The Inca: Animal and Mineral
Peru is different. The deserts are drier, the mountains are higher, the chile peppers on your plate are a different species. Today the desert Pacific coast of Peru exceeds the usual definition of a desert as a place where, for reasons of climatic stringency, usually drought, every plant is separated from every other plant by bare soil. In many places there is absolutely no vegetation whatsoever, but this moon landscape is in part caused by European deforestation. Even in pre-Columbian times, however, the vegetation was sparse, because for all practical purposes it does not rain on the Pacific coast of Peru. The ocean, however, is brimming over with life, because the cold Humboldt current carries immense quantities of nutrients which feed great populations of mollusks, fish, birds, and sea mammals.
A trifle inland, in the foothills of the Andes, you get the first consistent vegetation. It is watered by the mist, the garúa, that blows in off the sea, and therefore varies with the season. In a good year it can provide pasture and edibles like snails. Above this region, known as the lomas, the mountains rise rapidly, going through a series of climatic zones which end with permanent snow. The Andes as a whole are a tangled skein of north-south mountain ranges, but where our interest centers, in north-central Peru, there are only two. The Black Cordillera overlooks the Pacific, and the higher White Cordillera parallels it to the east. The two ranges are sometimes close together and at other times draw apart, leaving a high plain between them. Despite the altitude this was the most prosperous part of the Inca empire.
Beyond the city of Cuzco, which was in ancient times the seat of the court of the lords of these kingdoms, the two mountain ranges of which I speak separate, leaving between them a great plain, which is called the province of Collao. Here there are many rivers, and Titicaca the great lake, wide spaces and copious fodder, because while the land is flat it has the same altitude and climate as the mountains. No trees grow there, and there is no firewood, but they replace bread by some roots they plant which they call papas which grow underground, and these are the food of the Indians, who by drying them and curing them make what they call chuño, which is the bread and sustenance of the country. There are also other roots and herbs which they eat. It is a healthy place and the most populated of the Indies, and the richest because of the abundance of cattle which are easily raised there . . . the native ones which are called guanacos and pacos, there are also partridges to hunt to your heart’s content. (Acosta in Porras Barrenechea 1986: 387)
To the east of the White Cordillera the slopes descend into the Amazon forests, and the rivers, no longer mountain torrents, begin a more sluggish stage of their journey toward the Atlantic.
Even though this description of the Inca area is of the sketchiest it should be evident that there are enormous quantities of ecological niches available. Given that for every thousand feet one ascends the temperature drops three or four degrees Fahrenheit, and adding to this all the possible differences in soils, sunny slopes or shady ones, good or poor drainage of water and frost, and protection from or exposure to damaging winds and hail, the number of available microclimates is astronomical. It makes plausible the Peruvian claim that their inventory of domesticated plants is the world’s largest.
The Inca who inhabited this remarkable country when the Europeans appeared were even newer at empire building than the Aztecs. Most of their territorial expansion took place in the highlands in the second half of the fifteenth century, although, again like the Aztecs, they were surrounded by the ruins of the empires that had preceded them. The Inca, a term now used for both the people and their ruler, were more systematic than the Aztecs in their conquests. They demanded that the conquered learn Quechua, accept Inca gods and laws in addition to their own, and send their local gods to Cuzco, the Inca capital. Rebellions were crushed by exchanging populations over huge-distances. Habits that the Inca disapproved of, like eating dogs and people, were eliminated.
From the culinary point of view one major difference between the Inca and the Maya and Aztecs to the north is instantly obvious. The Inca had not one but two species of domesticated large mammals: the llama (Lama glama) and the alpaca (Lama pacos). Along with the two wild species, the vicuña (Vicugna vicugna) and the guanaco (Lama guanicoe), they are known as the American camelids, which gives us a clue to their Old World relatives. The llama seems to have been domesticated in the highlands between 4550 and 3100 B.C. The Spaniards usually called llamas and alpacas ovejas de la tierra and carneros de la tierra, or native sheep and native lambs, but sometimes they switched the names.
There is nothing in Peru that is more profitable and useful than the cattle of the country, which our people call the sheep of the Indies, and the Indians in their language call llamas. Looking at them carefully one can see that of all animals known it produces the most for the least expense. From this cattle they get food and clothing, as in Europe they do from sheep, but they also get transportation . . . for they use them to bring cargo and take it away. And they do not have to waste sustenance in shoeing or saddles or packsaddles or feed, as they serve their masters for free, contenting themselves with the forage they find in the fields . . . From the meat of this cattle they make cusharqui or cured meat, which lasts for a long time and is highly valued. They send troops of these animals as pack animals, and a string of them, three hundred or five hundred or even a thousand, will carry wine, coca, maize, chuño, quicksilver, and other merchandise. (Acosta in Porras Barrenechea 1986: 383)
The Spaniards praised the animals but did nothing to encourage their increase and well-being. Thousands were slaughtered for their bezoar stones, which are intestinal accumulations of insoluble salts that were believed to have medicinal value, as Monardes tells us.
