizes, from the one that will cook enough tamales for a small family to the one that will hold hundreds of tamales, enough for a village feast. A small quantity of water is put into such a pot, and a framework of sticks is constructed in the pot, so that the tamales are held above the water and steamed, not boiled. The fragments of Maya domestic pottery containing boiler scale which have been found in Belize might be taken as confirming the steaming of tamales there by the Classic Maya.
Steaming was not the only way to cook the tamale in its wrapping of leaves. It could be put on the heated comal and turned until it was heated through. Cooking under, in, or over the hot coals and ashes of the cooking fire, all were possible. The barbacoa, the framework of sticks that held objects to be cooked and smoked over a fire, could also be employed. For the larger versions especially there was the pib, the oven that was a hole excavated in the ground with a fire built in it to heat the earth and the stones. After the fire had burned down, this oven was loaded with food to be cooked and then sealed with leaves and earth, to be left until the fragrance signaled that it was time for the food to be unearthed.
A special bread, described ambiguously as being made of tortillas or tamales but more probably made out of the dough that is the basis of both, is still made today for the chaachak ceremony, as an offering to the rain god Chac. This bread is a many-layered construction of maize dough with ground toasted squash seeds, or ground black beans, between the layers. The Maya heavens are believed to consist of thirteen layers, and the layers of bread imitate the construction of the heavens. The dough is made by the women, but the actual bread is put together by the hmen, the leader of the ceremony. When it is assembled he jabs his fingers into the soft surface and pours balché into the resulting holes. Then the whole thing is wrapped up and placed in the pib, which has been dug and heated for the occasion. In some performances of these rites this special bread was shared among the participants after it was cooked. In others it was mashed with the broth resulting from the cooking of the sacrificial turkey and then consumed as a form of maize drink.
For travelers special tamales were prepared which we are told could keep up to twenty days. Some of these long-keeping provisions were large plain tamales, shaped like our loaves of bread, which were then sliced and the individual slices warmed on a heated comal or on hot stones. Another sort of traveler’s stores was eaten by Tomás de la Torre after his shipwreck:
Because we were hungry the Indians gave us some of their bread, which was lumps cooked in water, strung on a string like a rosary, black and hard and tasteless, and this was like ship’s biscuit for the Indians when they travel. (La Torre 1944: 149)
Maize dough that has been made into nixtamal by cooking with an extra amount of wood ashes produces tamales that have a hard skin when dried. These were used as storable supplies in Guatemala and may have been something like the “rosary beads” eaten by Tomás de la Torre.
The tortilla end of the range of edibles that may be made from maize dough is as varied as the tamale end. Today the tortilla is made large or small, thick or thin, depending on family size and taste. Families with many adolescent males tend to prepare large thick tortillas. The tortillas are cooked on the comal, but they could also be cooked in the other ways that we have described or folded into leaves and placed directly on the heat source.
Baer and Merrifield (1971: 187–190) give us four different kinds of tortillas, each used and appreciated for their distinctive qualities by the contemporary Lacandons. The first are what we would consider to be the standard tortilla for the Maya area, shaped on a leaf and toasted on a lime water-brushed comal so that they puff up briefly, the way proper tortillas do. The second are sourdough tortillas, made of maize dough that has stood overnight and does not puff up when toasted in the way that the first kind does. The third kind is the young maize tortilla, and the final kind is shaped by the two-handed Mexican technique—it is smaller and thicker than the others. Other authors tell us that Lacandon cooked tortillas could be coated with bean paste and then more maize dough and toasted again.
Tortillas were made into travel provisions by drying in the sun or toasting on the fire again. Baer says that the Lacandon prefer the sourdough variety for this treatment, because it becomes crisp when toasted. If the product was not crisp it could be ground and drunk with water; in other words it could be made into a maize drink. This seems like a good idea when you read Valenzuela’s (1979: 312) recommendation for jaws with teeth of steel to cope with travel provisions like these.
The most interesting thing about a tortilla is what may be wrapped in it and what it is dipped into. It is rarely eaten without accompaniment, at the very least a sauce or a bean dish. The simplest sauce was ground dried chiles and water. From this humble ancestor comes the line which terminates with the trendy salsas beloved of a certain school of today’s chefs. But even the original inventors of tortilla-dipping sauces varied them when they could. The ground toasted seeds of large and small squashes, always carefully differentiated by the Maya, could be added to the basic chile water, or you could mix epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides) with water and then add ground toasted squash seeds to the flavored liquid. A member of the laurel family, Litsea neesiana, could step up the taste, as could Lippia mexicana, also known as Mexican oregano. Even better, however, than dipping your tortilla into one of these sauces was dipping it into, or wrapping it around, one of the meat, fish, or fowl dishes next to be described.