This is the introductory part of a cookbook of Maya food. The other chapters to follow are Yucatan 1, Yucatan 2, Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco. They have had to be uploaded separately because of space limitations in my browser, but they are all part of a single work. Enjoy….MAYALAND CUISINE:
THE FOOD OF MAYA MEXICO
E. N. Anderson
Dedication
To
Doña Elsi, Doña Zenaida, Doña Noemy, Doña Aurora, Doña Elide and Don Felix,
and all the other teachers
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Chapter 1. Yucatan 35
Chapter 2. Campeche 121
Chapter 3. Chiapas 135
Chapter 4. Tabasco 175
Glossary 211
References 215
These pages refer to coherent text—it had to be broken up for the website.
Acknowledgements
Thanks, first, to all my Mexican friends, Maya and other, especially the Dzib Xihum, Medina Uh, and Valdez Estrella households.
Thanks, as always, to Barbara Anderson. Special thanks to Myra Appel for much information and help. Thanks to Allyson Carter, Betty Faust, Eugene Hunn, Cameron McNeil, and many more for help and advice along the way.
Introduction
This cookbook describes the cuisine of Maya Mexico. I am assured on excellent authority that this work is unpublishable, being far too pedestrian and nerdish for the cookbook trade. Alas, I have none of the sparkle of Patricia Quintana or Diana Kennedy. However, I have a good deal of ethnographic experience with this cuisine, and some knowledge of the cultural background, and there is no thorough book on this in English. Thus I provide the present work, free and available to anyone who wants it. I guarantee the recipes; most are good, though some few are of purely ethnographic interest. I have sampled all the foods and cooked almost all of them. (I have not tried making the sausage or other cured foods, and have not been able to get the ingredients for some dishes.)
Mexico’s Mayan heritage is found in five neighboring states, comprising the southeastern part of the country. Yucatan, Campeche and Quintana Roo are the classic Maayab, “Land of the Maya.” Tabasco and Chiapas also draw on Maya traditions. Today, more than a million people in these five states still speak one or another of the Mayan languages.
They also cook superb food. Five hundred years of Spanish and Caribbean influence has led to the creation of a unique and distinctive culinary world.
Southeast Mexico is a different world. Until recently, it was almost a lost world. It was the stuff of romance: Trackless forests, lost cities of mysterious peoples, exquisite beaches where one could still find pirate gold. Poisonous snakes nine feet long crawled among huge trees covered with orchids. Most of the people were heirs of the Maya who built perhaps the greatest of all pre-Columbian civilizations.
Geographically, the area covered by this book extends from the north coast of Yucatan—a shelving coast with long beaches—to the Pacific coast on the south. (As in most of Central America, the oceans are north and south here, not east and west.)
The Yucatan Peninsula—the states of Yucatan, Quintana Roo, and Campeche–is a fairly level limestone platform. Soils are good, but thin. Hurricanes and droughts make subsistence precarious. Surface water is usually lacking; people have to dig wells, build reservoirs, or find cenotes (sinkholes or natural caverns with water). This need to collaborate on water storage was a factor in the growth of civilization. The thin soils favor maize, chiles, tomatoes, and fruit trees. Squash, herbs, root crops, and other plants grow well where pockets in the limestone create little areas of deep soil. Every Maya farmer knows how to seek out such pockets. The apparent disorder of a Maya garden is carefully planned: if you look closely, you will find that every plant is in a soil pocket just the right size for its roots.
Tabasco (and neighboring Campeche) is a water world, largely made up of the Usumacinta-Grijalva river delta, a vast land of swamps, marshes, lagoons, islands, and deep alluvial delta-lands. It once swarmed with crocodiles, snakes, gigantic fish, turtles, water birds, piguas (crayfish as big as lobsters), and all manner of other life-forms. It is now sadly hurt by overfishing and oil drilling (see below) but is still a lovely place. It is rich in cacao, bananas, and other tropical fruits, as well as sugar cane and cattle.
Chiapas is dramatically different: a land of steep mountains. These sweep up from the coastal plain to savage knife-ridges or to grand plateaus—the “highlands of Chiapas”—where Tzeltal, Tzotzil and other Maya groups preserve old languages and traditions. The fertile soils have produced particularly fine maize for millennia (though erosion now threatens this tradition). Beautiful large maize ears are a specialty of the central highlands. Chiapas grows a great deal of coffee, as well as a range of subtropical fruits and vegetables. The highest country is cold, and grows apples, pears, peaches, and other fruit more typical of lands far to the north. Separating the ranges are sharply-cut valleys; the Grijalva Valley is dry, thorny, and deep.
No one knows when the Maya came into the area. Yucatec is fairly different from the other Maya languages, implying a long separation.
The Maya seem to have migrated from the north down the mountain spine of Mexico until they reached the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala. (Here and for what follows, the best summary of Maya prehistory and history is Sharer and Traxler 2005.) Perhaps 5000 years ago, the Maya began a great radiation, primarily northward. Some now live as far north as Tampico (a Huastec Maya word meaning “place of dogs”)–to say nothing of more recent migration into the United States.
By this time, they were probably already farming. Widespread in the Maya languages are ancient root words for the major crops, including corn, beans, squash, chiles, avocadoes. Just as the related words hound, hund, canis, chien, kyon, and so on show that the ancient Indo-Europeans had a word for “dog” and were no doubt already dog-lovers, so the universality in Maya languages of ixi’im (or something very similar) for corn and ik or ich for chile shows that the original Maya cared for these plants.
About three thousand years ago, Mexico began to develop a true civilization. Leaders in this were the Olmecs, probably ancestral to the Mixe and Zoque people of today–next-door neighbors of the Maya. The Maya, always quick to learn, soon developed a civilization that far surpassed that of the Olmec.
Everyone has seen photos of the Maya ruins, especially the vast pyramids that recalled, in flat country, the sacred mountains of the homeland. Modern archaeological research has done much to dispel the mystery of these ruins. In particular, Maya hieroglyphic writing can now be read (though rare glyphs may remain obscure). The writing reveals a world of city-states, often at war, more often peacefully cultivating their crops and calculating complex astronomical calendars. They had a polytheistic religion and an extremely sophisticated tradition of arts and crafts.
The civilization rose to a climax between 200 and 800 A.D., then declined. Most of the great cities were abandoned. Population declined dramatically. The fall is still somewhat mysterious, but we know that drought was a factor (Gill 2000). Also, study of texts and ruins reveals that warfare had become ever more intense and destructive (Demarest et al. 2004). It is probably safe to assume that warfare became more and more devastating to the crops, irrigation works, orchards and reservoirs that sustained life. Eventually, scorched-earth warfare made intensive agriculture difficult or impossible.
However, the role of warfare in Maya culture has been exaggerated recently. Years of myths about the “peaceful” Maya have led to an overreaction, and current popular writings overstate the evidence for classic Maya war. Most of the “evidence” for the “warlike” Maya consists of sculptures and stelas erected in the public squares of the great cities. Think of our own midwestern towns–every one built around a square with a war memorial, with General So-and-So’s sword uplifted. The Maya were no different. Like the midwesterners, they probably had long forgotten the name of the hero on the monument, because they were too busy with their corn and hogs (or peccaries). The many reservoirs, canals and terraced fields attest to that; we have countless works of peace–and few fortifications.
Once, scholars thought that Maya agriculture was “primitive slash-and-burn cultivation.” Archaeologists and ethnographers soon learned otherwise. First, Maya slash-and-burn cultivation, still practiced, is anything but primitive. In addition, the Maya know thousands of wild plants and animals, and use most of them. As of this writing, 119 species of plants have been identified from lowland Maya archaeological sites (Lentz 1999:6-9). Some species are wild ones that show up in the sites by accident, but most are plants the Maya now use—and no doubt then used—as food, medicine, or firewood. Among those 119 species are at least 48 species now used for food. Modern Maya use many more, and one can be sure that most of the plants used today were used long ago as well. (For modern plant use among various Maya groups, see Alcorn 1984; Anderson 2003; Barrera Marín, Barrera Vásquez and Mendieta, 1976; Breedlove and Laughlin 1992; Breedlove and Raven 1974; Hunn 1977; Petrich 1985.) No other relatively small local group in the world has so much environmental knowledge known to be at their disposal. It is more than likely that the ancient Maya knew even more than this. They had a great civilization with thousands of books, and they lived in a world where native plants and animals were still common.
The ancient Maya practiced intensive agricultural techniques. They terraced hillsides, drained swamps, and built raised fields rather like the chinampas of central Mexico. They had orchards and root crop gardens. They grew herbs and spices; allspice, achiote, types of oregano, and other spices are native to the region. They had extensive cotton fields. In Chiapas and Tabasco, they grew cacao–chocolate–on a vast and intensive scale. (It grew, and still grows, locally in the Yucatan Peninsula, but could not flourish in most of that land of thin soils.) Their money literally grew on trees, for cacao beans were the international currency of the later pre-Columbian days (Coe and Coe 1996; McNeil 2006). They may have practiced aquaculture. They seem to have known a good deal about fertilizing. They surely were at least as sophisticated as their contemporary descendents in controlling pests; the modern Maya use a number of biological control techniques, from companion planting to encouraging pest-eating insects. They had extensive waterworks, some almost certainly used for irrigation. They had selected crop varieties.
The Yucatec Maya in the north and the Chol Maya in the south must have had a great cuisine in their spectacular cities. We know something of it, thanks in part to the research of Karl Taube (1989a). It was, of course, based on maize. The basic food was waj (corncake of any kind; pronounced “wah,” with the “h” sounded). Dr. Taube has established that the original waj was probably like the modern piim waj: a large thick cake or mass of corn dough wrapped in leaves and cooked in the pib, the Maya earth oven. Many clear pictures of people carrying, or offering, tamales and waj appear in Maya art. Complex chocolate drinks accompanied these. The long roster of available foods—including plenty of game animals—implies complex stews and other dishes, though we have little direct record of such.
The Maya influenced each other. Sweet potatoes and manioc, both probably from South America, are known throughout most of the Maya world by names that seem to go back to lowland origins. Probably the highlanders borrowed them.
If our current reconstructions are correct, Mayan agricultural technology of the Classic period was superior to anything in western Europe, then undergoing the Dark Ages. Centuries later, the Spanish conquistadors stared open-mouthed at Mexican farms.