It is the moste principall remedie that we knowe nowe, and that whiche hath doone best effect, in many that have been poysoned, whiche have taken it as well by Venome taken at the mouthe as by bitinges of venomos wormes, whiche are full of poyson. It doth truely a marveilous and a manifest worke, unto them that have dronke water standying in a stinkyng lake, beyng infected with beastes or varmentes whiche are full of poyson, and beyng swollen imediatly after that they had dronke it: by takyng of this stone twoo or three tymes, they were remedied, as I have seen them after this did happe, whole and well. (Monardes 1925, 2: 27)
The chaos of a downed empire took its toll of the llama population as well as of the human one. During Inca rule llamas infected with caracha were slaughtered by the state shepherds and buried in an out-of-the-way place. When this was no longer done, the infection could spread unchecked, and by 1544 it reached the magnitude of a great epidemic. An estimated two-thirds of the llama flocks died.
Llamas used to transport maize and potatoes to the state warehouses. From Guaman Poma de Ayala 1936:1050.
Llamas had a major role in Inca ideology as well as gastronomy. A perfect white llama, decked out with red clothing and gold earrings, was a symbol of royalty and sometimes preceded the Inca on his progresses. A llama figures in at least one version of the origin myth. Llamas were sacrificed in great numbers, with llamas of specific colors being reserved for specific gods, and llama blood was used for ritual anointing. Llama bones appear in graves, especially skulls and trotters. Archaeologists have suggested that the meatier portions were used to make dried meat, charqui (a word derived from the Quechua cusharqui and the source of the English word “jerky”), while the less-enticing bony portions were left for the dead. This tells us more about the modern prejudice in favor of muscle meat than it does about ancient Peruvian eating habits. The Europeans found llama tongues and brains great delicacies. Perhaps they were delicacies for the Inca as well, not just useless scraps to be disposed of by pitching them into the nearest grave.
Because the llamas were so important in Inca culture, their use was very strictly controlled, at least in theory.
And one should know that, even though there was such a great quantity [of camelids], it was commanded by the kings that nobody should dare kill or eat any of them under pain of great punishment. And if they did break this command they were punished, and with this fear they did not dare to eat them. (Cieza de León, 1967: 49)
Every five hundred llamas in the state flocks were assigned a shepherd, and he was accountable for every bit of every one of his charges.
If an animal died, he [the shepherd] was obliged to put the skin in one place and the wool in another, which he had to account for, and all the meat, piece by piece, insides and outsides, he had to salt with the bones; so that when they asked his accounting he could almost reconstruct the llama, taking and showing piece by piece. Thus not a piece of meat or anything else could be eaten by the shepherd or used by him for anything else without it being obvious. (Las Casas, quoted in Antuñez de Mayolo 1981:63)
The rulers in Cuzco may have had slaughterhouses to provide them with meat, but the plebeians probably had to wait for one of the commuñal feasts to get a bite. What did it taste like? Antuñez de Mayolo says that the flesh of llamas more than two years old is resinous because of their diet, but the resinous taste disappears if the meat is made into charqui. Acosta agrees:
Their meat is good, although resinous, that of the young ones is one of the best and most delicate things you can eat, but they use little for eating, as their main uses are for wool to make clothing and as pack animals. (Acosta 1954: 136)
E. G. Squier, who traveled in Peru in the 1870s, said that the best llama meat was inferior to the worst mule meat.
If llamas were more useful when alive as transport and sources of fiber, and when dead their meat was controlled and distributed by the state, what was available to the humble householder? The answer was guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus), known in Peru as cuy. Domesticated and widespread by 2000 B.C. in the highlands, their squeaking and rustling still enliven Indian dwellings today. They are fed specially collected wild plants and, because they cannot climb, a simple sill is enough to keep them inside the house. Notorious for quick multiplication, two males and twenty females are said to be able to provide a family with a cuy a day.
The Indians eat this little animal with the skin on, only removing the hair as if it were a suckling pig. For them it is a great delicacy, and they cook it whole, gutted, with much chile and smooth pebbles from the river. The stones they call calapurca, which in Aymara means “stomach stones,” because in this dish they put the stones in the belly of the cuy. This dish the Indians consider a greater delicacy than anything the Spaniards can make. (Cobo 1890–1893, 2: 306)
The stones Cobo describes were heated before they were put into the belly of the cuy. Roasting and boiling, using heated stones, were important in Andean culinary technology and had other uses as well. During the siege of Cuzco, when the rebelling Inca had a force of Europeans bottled up in the town, the thatched roofs were set on fire by hot stones hurled by the Inca. Putting a few heated pebbles in the body cavity of a cuy would have posed no problem. Other recipes for cooking cuy suggest stuffing it with mint and Tagetes minuta, a Mexican species of New World marigold. In aboriginal times the mint was probably replaced by muña (Minthostachys setosa) and the Mexican Tagetes by any of several Peruvian ones. The entrails of the cuy could be cooked in a soup with potatoes or made into a sauce. But even this inoffensive animal aroused the wrath of the Church.