Above all, the Mesoamerican peoples—Mayas, Aztecs, Zapotecs and their neighbors—were among the great plant-breeders of the premodern world, and thus benefited the entire world (Coe 1994; Crosby 1972, 1986; Weatherford 1989; and, for Maya agriculture especially, Gómez-Pompa et al. 2003). They changed corn from a scruffy weed to a plant that produced a ton of grain per acre (modern corn yields up to five or six times that). They turned bitter, inedible wild gourds, weighing perhaps eight ounces, into sweet, meaty squashes weighing many pounds. They domesticated several species of beans, creating varieties of every color, pattern and flavor. They domesticated the tomato and sunflower and gave us ancestral forms of all modern varieties. They took the wild chiles–tiny, unbearably hot fruits–and bred peppers of all degrees of hotness, all sizes up to a foot long, and all imaginable shapes. They also developed many of our common garden flowers: cosmos, zinnia, dahlia, tuberose, marigold, and others. Without the plant breeders of ancient Mexico, the world would be a very different and very much poorer place.
When these plants reached the Old World, they caused a revolution. Corn greatly extended cultivation and food production. Chiles brought a convenient (if “hot”) source of vitamins A and C to the poorest peasants.
Even before the Spanish came, the Maya were not isolated. Nahuatl–the language of the Aztecs–influenced Maya languages, and Nahuatl cooking influenced Maya fare. Even the omnipresent tortilla is apparently a central Mexican introduction. The most ancient Maya foods seem to be thick corn cakes and tamales. After the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl influence increased in much of the South. Among the words that English owes to Nahuatl, via Spanish, are: tomato, tamale, chile, and sapote. “Chocolate” is Nahuatl, but cacao and thus “cocoa” are Maya. Of more immediate concern are the dishes with Nahuatl names that nest in the south. The Maya certainly had tamales, pozole and atole–they have their own names for them. Conversely, we know that the Spanish introduced potatoes, though these are native to Peru. Mole, however, is a Nahuatl word (meaning “sauce”), and mole dishes seem to be introduced.
Maize was the basis of the ancient Maya pattern (for which see Fedick 1996; Flannery 1982; Harrison and Turner 1978; for the whole story of pre-Columbian cuisine, see the superb work by Sophie Coe, America’s First Cuisines [1994]). The major subsistence activity is slash-and-burn agriculture, producing largely maize, but also beans, squash, chile, and much else. Secondary to this are the lush dooryard gardens that produce vegetables, herbs, and fruit.
Skeletal analysis shows that the ancient Maya typically obtained about 75% of their calories from this grain (White 1999, passim). In some areas they ate more sea food or root crops, and maize dropped to around 50% (Magennis 1999.) Maize is a C4 plant; other common Maya foods are C3 plants. This refers to different pathways for metabolizing carbon; the C4 pathway is more efficient than the C3 under very hot conditions, and is thus commonest among plants of hot, sunny, tropical areas. The C3 pathways works better under cooler conditions. These pathways leave different ratios of isotopes of carbon in people or animals that eat these plants. Thus, analysis of skeletons can tell us how much maize people ate (Reed 1999).
Usually, the Maya ate much maize, and so did their one domestic mammal (the dog) and so did two of their favorite game animals—peccaries and pacas—who lived by robbing milpas. Deer, however, ate more C3 food (Reed 1999), though they ate enough C4 to prove they had been raiding gardens!
In the early 20th century, a study by Benedict and Steggerda (1936) showed that 75% of the calories consumed by Maya in rural Yucatan were still coming from maize. Toward the end of the century, research by Maria Elena Peraza Lopez (1986) in rural Quintana Roo showed the same. And, for the rural poor, I found the situation still the same in the 21st century. The well-to-do are now eating white bread and sugar—far more than is good for them—but even they still get about half their calories from maize. So the 50-75% figure has remained stable for 2,000 years.
Maize was divine for the ancient Maya, who worshiped the young Maize God (see Taube 1989a, 1989b, 1995), often under the name of Handsome Lord. Almost inevitably, this name has been transferred to Jesus, whose cross strikingly resembles pre-Columbian representations of the maize plant. The ancient Maya bound the heads of infants, to give them the elongated, tapered shape of the sacred corncobs.
Very early, people discovered that maize cooked with lime (burned limestone) became softer and easier to grind. They probably realized it was more nutritious. Boiling with lime destroys phytic acid, which otherwise bonds with niacin and mineral nutrients, making these much less available to the human digestive system. Lime-boiled maize—known by the Nahuatl name of nixtamal all over modern Mexico—is thus much more nutritious than plain maize grain (Katz et al. 1974). The vast majority of maize in south Mexico is so prepared, and then ground into a wet dough known as masa. This can be dried for flour or meal, or, more usually, made directly into breads, tortillas, and tamales. A lump of masa mixed with water becomes pozol or pozole (another Nahuatl word, borrowed into Maya), the universal drink in fields and woods. At home, one more often drinks atole (another Nahuatlism—the Yucatec Maya is sak ja’, “white water”), a term covering various maize preparations made with plain maize rather than nixtamal but also extended to include pozol. The simpler atoles are ritually important everywhere; more complex ones (sweetened, flavored) are occasional indulgences. All these foods date to long before the Spanish conquest, though tortillas may not have reached Yucatan till after that traumatic event.
Nothing else came even close as a food. It is probable that the second most important staples in ancient times were either squash seeds (see below) or tuber crops: manioc, sweet potato, and the taro-like makal. The tubers were and are especially important as famine staples. If a fire or hurricane passed, their underground storage structures remain untouched. The plants withstand drought and, unlike maize, tolerate poor soil. Sweet potato, in particular, still has its role as a back-up when maize failed. In 1989, 1995, and 2007, when hurricanes devastated Quintana Roo, this crop saved many lives—including those of friends of mine in Quintana Roo.
Chocolate was the great drink, the great luxury, and the great ceremonial and ritual indulgence (Coe and Coe 1996; Landa 1937; LeCount 2001; McNeil 2006). All sorts of vessels and cups, beautifully ornamented, were used for the drink; we know because the word kakaw (the same word we borrowed as “cacao”) was often written on these vessels, and sometimes identifiable chocolate residues are still within. When I was a student, I learned that The Primary Standard Sequence, a then-undeciphered formula written on many cups, must be a powerful prayer and ritual incantation. It proved to mean, roughly, “this is so-and-so’s chocolate cup.”
Early Spanish accounts preserve a record of traditional food at the time of the Conquest. Bishop Landa (infamous for his burning of Maya books) wrote in 1566 (Landa 1937) that the Maya depended on maize, supplemented with chile, chocolate, and stews. He describes the drink made of toasted corn meal and flavored with chile and chocolate, still popular in much of southern Mexico (see recipe for “tascalate” in Chiapas chapter below). Another source from the late 1500′s, probably written by a Maya, states that mamey and chicosapote fruits were dried for storage, and that this was a hedge against famine (Relaciones 1983/1579). I met an old man in southern Quintana Roo who remembered this as a regular practice in his childhood. It is no longer done.
After a few tentative encounters, the full force of Spanish aggression burst on the scene in 1519. The Maya of the deep interior held out for centuries. The last pagan Maya city fell as late as 1697. Many Maya holed up in the hills, beyond the reach of Spanish power; they were the uitsil, “hill folk,” and their descendents are still with us—I have met Maya in remote areas, living under conditions of almost total isolation from the rest of the world. Moreover, a highly successful revolution in 1846 led to an independent Maya world in the interior Yucatan, lasting until 1901 and in places until the 1930s.
Most of Mayaland, however, soon came under Spanish domination. There was dogged fighting, but nothing like the huge battles that temporarily set the Spanish back in Mexico City and in Peru. The Spanish quickly developed towns, reconstructing Spanish town life as best they could. They set up a capital, Mérida, on the site of the Maya town of Ti Ho. The Spanish imported their own staple foods, such as wheat, olives and wine. The conquistadors may have won the gold (very little in Yucatan), but a wholly disproportionate amount of it went immediately into the hands of the importers of these desperately-wanted commodities. At first, a merchant with flour or wine could name his price in gold. Wheat soon took its place as a Mexican product, but wheat, olives, almonds and wine grapes stubbornly refuse to grow in Mayaland, so they are still imported, though now from no farther than north Mexico.
Neither in the Antilles nor on the south Mexican mainland could the Spanish re-create their beloved Iberian pattern. Their homelands in south Spain were then, and are still, a vast monocrop landscape: Wheat on the flats, vines on the fertile slopes, olives and a few almonds on the infertile ones. Grazing takes over the lands not fit for any of the three. Vegetables and minor fruits are confined to small gardens. Pigs run wild in Spanish mountains, living on acorns. Of all these domesticates, only the pigs did well in the new lands. By the time the Spanish reached central Mexico, which is excellent wheat and vine country (though marginal for olives), merchants in the homeland had monopolized the trade; the Crown banned cultivation of grapes and olives in the new land.
Spanish cooking goes back to Celtic and Roman roots. The Celts and ancient Iberians were wheat-farmers and stock raisers. They were particularly distinguished as rearers and users of the pig, cooking pork in large cauldrons. The Romans contributed a sophisticated cuisine, though the famous (and often exaggerated) refinement of Roman cooking was probably very rarely seen in the Iberian Peninsula. Still, complex Roman techniques like sausage-making and fish processing flourished. Spanish and Portuguese sausages and hams are among the best in the world. Mexico has drawn richly on this tradition. From the Iberian Peninsula, too, are the stews of beans with all parts of the pig (including, of course, ham and sausage). In ancient Spain these were made with broad beans, but the superior New World beans were quickly adopted there–just as the pig was quickly adopted in Mexico. Today, therefore, the classic Spanish pork-and-bean dishes are rather similar on both sides of the Atlantic: they use American beans and Spanish pork butchery.
In southern Mexico, the healthy highlands, with their climate similar to Spain’s, attracted more settlement than the southern lowlands. Chiapas cuisine is thus more Spanish than that of Yucatan or Tabasco. Chiapas proved particularly good for Spanish charcuterie (see Glossary).
Spanish also are the wheat products, including the sweet breads and the egg-rich cakes. (French influence in the 19th century also influenced the Mexican bakery tradition.)
As the Spanish conquered and settled the New World, they quickly made use of its greatest crop gift, maize. Almost immediately they also seized on the other great staples of the Caribbean: sweet potatoes, and manioc (a.k.a. tapioca, cassava, yuca). Other “roots, fruits and shoots” were borrowed later, but still very early. Allspice and chile assuaged disappointment at failure to find the true Spice Islands of the Indies. Tobacco spread throughout the Old World.
Sixteenth-century Spain participated in the mania for spices that swept Europe at the time. Spices were the leading expression of luxury and wealth. The modern story that the spices were used to cover up the taste of spoiled food is not taken seriously by food historians (see Anderson 2005a). The lords and ladies using spices were hardly the sort to make do with spoiled food. In any case, spices bring out the taste of food, as every cook knows.
The Iberian explorations of the 15th and 16th century were triggered by a desire to take over the spice trade. Carrying spices everywhere, the Spanish naturally imported Asian spices to Mexico. Of the classic Old World spices, black pepper and cinnamon were particularly used. Saffron, always a Spanish specialty, is widely used in Mexican cuisine (though use has diminished greatly in the last century, to judge from earlier cookbooks). Attempts to cultivate these in the New World never got off the ground, and they remain imports. Native flavorings—chiles, allspice, vanilla, and the rest—continue to outweigh the Asian spices in importance.
The main Spanish contributions to the Maya were domestic animals; the ancient Maya had only dogs, turkeys and muscovy ducks. However, the enormous fondness for pork that is now so evident in the Yucatan has pre-Columbian origins. The native collared peccary (kitam in Yucatec Maya; chitam in the highlands) was hunted or caught, tamed, and kept as livestock. It still is, in remote settlements. The larger white-lipped peccary was less common, but in Yucatan it gave its name, k’ek’en, to the domestic pig. (The white-lip is now called “forest k’ek’en.”) The domestic pig is chitam in the highlands, where the white-lipped does not occur but the collared does. No doubt peccaries not only went into the pib, but also produced Maya-style “lard”–that is, pan drippings–for use in making tamales. Deer once abounded, but have now been shot out or nearly so, and recipes for deer now use beef.
In some cases, the Spanish found equivalents to their own home cooking in the new land. Maize was not too dissimilar to wheat. On a more humble level, the Spanish found Yucatan oregano to be almost the same as that of the Old World. Judging by its popularity today, it must have been just as important to pre-Columbian Mayan cooking as its relative was in the Mediterranean. The Spanish in the central highlands of Mexico even found onions, garlic, cherries, and hawthorns—not quite the same as Europe’s, but close enough. Allspice resembled pepper, and is still called “Tabasco pepper” in south Mexico. Conversely, the Maya quickly adopted cinnamon and cloves, which taste like allspice—but, typically, only allspice is used in the most sacred ritual dishes.
With these items, the development of a fusion cookery was easy. The fusion soon took place, influencing both sides of the Atlantic. Alfred Crosby (1972) and Jack Weatherford (1989) have told how potatoes, tomatoes and corn revolutionized Europe, and now William Dunmire (2004) has told the story of how Spanish crops spread through Mexico and northward.
In this book, I emphasize the Maya tradition, thus excluding much of the Spanish-derived cuisine. This is not out of prejudice, but simply because excellent cookbooks of Mexican cuisine, including these Spanish elements, are available at any bookstore.
In south Mexico, the stamp of a Spanish dish is usually the presence of olives, capers, almonds and raisins. These, with wine, olive oil, and vinegar, were the food items easiest to import from home in the old days.
Black pepper is by far the commonest borrowed spice, but, cinnamon, cumin and cilantro (coriander) are popular. Parsley and the usual European vegetables–lettuce, cabbage, beets, and the rest–came with the conquerors. Lowland south Mexico, however, is a hostile climate to the temperate crops. Outside of a hardy few, such as coriander and radishes, most took poorly there.
Spain’s influence on Mexico did not stop there. Ordinary items spread quickly and easily. These ranged from bread and wine to cocidos and charcuterie—including cured beef as well as pork. Spanish sweets became standard in Mexico. These included some sickeningly sweet and eggy preparations, requiring up to three or four dozen egg yolks. One wonders about the inordinate dominance of egg yolks in some Mexican sweets originating from nunnery cuisine, until one learns from Penelope Casas (1996:391) that in Spain the whites of the eggs were used for clarifying wines, leaving the yolks with little future except to go to the nunneries for cake-baking. Whites also were used in making plaster and egg tempera paints, leaving, again, surplus yolks. Nunneries were the bulk sweet-makers throughout much of the Mediterranean in olden times, especially in Sicily (Simeti 1989) but also in Spain, and this naturally led to sweets based on egg yolks.
The Spanish had shared their peninsula for 800 years with Muslims. Muslim Arabs conquered almost all Spain by 711. Arab power and culture centered in Andalucía, Spain’s southernmost region. Here the Arabs created a brilliant civilization, famous for its refinement in poetry, art, music, and—not least—cooking (see e.g. Gerli 2003).
Through the Middle Ages, the Spanish slowly regained control of the peninsula, completing the “Reconquest” in 1492 with the conquest of Grenada. This final resolution gave the Crown the money and security that allowed them to send Columbus off adventuring.
The Spanish were initially rather tolerant of Muslims and Jews(see esp. Mann et al. 1992), but after 1492 they became merciless to their conquered subjects. They drove out Jews and Muslims that would not convert to Catholicism. Then the Inquisition hounded even the converts, whose sincerity was suspect. Converted Jews were burned at the stake for failing to work on Saturday, or for not eating enough pork (Gitlitz and Davidson 1999). Spies searched the garbage from converso households to make sure there were pork bones. This had one result important to the New World: Thousands of converts (“New Christians”) who were suspect, but who managed to avoid specific charges, were sent to its outposts. This explains much—including the presence of classic Arab recipes in the small villages of New Mexico and the urban wards of Puebla. One can find thoroughly Mesopotamian Arab dishes in remote Hispanic villages of New Mexico (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000).
Many of these dishes carried high prestige in Spain. The Spanish rejected Moorish religion, but fortunately not Moorish food. Spanish haute cuisine of the 16th century was, in a word, Moorish. The Spanish had learned elaborate techniques and recipes for using sugar, almonds, complex spice mixes, rice, and so on. Only the pork cuisine and pork charcuterie was thoroughly un-Moorish–for obvious reasons.
The more elaborate dishes of south Spain are largely of Arab ancestry, even today. Many Moorish dishes crossed the Atlantic. More generally, the standard Moorish spice mix—cumin, clove, cinnamon, and black pepper, sometimes also saffron—became standard in Mexico as well. (This medieval Arabic spice mix builds in turn on earlier Roman and Babylonian usage. See Perry 2005, Rodinson et al. 2001.) Marinated and herb-rich dishes are often Moorish. In many rural parts of Mexico, including much of Mayaland, spices are almost the only plant foods that are generally used but not raised locally.
Most of the early conquistadors came from Andalucía or Extremadura. The latter is a rather remote, barren land in Spain’s southwest, bordering the mountains of Portugal. It is a land of vast flat plateaus separated by long, low, oak-forested ridges. The plateaus grows wheat, or, where too dry for that, provide grazing. The ridges produce the best pork and ham in the world. (I doubt if anyone who has had real Extremaduran acorn-fed ham will challenge that.) The region lies north of the western half of Andalucía. Thus, its vast lonely expanses and rather Spartan villages lie a short journey away from the great ports of Cadiz and Sevilla, and the great urban centers of Cordoba and Grenada. Small wonder that Extremadurans sought wealth and adventure far from home.
Small wonder, also, that some Extremaduran dishes (Villalón and Plasencia 1999) are shared with Mexico. Extremaduran cocidos (stews), pucheros (stews with the meat and broth served separately), and charcuterie became foundational to modern Mexican cuisine. Alboromia, an eggplant dish named for Burun, the wife of the Caliph Al-Ma’mun of early Baghdad, has come from Andalucía to Mexico.
South Mexico has many Arab dishes, but Puebla became, in many ways, the culinary capital of Spanish Mexico, and thus a notable home of these elite Arab-Andalusian dishes. These deserve a brief note, if only because they have influenced recent south Mexican cooking. The famous mole poblana is most notable for its chocolate and chiles, but it is, in fact, simply a standard Arab-Andalusian chicken dish with these New World ingredients added. It is apparently another contribution of nunnery kitchens. (Diana Kennedy gives several origin myths for it; as she says, “they all agree that the mole was born in one of the convents” [Kennedy 1972:200], and this agrees with what I learned in Puebla.). Chiles en nogada, another Puebla specialty, adapts classic Arab-Andalusian cooking traditions—stuffing vegetables, combining sweet and savory, using raisins and almonds and spices together in meat dishes—to the large, flavorful poblana chile. Other Pueblan specialties follow the pattern. (On the development of Mexican food, see also Coe 1994.) North Mexico was less influenced, but had its Arabic past. Encarnación Pinedo’s 19th-century cookbook from San Francisco (Pinedo 2003, edited and translated by food historian Dan Strehl; Spanish original 1898) is full of Moorish recipes, some of them little changed from the 12th century.
Widespread south-Spanish dishes, such as chanfaina (a stew usually made from internal organs) and escabeche (food cooked, or at least marinated, with vinegar—initially to preserve it; the name is from Arabic sikbaj, itself derived from the Persian word for “vinegar”), came to Mexico in Extremaduran-Andalucían forms. In Yucatan, I found that turkey in escabeche was a popular traditional dish; it is a New World bird cooked by an Extremaduran technique (compare Villalón and Plasencia 1999:161, 166 with, for example, Neri 1998:52-53). Extremaduran spicing—bay leaf, parsley, pepper, occasional saffron, sometimes cinnamon, clove, and other exotica—became standard in Mexican folk cuisine. In Maria Ignacia Aguirre’s Mexican cookbook of 1832 (Aguirre 1980) I count at least 10 Moorish recipes in 38 pages. For example, one (p. 25) involves cutting up and frying pigeons with pepper, garlic, and cumin, then finishing them in a sauce of ground blanched almonds with some flour (and a very un-Muslim glass of wine). This is a variant of a whole class of Moorish recipes that became popular in Renaissance Europe.
One very characteristic Mexican dish that is thoroughly Arab-Andalusian is fish in green sauce. Green tafaya—fish in a sauce involving mashed cilantro, onions and fennel, along with the usual spice mix of the time—is recorded in an early medieval Arab-Andalusian cookbook (Bolens 1990:129-130). It would have looked and tasted like the fish in green sauce of modern Campeche (see recipe in that chapter below) or Tabasco.