The usual sacrifice is of cuys, which they use to no good end, not only for sacrifices, but also for divining and curing. And if it were possible to get rid of them it would be a good thing, but everybody raises them in their houses, and they even have them in Rome, where I saw them being sold in public, and asking as if I did not know what they were, they told me they were “rabbits of the Indies.” (Arriaga 1968: 210)
Fortunately for the hungry inhabitants of Peru, the attempt to get rid of cuys altogether was quashed by an early Spanish administrator.
Unfortunately for us there were also other creatures from the New World being raised and eaten in sixteenth-century Rome as “rabbits of the Indies,” or conigli d’India. Bartolommeo Scappi, who described himself as the “secret cook” of Pope Pius V on the title page of his cookbook, which was published in 1570, gives several recipes for “rabbits of the Indies,” mentioning that they are in season from November to March. But as one begins to read his description of the animal doubts begin to gather, and then they become overwhelming. Whatever the creature was (and it may have been an agouti, Dasyprocta mexicana, an animal from Mesoamerica which makes such delicious eating that it is reputed to have been served Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Belize), it certainly was not a guinea pig. Scappi says that it had a pointed muzzle, and there is a contemporary drawing by the natural history artist Jacopo Ligozzi labeled coniglio d’India and identified as an agouti picturing this eminently non-guinea pig characteristic. Another warning to culinary historians not to jump blithely to conclusions.
Other early sources describe ducks being eaten in Peru, but archaeologists have found no domesticated duck bones in the rubbish they have dug up. Bones of the muscovy duck (Cairina moschata) have been found in Ecuador associated with bones of domesticated cuys in an archaeological phase that lasted from 100 B.C. to A.D. 800 (Stahl and Norton 1987). It may have been these ducks that figure in one of the very few eyewitness descriptions of actual food by the conquistadors. The gift one of the claimants to the Inca throne sent to the advancing Francisco Pizarro was some dried ducks stuffed with wool. Whether this was elite food, incense, or an implied insult will be discussed later.
There were other edible wild animals and birds. The wild camelids have been discussed, but there were also two species of deer, the whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and the huemul deer (Hippocamelus antesensis), as well as an indigenous creature called the vizcacha (Lagidium peruanum).
There is another kind of animal called a vizcacha, of the size and shape of a hare, except that it has a long tail like a fox, it lives on rock slides and stony places . . . the Indians kill it with lassos; they are good to eat when well hung; and of the skin or fur of these vizcachas the Indians make great mantles, as smooth as if they were of silk, and they are very highly prized. (Cieza de León n.d.: 475)
The exploitation of wild animals seems to have been as tightly controlled by the state as the utilization of the domesticated ones. Cieza de León does not mention in the following quotation what happened to the meat of the animals that were culled during these great hunts, but other sources tell us that it went into the ever-ready state warehouses.
I have been told that the Inca had in this province a royal preserve, where under pain of death no one of the aborigines could enter to kill wild camelids, of which there was a great number, as well as some lions [pumas presumably], bears, foxes, and deer. And when the Inca wished to have a royal hunt, he ordered three or four or ten or twenty, or however many Indians were needed to be brought together, and they encircled a large portion of that country in such a manner, that little by little they came together so that they could join hands, and in the enclosure they had made there was all the game collected. There it was greatly diverting to see the jumps the guanacos made, and the fearful foxes going from one place to another looking for a way to get out; and a certain number of Indians would go into the enclosure with their slings and sticks and kill and capture as many as the lord desired, because in these hunts they could take ten to fifteen thousand head of camelids, or as many as they wished, because there were so many of them. From the wool of these animals they made the most esteemed fabric, to ornament the temples, and for the service of the Inca and his wives and children. (Cieza de León n.d.: 400)
The sea also provided food, especially dried fish, the mainstay of the Inca army. A glimpse of the variety available is given to us by the excavations of Marcus (1987), though the site is actually slightly earlier than the Inca period. There were three areas to be exploited: the rocky cliffs, the cobble and gravel beach, and the sandy beach with mudflats at the rivermouth. From the first came limpets (genus Fissurella), mussels (Perumytilus, Semimytilus), chitons (Acanthopleura, Enoplochiton), and chanque (Concholepas), an abalonelike creature. Fish fed on the mollusks, and there were also bird rookeries, penguin nurseries, and sea lions (Otaria flavescens). The cobble beach had robalo (Sciaena starksi), bonito (Sarda sarda), dolphins, and more sea lions. The sandy beach provided crustaceans, skates, rays, and small sharks (Mustelus), and the mudflats produced mullets (Mugil) and sea-catfish (Galeichthys peruvianus). The buildings excavated provided a rare glimpse of culinary activity. There were two long hearth trenches for heating rows of pots. There were great storage jars set in the floor, with capacities of 700 to 2,000 liters. The major role of chicha, beer made from maize or other things, in Inca social structure will be described later, but this substantiates the chroniclers’ tales. There was a room with cuy droppings and soiled grass, and another room with bedding for the cuys. Finally, there were rooms filled with fine sand, apparently to store the small dried fish the establishment prepared, the sand keeping them dry by hygroscopic action.
Frogs, including the rana de Junín (Batrachophyrynus macrostomus), provided meat in other places. These may be the creatures to which Monardes is referring in his picturesque Elizabethan translation:
It raineth Todes as great as those of Spaine, the whiche the Indians dooe eate rosted, for thei are a kind of people whiche eate all kinde of venomous beastes. (Monardes 1925, 1: 143)
Mayfly larvae, which develop on the highland lakes during Lent, were also consumed, either raw and alive in great fistfuls or else prepared for storage.
They also store them to make sauces, prepared in this manner: after being toasted and ground they make them into little loaves . . . which can be stored for a long time. With much chile added these make a sauce which the Indians find a delicacy and very appetizing. It is not badly received by the Spaniards, especially those born in this country, who are called creoles. This sauce is eaten with fish and any other thing, both on ordinary days and Lenten ones. (Cobo 1890–1893, 2: 138–139)
Caterpillars, beetles, and ants were also eaten, but we have no accounts of precisely how.
The preservation of meat, fish, and insects immediately suggests salt. There was plenty of salt available in Peru, both from the sea and from salt springs in the highlands. We know that salt was a highly valued condiment because the simpler stages of fasting and penance consisted of eating without salt or chile. Yet Cobo, considered one of the best sources, even though he was in Peru in the early seventeenth century and did not write his books until the 1650s, denies that it was ever used to preserve meat or fish.
Even though the Indians thought so highly of salt that the most rigorous fast in the time of their paganism was to abstain from it, however, they used very little in comparison with what we use. There was little enough to put salt in, because even the meat and the fish they dried, to preserve it and take it from one place to another, was without a grain of salt, which they did in this manner: if the meat or fish was to be kept for a short time they roasted it on a barbacoa, and this was done by the Yunca Indians of the hot country [Amazonia], but those of Peru, to store things for short or long time alike, dried their meat and fish in the sun on the sea coast and by freezing it in the highlands. Even the stews and pottages they ate were not always seasoned with salt. Instead, when they ate, they would put a lump of salt next to the dish, and that was the salt cellar, and when they ate they would lick it, giving the palate a taste of salt rather than the pottage. Sometimes, when many were eating together, and there was only one lump of salt, they would pass it from hand to hand, licking it one after another. (Cobo 1890–1893, 1: 238–239)
Although this sounds very convincing and has been accepted by many modern scholars, there are many other sources which speak of fish dried and fish salted, as if both things existed. One of them is Bartolomé de las Casas, who compiled his material in the first half of the sixteenth century but worked in Mexico and never went to Peru himself.
They ordered built on high mountains and suitable places . . . many large attached houses in rows, and they were warehouses for all the goods of the empire, excluding nothing. Some were full of maize . . . beans, lima beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, jicamas, all good edible roots, as well as others. There were warehouses for salt, dried meat cured in the sun without salt, salt meat, salt fish, sun-dried fish without salt, and other dried meats; the greatest provision and abundance of food that could be had in the empire, and this was found all over the empire. (Las Casas 1958: 228)
The Tibetans, who live in a very similar high mountain environment, use the same technique of freeze-drying meat and then eat it without further cooking, exactly as the Europeans saw the Inca doing. Whether or not salt was used for preservation as well as a condiment, it was not the only inorganic substance eaten. There were also two edible clays.
Pasa is what the Indians of Peru call a certain clay, which is white with a few brown spots like soap . . . it is used by them as a highly prized sauce, with which, dissolved and with salt, they eat their papas and other roots, moistening them in this mud as if it were mustard, and for this reason it is sold in the plazas of all the towns.
(Cobo 1890–1893, 1: 243)
An Indian girl, young and pretty, was going from Cuzco to Copacabana, for religious purposes, in the company of others. She was so devout, and so poor, that she was going barefoot, and eating a kind of white earth called chaco. (Calancha 1972, 1: 599)
So much for the animals and the minerals. The third kingdom, the vegetables, merits separate treatment.