Another interesting blend dish is “Mexican rice,” known all over Mexico, and related to many Caribbean rice dishes. It is simply Near Eastern pilaf with Mexican flavoring. One fries the rice, then boils it dry with tomato, green pepper, and similar items. Since pilaf seems to have been unknown in old Moorish Spain, judging from surviving recipes, this would seem to be a more recent borrowing from the Middle East via the west Mediterranean. I suspect pilaf was known in later Moorish Spain (most of our recipe books are early).
Mexico, in turn, influenced Spain and the Mediterranean (Coe 1994; Crosby 1972). Mexican tomatoes, squash, and chiles quickly spread back to south Spain. Chiles stuffed with mariscos (sea foods) and other classic Mexican chile dishes now grace Extremaduran tables. On the other hand, having more meat and fresh fish, Mexico did not take up Extremadura’s vast wealth of salt cod preparations and egg dishes.
Spain, however, shares Europe’s widespread bias against maize. Thus the Mexican tortilla has not encroached on the domain of the Spanish one; a Spanish tortilla is, and long has been, an omelet-like egg cake. In the 16th century it also meant a small, flat wheat-flour cake, so the Spanish used it for the Mexican maize item. The Spanish named it before they learned Nahuatl, and thus failed to borrow the Nahuatl name, tlaxcalli (taxcal in some modern dialects). This is of some historic interest; almost everything else that the Spanish adopted came with its Nahuatl name. English-speakers can easily recognize the Nahuatl words tamalli, tomate (or tomatl), and chocolatl.
Spain failed to borrow tortillas, tamales, or other maize preparations. In Spain, there is little use of maize outside of popcorn—a very ancient Mexican snack. Ears of corn get into Extremaduran cuisine on occasion, but corn dough is unknown. Extremadura and Andalucía are even more devotedly wedded to wheat bread than the rest of the country, and they are fine wheat-raising lands. They did not have the incentive provided by land that could yield far more maize per acre than wheat. This incentive drove north Italians to learn make their polenta from maize, and taught the Rumanians to make mamaliga the same way.
America’s two domesticated birds, the turkey and the muscovy duck, reached Europe. So did a wealth of Mexican vegetables and fruits, including green beans, dried frijol beans, and winter squash. Avocadoes and tunas, the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, came too. The prickly pear has invaded much of the Mediterranean; it is more popular in Sicily than in Spain. In contrast, Mexican herbs and greens like hojasanta and chaya (see below) do not grow well under Spanish conditions. Central Mexican delicacies like grasshoppers and ant pupae were repellent.
Interesting is the case of gazpacho, the universal soup of Andalucía and Extremadura. This traditional Arab soup is still common in its original form, made with chicken stock and flavorings poured over reheated leftover bread. But local cooks never let gazpacho alone, since each town has its own recipe (Morales Rodriguez and Martínez García 1999; see also Salcedo Hierra 1995) and indeed almost every cook does. In Andalucía there are almond gazpachos, vinegar gazpachos, fruit gazpachos, simple water gazpachos, and countless other variants. Some unsung genius saw fit to mix Mexican salsa picante with this soup, and thus was born what is now the most familiar gazpacho: a soup based on blended tomato, usually with green or red pepper, garlic or onion, and other flavorings. Naturally, highly Mexicanized forms are common in Extremadura, where gazpacho can be a substantial soup involving anything up to a whole rabbit (Villalón and Plasencia 1998:36).
More important was Mexican chile sauce. The general class of chilmolli (chile sauce) in central Mexican cooking was enthusiastically accepted by the Spanish. If native onions and garlic were not already used in Mexico, the Spanish immediately made up the lack. The mix of chiles, tomatoes, onions, and garlic became popular in both Mexico and Spain from the 1500s onward. It did not stop there. The first Italian tomato sauce recipe, dating from 1692, is called salsa spagnola and is simply a Mexican salsa (Long 2000). The rest is history; how many modern Italian dishes use tomato sauce and/or green or red peppers?
Turkish ezme, Tunisian harisa, and other Mediterranean hot sauces are later transforms of the same Mexican-Spanish source. The Turks considerably improved on the original by developing a technique of mashing (separately) the tomatoes and the chiles, and drying the mashes in the sun to a solid paste consistency. The result, called salça or salca (!), is slightly fermented, developing a wonderful floral taste (Valent et al 2000, and my own observations; on the history of sals and salsa in the Near East, see Rodinson et al. 2001). This substance is seen in beautifully shaped mounds in every Turkish spice market. A well-stocked shop will have salças made from each of Turkey’s famous regional chiles: Antap (a.k.a. Ghaziantep), Urfa (Şanliurfa), etc. The Tunisians have also learned the technique (Kouki 1997:46 describes it for tomatoes, and I have seen it made with chiles too), and their harisas are accordingly sophisticated—ranking as perhaps the finest, most popular, and most blistering in the Mediterranean-European world. Thus did a Mexican indigenous sauce become adopted by the Spanish, and then spread beyond, becoming far more important and popular in other Mediterranean lands.
Wholly new dishes depending entirely on New World ingredients are rarer, but they exist. Strangely, by far the most important and salient is found in Cataluña, a land otherwise one of the least Mexican-influenced parts of Spain. It was here that some unsung sage, not too many decades ago, invented pa amb tomaquet. This dish is not the most complex. The name, which is just the Catalan for “bread with tomato,” is pretty much the recipe. One toasts a slice of the best white bread, and then mashes a garlic clove and half a ripe tomato onto it—discarding the skin. The result is then drizzled with olive oil—or, depending on your appetite, drenched with olive oil. (In Spain have seen a whole cup poured on a single pa amb tomaquet.)
Pa amb tomaquet has become a cult in Cataluña. It has become essential at breakfast, being automatically served with one’s eggs or ham. It is a standard foundation for lunch sandwiches. It is a snack at any time. The name, in ordinary speech, has become a single word, pronounced something like “pantomaket.”
Another channel for exchange and flow of foods led through the Caribbean, and, often, from Africa. Yucatan was closer to Cuba than to central Mexico, and Havana was its metropolitan city as far as trade went. Thus, much of Yucatecan cuisine is Cuban. This makes the picture even more complicated, for Cuban food is a fantastic mix of Spanish, Indian and African. Caribbean Indian traces mediated through Havana to Yucatan include the habanero chile, one the hottest chiles in the world. The heavy use of achiote is probably another Caribbean Indian contribution to Yucatan via Cuba. (The Maya had achiote and used it a good deal, though.) Spanish in origin, and ultimately Arab-Andalusian, is the enormous importance of bitter orange as marinade and cooking liquid in Cuba and hence in Yucatan. Generally, in Mexico, lime has been substituted for bitter orange, but bitter orange was used in at least some of the original Spanish (Andalusian) dishes for souring, though vinegar was the commonest souring agent there.
Rice growing and technology is also, to a great extent, an African borrowing into the Caribbean world. Judith Carney (2001) has shown that early attempts to grow rice led to importing slaves from the Wolof and Mande (Mende, Mandingo) areas of West Africa that grow native African rice. These slaves brought with them the techniques, including the cooking techniques, that made rice a major Caribbean product. Of course, Arab-Andalusian rice cookery was not unrelated—the Wolof and Mande had been in touch with Morocco.
Another African contribution is the black-eyed pea, which has found a happy home in Yucatan. The native Mexican beans are mostly highland plants, and although they grow in Yucatan they do not yield well. The black-eye is more resistant to Yucatan’s climate. Moreover, it is better than the native beans for eating in the young and tender stage. Thus it has propagated throughout the cuisine, under the odd name xpelon. This means “little bald ones”–the Maya diminutive x coupled with the Spanish pelon “bald,” with reference to the smooth, rounded, white top of the bean.
A very different but very important Spanish-Moorish influence on New World foodways was the coming of humoral medicine (Anderson 1996; Foster 1993). The ancient Greek medical tradition of Hippocrates and Galen spread with the Roman Empire, and later, more thoroughly and deeply, with the Arabs, who enthusiastically adopted it and developed it to a high level of sophistication. The Spanish derived it from all these sources. Especially important was evaluation of foods as “heating” or “cooling” to the body—not so much in the literal sense as in a humoral sense, involving damage to the body by excessive hot or cold energy. On the whole, high-calorie foods and those that produced a “burning” sensation were heating; low-calorie, watery, or sour foods were cooling.
In Mexico, this tradition fused with indigenous ideas of hot and cold. No one can miss the fact that a feverish body is a sick body; no one can ignore the damage of hypothermia and chill. The Mexican indigenous civilizations had brought medicine to a high level, and were well aware of this. They had their own hot and cold theories. To judge from surviving beliefs, they saw wild areas as cooler, villages and towns as hotter. Indeed, wild areas are shadier and moister than towns. The pre-Columbian peoples also apparently believed that cold winds and cold drinks caused disease. At least, the Maya today believe that illness and bodily woes almost always come from such sources (unless the woes are caused by supernatural agency.) Thus, the Maya are careful not to drink cold liquids. This is especially true when individuals are overheated, since then the contrast is virtually certain to produce illness. Overheated people drink warm liquids. They also make sure the drinks or foods are heavily salted, since they are well aware that this prevents collapse. The blistering heat of south Mexico causes heavy sweating, which depletes the body’s salt reserves. The result can be a sudden and life-threatening crisis. Extreme and sudden salt depletion starts off by producing a strong sensation of chill. Thus, naturally, the Maya see it as a cold condition, and think of salty liquids as heating. Thus does empirical knowledge derived from experience lead to folk theories of illness.
Traditional Maya ideas of illness, including this form of the hot/cold theory, prevail in the remote and rural communities. The Hippocratic-Galenic tradition still holds on in the towns, giving way slowly to modern biomedicine.
In 1821 Mexico became independent from Spain. The Maya, knowing a good idea when they saw one, soon rebelled in their turn, in the so-called “War of the Castes” (1846-48; see Dumond 1997; Farriss 1984; Jones 1989; Reed 1964; Dumond points out that not all the Maya rebelled, and not all the rebels were Maya. Even so, it was largely a Maya independence movement). This was one of the most astonishingly successful indigenous movements in all world history. It almost succeeded in driving the Spanish-speakers from the Peninsula. What is now Quintana Roo became completely independent, and most of it remained so till 1901. Parts of the interior remained outside of real Mexican control until the 1940s.
French influence on Mexican cooking peaked in the mid-19th century (on this and other historic matters, see Pilcher 1998). After that, world influences flowed in—Chinese salted plums, American pie, Italian pizza.
A later Arabic influence on Mexico’s foodways occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Arabs from Syria and the Levant fled persecution in the Turkish Empire. Many were persecuted for being Christians, often Catholics, and they often went to Latin America. The Yucatan Peninsula has a large number of old Arab families. Their cuisine is influential (see Chapter 1, and also Manzur de Borge 2001). Once again, Puebla became a center, but the Yucatan Peninsula also received a large wave of Lebanese settlement. They introduced many foods, of which the most widely known today is the semita, a sesame-seed pita bread (semit in Arabic) or roll, used for sandwiches. In Mayaland, Arab recipes for kibis, stuffed vegetables, and other Levantine foods became more popular than semitas. Kibis—fried torpedo-shaped balls of ground lamb and bulgur wheat—have become a “Maya” food, sold widely on the streets of Mérida.
The Spanish divided Mayaland between Mexico and Guatemala. Colonial Maya Mexico consisted only of Yucatan, Campeche, and Tabasco. In the 19th century, Chiapas broke away from Guatemala and became part of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Maya rebelled, and the eastern part of the Yucatan Peninsula became independent of Mexico in 1847. This led, eventually, to territorial and later full state recognition for Quintana Roo.
Until the railroad finally came through at the end of the 19th century, the Yucatan Peninsula was tied to Cuba at least as much as to Mexico. Havana was about as close to the Yucatan coast as Veracruz, and thus much more accessible than Mexico City. From the Conquest on, the Spanish maintained ties with Cuba, and contacts continued to be strong well into the 20th century. A number of Maya were taken as slaves to Cuba after the Caste War; many more came as free contract laborers. The descendents of these Maya retain some memory of their heritage. Food influences from Cuba are strongest in Yucatan state, where the sauce mixes (recados), use of achiote, use of bitter orange juice, and many other traits recall Cuban influence. Comparing Yucatan food with traditional Cuban food shows many shared dishes (see the Cuban cookbook Delicias de la Mesa by María Antonieta Reyes Gavilán y Moenck, 1942).
Maya Food Today
All five states in southeast Mexico share a common Maya heritage. Outside the cities, in Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo, Yucatec Maya was still the language most often heard until a few years ago, and still is the dominant language in many areas. There are about a million speakers. These are the people who actually call themselves “Maya” (technically spelled Maayaj, the j pronounced “h” when not dropped) and their land “Mayab” (Mayaland). The term has been extended to their linguistic relatives.
Tabasco’s Maya heritage is Chol (locally known as “Chontal,” which is Nahuatl for “speakers of a different language”), but few Tabascans still speak the Cholan language. Chiapas has many Maya languages. In addition to dialects of Chol and Yucatec in the lowlands, Chiapas has several Mayan languages in the cool, pine-clad highlands: Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Mam and others. The languages and cultures differ, but there is a broad common tradition. Chiapas also has small groups of non-Maya Indians, notably the Zoque.
Over the millennia of isolation, Maya Mexico developed its own cuisines. Each of the states has a different tradition. In particular, the Yucatan Peninsula was so isolated from the rest of the world and so strongly Maya that its cuisine is sui generis. Such foreign influences as did reach Yucatan came from Spain and Cuba more often than from central Mexico.
Tabasco and Chiapas were much more directly influenced by Spain and central Mexico, as far as food goes, but they retained many local traditions. In particular, Tabasco’s seafood was strange enough to the Spanish that they adopted local Maya techniques for cooking it. Herbs unknown to the rest of the world were used to flavor fish and turtles that had no Spanish names.
Maya cuisine also survives in neighboring countries, where it is quite different from Mexico’s Maya heritage. El Salvador and neighboring west Guatemala have few identifiable Indians left, but preserve better than any other country the great urban cuisine of pre-Columbian Maya, as seen in their elaborate tamales and pupusas and the use of strange plants like loroco (the shoot of a local vine) and pacaya (palm inflorescence of Chamaedora tepejilote—bitter but good). This universe is outside my boundary here. For a good account of it, with recipes, see Copeland Marks’ fine book False Tongues and Sunday Bread (1985); for more detail, if you can find it, Aurora Sierra Franco’s Cocina regional guatemalteca (1990).
Maya cooking, in ancient times and now, took place over the k’oben or the pib. The k’oben is a simple hearth: three roundish stones, a few inches thick, placed in a triangle. A fire is built within the triangle and is fed by sticks pushed in between the stones. Although this is the simplest of arrangements, it is psychologically of tremendous import to the Maya. It is the center of the home and thus the symbol of home, family, nurturance, mutual support, and all good things that pertain thereto. I have seen the same three-stone arrangement in up-country Southeast Asia—among the Toba Batak people of Sumatera, for instance. It has the same significance there. One thinks also of the equation of “hearth and home” in English, and of the Spanish word hogar, which means both. Don Pastor Valdez, from whom I rent my room in Chunhuhub, is a fairly affluent school principal; he bought a modern gas stove to make life easier for his wife. They soon left the stove to rust away, and went back to the k’oben. It cooks so much better!
The other cooking site in the villages is the pib. This is an earth oven, a barbecue pit, identical to the ancient luau of Hawaii. It may be a small, impromptu one for baking a few tamales, only two feet deep and two or three feet long, or it may be a mammoth pit six feet deep and ten feet across, used to cook whole large animals. In either case, it is first bedded with large stones. Then the pit is filled with firewood, which is burned to ash. This makes the stones intensely hot. The ash blankets the stones, insulating them somewhat. Then packages of food, wrapped in many layers of tough green leaves, are placed on the rocks. Then the whole is covered over—sometimes with a layer of palm fronds, then always with a metal cover. In pre-Columbian times, before the days of metal, a layer of poles was laid over and covered with fronds. Finally, the whole thing is buried in several inches or more of dirt, and left for anywhere from an hour to many hours. (Four hours is usually about the maximum.) Then the food is dug up and unwrapped.
The wrapping is itself an art. Traditionally (and still today), the first layer was often the leaves of the cultivated pepper plant called hojasanta in Spanish (Piper auritum). These large, soft leaves have a fennel-and-black-pepper flavor which they impart to anything wrapped in them. Around these were wrapped the large, tough leaves of the boob tree (Coccoloba spp.). Around these in turn were wrapped the huge, thick, almost indestructible fronds of palms, which protected the bundle from burning by the rocks. Today, banana leaves often replace hojasanta and boob, and even palm. Banana leaves have a good flavor, are large, and are tough enough to withstand the heat. Even burlap is pressed into service. (You can easily make a pib in the back yard, but getting the fire and timing right is not at all easy–it’s an expert skill. Fortunately, one can easily approximate the virtues of the pib by wrapping the food tightly and subjecting it to long, slow cooking in a pan or Dutch oven within a regular oven. Set the oven around 200o and leave the food in it for hours. You might also try a smoker barbecue.)
Both the k’oben and the pib impart a wonderful smoky flavor to the food. The Maya are past masters of firewood choice, picking chunks that will burn perfectly and provide just the right flavor.
In traditional households, people eat from the common pot or common roast of meat, tearing off pieces of tortillas to use as spoons or to pull off pieces of larger hunks of food. Pib-baked corn breads are broken up to be dipped in stews. Soup and corn gruel required a luch: half of a tree-calabash, hollowed out and cleaned. This makes a tough, light bowl holding about a pint. Today, plates and ceramic bowls have come, but villagers still prefer to scoop up food with bits of tortilla, or to hold pieces of meat in tortillas—making their own tacos.
In a contemporary Maya village, the daily fare is tortillas. A grown man will eat at least 30 a day, and in seasons of hard labor, such as planting and harvesting times, he may eat 50. This is not so heroic as it may seem; Maya tortillas are half the size of the ones familiar in the United States and northern Mexico. Women and children eat proportionately less, but still consume many tortillas. This keeps the women of the family very busy. Most women still boil the corn and make their own tortillas. Usually, the maize is now ground in the village mill, not by hand on a grinding stone. For variety, the family may make their corn into pozole, tamales, or big corn breads baked in the earth oven.
The maize tortilla, now universal in Mayaland, was apparently not present in the Classic Period. It came later, from central Mexico; perhaps it is even a post-Conquest introduction. Militating against such a late origin is a striking difference in production method: Maya tortillas are not patted out, as in central Mexico, but are pressed out on a leaf (or, today, a plastic sheet).
Maize is by far the most important food for the Maya—not just the Yucatec, but all the Mayan groups. This is still universally true today, as it has been for thousands of years. Recently, white bread and sugar have become common (all too common), but traditional Maya communities still rely on maize for most of their calories.
Nothing else comes close, except in so far as wheat and sugar have made recent inroads. There is no “second most important” food, though squash seed meal (known as sikil—see Glossary) once apparently filled that niche.
Maize is almost always boiled with lime (made by burning the limestone that undergirds all the Yucatan). This softens the shell of the kernel and makes it easier to grind. It also has the highly desirable side effect of neutralizing the phytic acid that, otherwise, ties up the nutrients in the maize (Katz et al. 1974; and see below under “corn”).
Everything else is but a relish for the maize products. Probably the most common item on the menu, after maize, is the black bean (more specifically, the black turtle bean). This variety of the common frijol bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) is a small bean with a distinctive, intense flavor. It is the preferred bean throughout south Mexico and most of Central America and the Caribbean. It grows rather poorly in Mayaland, surviving well but yielding small crops. It requires long cooking, and is usually simmered slowly in the ashes by the fire. Bu’ul kabax (here as elsewhere the words are Yucatec Maya), black beans boiled with a sprig of epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides), is a mealtime regular. One scoops up the beans and their cooking liquid with a bit of tortilla. Using a tortilla shred as a spoon takes some practice, but is an efficient and delightful way to eat kabax. The small native Mexican lima beans are far less often eaten; they are stewed with pork. Black-eyed peas, introduced from Africa in colonial times, are most often cooked and mixed with corn dough to produce various dumplings. They are often eaten boiled with chile. A “snake’s head” is a split-open corn dumpling with black-eyes and chile in it.
Flavorings in everyday Maya food are onions, garlic, tomatoes, chiles, radishes, mint, chives, oregano, cilantro and more. There is always fruit: avocadoes, bananas, plantains (big starchy bananas), mameys, sapotes, oranges, limes, grapefruit–the family’s dooryard garden probably has a dozen kinds, and their neighbors grow still other kinds, so they can trade. The neighborhood has perhaps three dozen fruit species. Never is there a day without fruit, and the collective total is often second only to maize as a calorie source.
Meat and eggs are usually available, but in small quantities. On almost any given day, someone has killed a pig. Or someone has a birthday and a few chickens were cooked for the occasion. Or someone with a shotgun had good luck the night before, and shared the deer meat with kin and neighbors.
The Maya know many ways to stretch the meat. Most convenient of all is to boil it, with everything else edible, in a big stew. Chopping it and using it in tamales is more a strategy for leftovers than for fresh meat, unless this is a ritual occasion when serious killing of poultry must be done, and the whole village revels in the tamales. Alternatively, one can eat the meat with strong chiles, which makes it seem like more. One bite feels like a major event.
Children may have a hard time between weaning and young adulthood, because they can’t handle the chiles and so don’t get the meat. (This is my experience, at least. I have seen the same problem in many parts of southeast Asia, Africa, India, and Latin America.) At this stage, they are prone to anemia and digestive upsets, and parasites are not uncommon. But children and others make up for it by eating all the fruit they can find; some of it–especially the mangos and mameys–has vitamins and minerals they would otherwise lack. Children, and everyone, would be doing better if they would grow and eat more greens, especially chaya, but habits die hard; corn and meat are real food, greens are not. The Yucatan anthropologist Maria Elena Peraza Lopez [1986] described these values and problems in a superb but, alas, almost unavailable description of eating in a small, traditional, far-from-affluent village.
The simplest recipes in south Mexico are still Native American ones: corn gruel, tamales, venison stew. Some of the elaborate dishes are almost pure Spanish: sausage, chanfaina, flan. However, the vast majority of the recipes in this book combine the two. In most of these cases, they add Spanish ingredients to a basically Indian dish. Sometimes the basic dish is Spanish, and only the tomatoes and peppers announce a Maya or Aztec influence. In some cases, it is impossible to tell which way the influence went. Consider the stew-of-almost-everything known as puchero or cocido. The name is Spanish, and the dish is well-known in Spain, but surely the Maya had the same sort of dish–every culture has it. The recipe is, after all, hard to miss: Take everything edible that you can find and boil them together. And the omnipresence of tomatoes, peppers, squash and allspice in the south Mexican variants bespeak a Mayan or Nahuatl ancestry. Indeed, where is the dividing line between puchero and Nahuatl-named stews like ajiaco and mole?
Mayaland food, today, is divided into the maize staple foods and all the rest. Broadly, life is based on maize breads—tortillas and pib-baked thicker breads. In Yucatec Maya, these are collectively known as waj. Corn drinks, pozol and (other) sak ja’ (see above), were until recently second in importance, or, in Tabasco, often even more important than tortillas. Tamales are another category. They are known by their Nahuatl name (tamalli or “tamale”), which implies some change from ancient times; were they once called waj like other solid maize foods? Or have we lost some ancient word?
The Nahuatl, at least some of them, traditionally divide major foods (as opposed to snacks) into tlaxcalli (tortillas), tamalli, and taballi—everything eaten with the tortillas (Stuart 1978). A taco is some taballi folded in a tortilla. The Maya seem not to have anything so formalized, but the idea is there. Solid food is largely divided into tortillas and the many things (usually rather soupy) picked up with them. Tamales are ritual foods or occasional snacks.
A large range of snacks seems hard to fit into other categories. Market and street foods, modern packaged items, and other small items do not fit into traditional categories. In the recipe sections of this book, I have lumped snacks and tamales, but that is not necessarily the way people classify the food world in south Mexico.
The Future, and Some Issues of Environmental and Nutritional Concern
Modernization has provided access to more and better store foods, but has also brought soft drinks, alcohol, and comida chatarra (“junk food”) within reach of all. The net effect, especially on dental health, has not been good. Iron deficiency, always a problem in this maize-dependent, meat-short part of the world, has not been helped by the rise of comida chatarra. Within the time I have been working in Mayaland, diabetes has become common in the villages I know, as it has throughout Mexico. Village clinics circulate good information about nutrition, but it is all written for city people, and a lot of the foods the clinics recommend cannot be found in the villages.
South Mexico is not a rich area; Chiapas is the second poorest state in Mexico (after Oaxaca) and Yucatan is also a very poor state. The other three states covered in this book are more affluent—Tabasco and Quintana Roo are among Mexico’s richest—but pockets of stubborn poverty persist. Outright undernutrition, even genuine want, still occur (this is based on my own observations and those of medically trained persons I have interviewed). As land becomes scarce and traditional agriculture becomes less viable, economic development becomes more necessary.
The worst tragedy lies in what modernization has often done to food production. South Mexico has not been a beneficiary of the Green Revolution. Central and North Mexico did very well indeed from the Green Revolution. Wheat, potatoes, tomatoes and other vitally important subsistence crops sustained huge leaps in production. The South was not so lucky. None of the Green Revolution techniques worked there. The new varieties of corn yield no better than the old ones. Artificial fertilizer is wasted because the soil lacks more than just fertilizer; it lacks depth, texture, nutrient-holding capacity. Pests and weeds not only overwhelm control efforts, they positively thrive on them. Insecticides in Yucatan killed natural predators, releasing plagues of insect pests such as whiteflies. Whole villages were reduced to near-starvation. Weedy grasses, released from competition by herbicides that killed their competitors, overwhelmed the best land in many villages.
The Green Revolution in much of Mexico benefited largely the farmers who could afford its more expensive offerings. The Maya were far from that category. Their poverty remained severe, and—especially in Chiapas—often became worse than ever.
The future lies in combining the best of the old with a whole new generation of techniques. After the relative failure of the Green Revolution in the south, farmers and agronomists have learned to use recent advances in biological control, cultural techniques, water-saving irrigation methods, and low-tillage farming. Drip irrigation systems and third-generation, targeted fumigant chemicals work side by side with ancient Maya techniques such as intercropping squash and other crops–the squash leaves shade out weeds, and the cucurbitacins in the squash kill insect pests (see Anderson 2005b; see also Gómez-Pompa et al. 2003, passim, for a wide variety of opinions and approaches, in the context of historical developments).
This third wave of integrated, skill-intensive techniques is spreading slowly. Farmers bright enough to learn and use such methods are also bright enough to go to the city and make their fortune, and they usually do. There is a steady brain drain to the hotels of Cancun, the oil rigs of Tabasco, the truck-driving firms of Chiapas and the factories of Merida. You are as apt to hear Maya spoken in a sophisticated vehicle repair shop in Quintana Roo or a radio station in south Yucatan as in a cornfield or orchard.
The loss of enterprise pales into insignificance before the ecological catastrophe that threatens to overwhelm the south.
When the Spanish landed, they did not realize that they were touching on the most biologically diverse and probably the most biologically rich area in North America. South Mexico is a zone of interface between land and sea, tropical and temperate zones, dry and wet areas, highland and lowland. It probably has more bird species than the whole continent north of the Mexican border. It has forests where hundreds of species of trees occur. It has the vast Usumacinta-Grijalva river system, whose delta once supported a population of fish, shellfish, birds and turtles that is simply beyond imagination. It once had some of the most fertile soils in America (though also many that were bleak).
Today, much of this wealth is lost, and the people have very little to show for it. Much was carried off to Spain, and later to Mexico City and the United States. Much more was frittered away. Worst of all was clearing land for cattle. Initially, cattle flourished on natural grasslands, widespread in Tabasco and parts of Quintana Roo. However, later, ranchers have cleared more and more forest for cattle. Tropical forests whose hardwoods alone were worth millions were burned to clear the land for worthless scrub cows. Breeding better cattle has improved this situation, but, still, many valuable forests are being cleared today for much less valuable cattle, due to perverse marketing systems and incentives. Other forests have been cleared for monocrop cultivation of sugar, oranges, henequen–crops of low value, usually far lower value than the forests they replaced. The henequen industry collapsed when nylon replaced henequen, leaving desperate poverty. (On the negative effects of modern agriculture in south Mexico and Central America, see Anderson 2005b; Faust 1998; Painter and Durham 1995; Stonich 1993.)
The Usumacinta-Grijalva river delta faced a different threat. It lies over an oil pool (the oil formed millions of years ago from rotting vegetation in an ancestral delta). Pollution from the oil industry was allowed (until recently) to go uncontrolled, and the fish and shellfish are gone. Moreover, the oil pool turned out to be much smaller than expected. The poor were forced onto marginal lands, mostly steep or impoverished. These they worked until the soil was gone.
Today, much of the remaining forests and swamps in the south are being preserved, but whole geological eras will be required to reforest the eroded slopes of central Chiapas and to flush out the poisoned Usumacinta Delta. The Yucatan Peninsula has fared better, but many forests of central and western Yucatan are gone, and with them most of the soil.
Marine resources are being overharvested around most of the Maya coasts. Fish are declining. Conch—the giant snail of the Caribbean—is disappearing in many areas. Sea turtles were once common, but now the last few are now protected, probably too late. Poaching goes on, and the turtles are now so rare that even a very little poaching is deadly. The story of the destruction of the Caribbean sea turtles is one of the most heartbreaking in the long roll of human shortsighted folly. A few still nest on Campeche beaches.
The south will survive and flourish only if the third wave of skill-intensive, knowledge-intensive agriculture is complemented by aggressive government and private action to conserve resources and use them sustainably. Fortunately, almost everyone is aware of this now. Unfortunately, some of those who know better are still profiting from rape and pillage of the land.
Game is sadly depleted (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005; Terán and Rasmussen 1994). The traditional Maya were careful game managers, and some still are. Yucatan, once known as the “land of curassow and deer,” now has virtually none of either. (The curassow is a turkey-like gamebird.) Local subsistence hunting is bad enough, with modern population expansion, but the kiss of death is commercial hunting for big-city markets and restaurants. Some traditional Maya villages refuse to allow this and still manage their wild animal populations. Game is still found in remote parts of the Yucatan Peninsula, but overhunting has wiped it out in most places. Some restaurants still offer it, illegally. Restaurants in the First World get their meat from game farms, but in Yucatan it is all poached in the wild. The last few animals must be saved for subsistence needs and for restoring–hopefully–the desperately depleted stocks. Enforcing game laws in an area as vast and wild as Yucatan cannot be totally effective.
The immorality of illegal hunting cannot be overstated. It is not just a question of saving animals. Many Maya families still live by traditional subsistence farming and hunting. As late as the 1980s, 1/3 of the families in western Quintana Roo reported “no (cash) income,” i.e. a subsistence economy. Even today, people often depend on a lucky shot for their very survival. If market hunters exterminate the game, Maya children will starve.
So, as of this writing, you should never eat game in a south Mexican restaurant. If you are offered game in Mexico, do not buy or eat it, unless you know it was farmed, or harvested by responsible and sustainable hunting.
Finally, and most serious, the very forest itself—and with it the soil—is slowly melting away. Mayaland remains more forested than other parts of Mexico, in large part because the Mayan peoples have protected it. But deforestation is advancing there too (Anderson 2005b; Faust 1998; and compare the accounts from neighboring areas of Guatemala in Atran 1993; Atran et al. 1999a, 1999b; Schwartz 1990). Maya farming spares the forest. The Maya cut a small tract and let it regrow. Problems occur only when population density is so great that people recut too often; the tracts then do not regrow adequately. This is a problem in the desperately poor henequen areas of Yucatan state. Worst off, however, are the marginal communities of Chiapas. Here, the thin soil has long ago eroded, due to cultivation of steep slopes. The only recourse for the rapidly-growing population is flight to the oil fields of Tabasco, the cities of the north or the coast, or—increasingly—the United States. Far worse than population growth has been land-grabs by rich ranchers, government projects, ill-planned reservoirs, roads, oilfields. It was in these villages that the Zapatista rebellion took fierce hold.
Large-scale conservation efforts have saved sizable blocks of forest, especially in Quintana Roo and Campeche, but Mayan interests are often neglected (Faust 1998; Haenn 2005). At worst, Maya are pushed off their own land. This removes their incentive to protect it, and they sometimes become poachers on lands they once guarded. On the other hand, dedicated Mexican government workers and private entities are making some notable attempts to work with Maya communities, reinforcing their forest-management traditions (Anderson 2005b; Anderson and Tzuc 2005). A building consensus sees this as the best hope for saving the valuable natural resources of tropical Mexico.
Even if you never go to south Mexico, you can support conservation and sustainable agriculture there. The people who gave the world corn, tomatoes, chiles, dahlias and chocolate deserve some return. For one thing, you can buy shade-grown Mexican coffee. Starbucks carries it, and so do many smaller firms. This coffee is grown under ecologically excellent conditions, often by indigenous people. (Mexico’s sun-grown coffee is not only less eco-friendly—it isn’t as good! Be selfish and go for the good coffee!) South Mexico already suffered one collapse, when the Classic Maya civilization fell in the 800′s A.D. This was almost certainly an ecological collapse, however much warfare may have precipitated it. We can prevent another such collapse by prompt action.
Surely this book will convince you to visit Mayaland! When you do, consider supporting low-impact ecotourism as an alternative to huge hotels. Look for local small restaurants where you can get chaya, hojasanta, and local pork instead of junk food and rainforest beef. You can, at the very least, avoid eating game or otherwise supporting the unnecessary taking of wildlife.
The Details: Tips on Cooking and Ingredients.
The core of this book consists of recipes I collected in the field, but more of the recipes are reworked from local cookbooks in Spanish. Wonderful cookbooks have been published in the south, most of them in small editions of very local distribution; see the present book’s bibliography for citations. These books are hard to find even on their native soil, and usually impossible to get anywhere else. Valuable also as a framework and source of ideas are a series of cookbooks covering all the states of Mexico, issued by Banrural (Mexico’s farm loan bank, then nationalized, now private; see Banrural 1987, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1988d, recently reissued by Conaculta, Mexico’s cultural bureau: Conaculta Oceano 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c). I have drawn heavily on these. I have indicated this by referencing the recipes, but note that all recipes have been rewritten and rearranged (among other things, to convert from metric to pounds and ounces), and most have been annotated and elaborated. These cookbooks drew on, and credited, local sources, but put the recipes into a clear, easily-used form.
The tiny locally-published cookbooks are another matter. Like many of their kind, they are apt to provide no quantities at all. Phrases like “as much as needed” and “as much as usual” abound, and above all that wonderful word bastante, which can mean “enough,” “some,” “plenty of,” or “lots of.” They assume that you know how to cook chicharrones, make tamales, and prepare achiote seeds. They assume you know that ciruelas in the Yucatan Peninsula are not plums (as they are everywhere else in Mexico) but a totally different local fruit. Redoing these recipes for the present cookbook involves total rewriting, with heavy input from my own knowledge of the cuisine.
Ordinary “Mexican” food–the cuisine of north and central Mexico–is now well known, thanks to Diana Kennedy, Patricia Quintana and many others, but south Mexico remains little known. Recently, four Mayaland cookbooks have appeared in English. The first was Foods of the Mayas by Nancy and Jeffrey Gerlach (1994). This cookbook is delightful, and it provides a quick introduction to Mayaland food, and focuses on the urban restaurant tradition. The second is Cherry Hamman’s wonderful book Mayan Cooking: Recipes from the Sun Kingdoms of Mexico (1998). This is an excellent study of the food of Yucatan state, written by an anthropologically trained chef. It includes a great deal of ethnographic data, delightfully told. Anyone interested in Yucatan food needs this book. The third is A Yucatan Kitchen by Loretta Miller (2003), also a worthy work. Finally, Lyman Morton’s Yucatán Cook Book: Recipes and Tales (1996) adds a personal touch, but the recipes in it come from all over Mexico and are nationwide restaurant standards; some are rarely or never seen in Yucatan. He has, for instance, a great recipe for Oaxaca-style grasshoppers, but most Maya are as horrified at the thought of eating those as most Anglo-Americans are, though famine did reduce some Maya to locust-eating in the old days.
None of these books covers the other Maya cuisines of the south, or most of the real village foods, and the recipes in the present book are thus substantially different from theirs. I have tried to avoid going over the same ground as they do.
Most of the chapters below are organized in standard cookbook format, but the Yucatan chapter is different; it begins with basics—the maize staple foods, the sauces and garnishes, and the spice mixes (recados). These really have to have special sections of their own, at the start of the book’s recipes. On the whole, they have information useful in other chapters; the chile sauces, in particular, include some widespread favorites, and the recados are used in Campeche as well as in Yucatan.
I assume, throughout, that anyone using this cookbook is already somewhat familiar with cooking and with ordinary Mexican or Caribbean food. I just haven’t space to put in the instructions for making tamales into every tamale recipe, or to explain the details of making salsa. Those who are not, and even those who are, should read (or reread) at least one of Diana Kennedy’s books The Art of Mexican Cooking (1989), Mexican Regional Cooking (1984), The Cuisines of Mexico (1984), and My Mexico (1998), and, definitely, Patricia Quintana’s work The Taste of Mexico (1986). There are, of course, many other good books about Mexican food, but these are particularly good at describing basic ingredients and basic processes. Sra. Quintana’s has a fine section on Yucatan, providing some elaborate, modernized recipes. The present book deals with ordinary traditional recipes, and I refer the reader to Sra. Quintana’s work for exemplary indications of what a creative, imaginative modern chef can do with this great cuisine.
Health Questions
If you visit southern Mexico, do not fear the dreadful diseases alleged to lurk in every pot. I have gotten sick from the food only once in south Mexico (total time there: a year and a half, living in villages and eating local food), and that once was in a fancy urban restaurant. If you see the food being cooked over reasonable heat, it’s safe. However, don’t eat raw items—especially raw seafood—and don’t drink the water. Even remote Maya villagers now drink bottled water.
Traditional South Mexican food is very healthy, based as it is on whole-grain tortillas, fish, beans, and assorted fruits and vegetables. The small amounts of meat eaten are usually lean. Maya cuisine relies on boiling, with no fat added to an already low-fat cuisine.
However, the present book naturally emphasizes the rather more luxurious recipes, which run more heavily to meat and fat. Moreover, the recipes of Peninsular Spanish origin often use appreciable quantities of eggs, butter, and fat meat.
Another necessary bit of advice concerns that recurrent phrase, “salt to taste.” Traditional south Mexican food is quite salty, since it is designed to fill the needs of men who are doing hard outdoor work in tropical sun and heat. The saltiness is intolerable to normal temperate-zone palates. On the other hand, the recipes don’t taste right without a fair amount of salt. However, if you have salt-sensitive hypertension, you can leave the salt out in most cases, without much damage to the product.
If you are worried about saturated fat or cholesterol in cooking:
–Emphasize the more traditional Maya recipes!
–Where eggs are mainly a binder, as in cakes, simply substitute 5 egg whites for 3 eggs.
–Mexican meat is very lean, so use the leanest cuts: pork leg or rump, beef rump roast or sirloin, etc. Trim off visible fat. In many of the chicken recipes, skinning the chicken improves the dish, as well as getting rid of much of the fat in the chicken. Chicken is no longer a low-fat, low-cholesterol food in Mexico or the United States. Chickens have been bred for more fat. Since, at the same time, pigs have been bred leaner, pork is now about as good an option as chicken, unless you are using only the skinned chicken breasts. Pork has always been very lean (and tasty!) in rural south Mexico, where the pigs forage on weeds and fallen fruit rather than being grain-fattened.
–DO NOT substitute margarine or oil for butter (no matter what other cookbooks say). The cooking qualities and taste of the recipes in question depends on butter. Moreover, it now appears that margarine (except very soft margarine) is worse than butter for your heart. You can, however, cut down on butter in most of the recipes that call for it. Since the Maya do not normally use butter, there are only a handful of recipes in this book that call for it.
–Oil can always be substituted for lard. If you do this in tamales, cut down the amount, since the amounts herein are premised on the assumption that you use “Maya lard” (see below).
–Yogurt can be subsituted for cream or sour cream in many cases. Try it.
Ingredients: Important notes (see Glossary for more technical lore)
Some Specifics
Achiote (annatto). As used in cooking, achiote is a paste made from the ground-up seeds of the achiote bush (Bixa orellana). Seeds are ground; they are very hard and require soaking and then heavy grinding action. The powder is then mixed with with soaking water or with some other liquid, and often with spices. This plant grows in virtually every south Mexican garden. The paste is brilliant red and has a wonderful, subtle, smoky flavor. Small blocks of achiote paste are found in Hispanic markets. Note that some of these blocks are spiced while others are simply the ground-up seeds. It’s better to get the straight stuff and add your own spices. Read the fine print. Even more widely available are the seeds themselves, which can be soaked and then ground at home. Look for them among the small cellophane bags of spices in Latin American groceries.
The paste is usually mixed with ground spices and garlic to make a “recado” (see recipes in Yucatan chapter). This is, in turn, mixed with bitter orange juice, lime juice, vinegar, or other dissolving liquid, and used as a sauce or marinade.
Animals. The dog was an occasional pre-Columbian food, but the only locally domesticated food animal was the turkey. This was the highland species (Meleagris gallopavo), and it does not flourish in the lowlands. The lowland turkey, a different species (Agriocharis ocellata), was never domesticated. Thus the Maya had little barnyard meat. This was at least partly because of the abundance of game; people did not need to go to the trouble of raising animals.
With the Spanish, pigs, cows and sheep became common. The Maya had no trouble with the pigs, for they had kept tame peccaries for centuries; they simply extended native terms for peccaries to the new animals. Sheep were more of a problem. They were called “Spanish deer” or “cotton deer”–the last confusing shortened to “cotton” in modern Yucatec Maya, with only context to tell you whether animal or plant is intended. Soon, however, the advantages of wool in the higher mountain climates was recognized, and groups like the Tzotzil became herders. This does not necessarily mean that lamb entered the diet; many Tzotzil regard sheep as quasi-sacred and refuse to eat them.
See also Game, below.
Beans. The bean of most of south Mexico is the black bean (frijol negro in Spanish), or, more precisely, the black turtle bean. This is a local variety of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). It tastes very different from other beans, and must be used for authentic south Mexican cooking. Fortunately, it can be found in almost all markets in the United States now. Many other beans are used locally, such as the black-eyed pea. Lima beans—iib in Maya—in south Mexico are small, about the size of the black beans, and are very flavorful.
Cooking black turtle beans, the Maya simmer them very slowly for about 3 hours. I find it perfectly acceptable to bring them to a boil, let them soak for 4 hours, and then boil for an hour or so. This does not lose flavor if you don’t change the water. Changing the water, however, eliminates some flavor.
Bitter orange (naranja agria). Introduced by the Spanish in the early Colonial period, these were adopted enthusiastically by the Maya. The juice is necessary for proper Yucatan cooking. Bitter oranges are impossible to find in the United States, though, unless you live in an area where bitter orange trees are planted as ornamentals. (They are a different species from the ordinary sweet orange.) If you can’t get bitter oranges, you can make an acceptable substitute by mixing orange and grapefruit juice or orange and lemon juice. However, in Quintana Roo, limes are routinely used instead of bitter oranges, so this is a perfectly good and traditional substitute. The bottled bitter orange juice preparations that come from the Caribbean are already flavored for island cooking styles. This makes them wrong for Yucatan. I am told that one can find bottled bitter orange juice without added flavorings, but I have not found it in the US.
Chaya. Chay, or chaya (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius var. chayamansa), is a leaf crop that grows on a large bush. It is a triumph of Maya domestication; the wild ancestor stings like a nettle and is hard to eat. (This wild pest is called mala mujer, “bad woman,” in Spanish; a bit of sexism.) Chaya is one of the most nutritious foods ever tested–far better than spinach. A small book has been written by Jose Diaz Bolio (1974) and another by his associate Luz Leon de Gutierrez (1974), to promote its use, and I have drawn on their recipes. Widespread and indispensable in Mayaland, it is now grown in South Florida and becoming widely available in the United States.
One of my students, Jeffrey Ross, found through genetic research that all the chaya plants in Yucatec Maya country are cuttings that trace back, ultimately, to one original plant (Ross-Ibarra and Molina-Cruz 2002). Somebody found the perfect chaya, and propagated it. (The Maya love to get cuttings of new things, and the most astonishing plants turn up—rare mid-19th-century French rose varieties grow in villages in Quintana Roo.)
Chaya has pronounced diuretic action, and is routinely used for this in the Yucatan.
If you can’t find chaya, substitute spinach or Swiss chard.
Warning: do not confuse with chia or chayote. These are entirely different plants.
Chiles. Chiles are one of Native America’s greatest contributions to the world. Thousands of varieties exist, and chiles are now popular throughout the warm regions of the planet. Several species are native to Mexico, others to South America. Non-hot varieties, “bell peppers,” have been developed. In spite of the intense pain they can cause in a greenhorn eater, chiles appear to be perfectly harmless. Capsaicin, the pungent chemical in chiles, acts by directly stimulating your pain receptors—fooling you into thinking the chile is harmful, so you won’t eat it and waste its seeds. Don’t be fooled. Capsaicin, technically an oleoresin, occurs in several forms, which have different effects on one’s nerves; some are hot initially and quickly lose their effect, but others are insidious—the pain grows and grows for many seconds after you eat the chile. Cold water has only a very temporary soothing effect. Some get better results by eating bread, which absorbs some of the capsaicin. Alas, only time really relieves the pain; it usually lasts only a few minutes. English refers to chiles as “hot,” but more chile-familiar cultures have more specific words for the feeling: picante in Spanish, for example.
When handling chiles, use gloves if you have delicate skin, and never touch your eyes or other sensitive areas after working with chiles!
Chiles and bell peppers should be seeded. Slit open; remove stem, seeds, and attached membranes. This makes the chiles less hot.
A range of chiles is available in south Mexico, though nothing like the truly astounding assemblage found in central Mexico. The cities of south Mexico and especially Chiapas have fair variety.
In the villages of Yucatan, however, the selection is rather small:
A large, mild group, green or yellow, usually known as xkatik, which means “little pod chile” in Maya (Capsicum annuum to scientists). These and the Tabasco appear to be the true native Maya chiles. The xkatik is a large, rather mild, yellow-green chile, rather like that which is called a “California chile” in the United States (but more like other yellow-green flavorful chiles of Mexico). Long, mild chiles are available anywhere in the United States and many other parts of the world, and will do as substitutes.
A small, hot, green group, including the jalapeño and serrano types familiar in central Mexico. The güero, a similar but yellow and very flavorful chile, shows up in Tabasco and Chiapas.
Tabasco chiles (“Tabasco peppers”). These are a different species (Capsicum frutescens), smaller and hotter than the above. They are half an inch to an inch long, brilliant red, roughly conical, and intensely hot. One finds them fresh, dried, or bottled. I always wondered what Tabasco peppers were called in Tabasco. They are called maax, pronounced “mosh”–this is the Maya name. Pimienta de Tabasco (literally “Tabasco pepper”) means allspice, not Tabasco chiles.
Habaneros (Capsicum chinense). Habanero chiles deserve a section of their own–maybe a medical textbook of their own. They may well be the hottest chiles in the world (there are several other candidates for this distinction, however). As the name implies, they are a post-Columbian introduction via Habana, Cuba; they are native to South America and spread up through the Antilles long ago. They are “Scotch bonnet peppers” in Caribbean English. They are about an inch long and ripen to an orange color. They are now widely sold in the United States. Watch out for them! Their flavor is absolutely unsurpassed, but you have to suffer to find that out. Their hotness reminds one of the description of Texas chiles by Alexander Sweet in 1885: “After these chile peppers have been kept on ice a week or so, they still retain sufficient heat to blister the mouth of an Alaskan river…. The incandescent glow [of the eater] is almost as heated as is the language he uses after his mouth has sufficiently cooled down to enable him to use it for conventional purposes.” (Quoted by Ernestine Sewell Linck and Joyce Gilber Roach, Eats: A Folk History of Texas Foods [Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth, 1989], p. 177. My Texan father remembered chile stew, the famous “bowl o’ red,” from his childhood.)
If you start with tiny amounts and work up from there, you can build up a tolerance. I have seen Maya eat habaneros like apples.
Dried chiles in south Mexico are usually of the sort broadly called ancho or “dried pasilla” in the United States. These come from central Mexico. Central and north Mexico has a whole conoisseurship of dried chiles, distinguishing many subvarieties. This is mostly lost on the Maya, so any relatively mild dried chile will do if a recipe happens to call for such. Frequently, dried chiles are toasted over the fire or on a griddle.
Chipotles. In central and north Mexico, chiles are smoke-dried; these are chipotles (Nahuatl chilpotl). They are sold loose or canned, sometimes canned in oil. This last is the form in which they are known in Mayaland; they are not part of Maya culture, and are rarely used. Canned chipotles are now available in all United States markets that have a Mexican clientele.
Chipilín. This plant (C. longirostrata) is similar to alfalfa. The tender young leaves are used. Alfalfa sprouts make a passable substitute. If you grow peas, use the tender growing tips of the peavines. Failing that, any mild-flavored green will do. Chipilín does not have much taste, so substitution is reasonable.
Chives. Chives (not European ones but Chinese chives, which do better in the tropics) are grown universally in Mayaland, and used in a small way for garnish and for flavoring tamales. They do not show up in the recipes because they are used opportunistically rather than as a key ingredient. The Maya chop them and cast them (raw) on any dish that seems appropriate, or incorporate them in tamale dough or filling.
Chocolate. Tabasco is, and Chiapas was, and locally still is, major chocolate-growing country. Yucatan is too far north and too rocky to grow much, but has some trees. Chocolate remains a popular drink. It is also used in sauces, but much less than in central Mexico. Cookie-shaped tablets of highly sweetened chocolate are universal, and in Tabasco you can get them right from the factories, always a treat. On chocolate, Sophie Coe and Michael Coe’s wonderful book The True History of Chocolate (1996) is indispensable.
Corn. Maize is, of course, the staple of all Mexico, perhaps especially the south. The traditional maize of most of the area is a vaguely-defined complex of landraces (the best account is in John Tuxill’s Ph.D. thesis of 2006—hopefully to be published!). One common cluster of varieties is widely known by its Yucatec Maya name, nal t’eel, “rooster corn.” It produces large, well-formed ears with yellow kernels. Similar but slower-maturing, larger-eared corns are either called by the same name or distinguished as “yellow corn” (kan ixi’im in Yucatec). These all make chewy, flavorful tortillas with a slight tang–a barely-noticeable sour or piquant flavor. These tortillas quickly become an addiction, and it is hard to eat Maya food without them.
In the United States, one cannot find anything very similar. The best Stateside tortillas are made of the soft white corn that was traditionally grown in Oaxaca and neighboring areas. (There, poor people can’t afford to eat their own corn; they sell it to el norte and buy far cheaper hog-food corn from Iowa.) A similar white, delicate corn is grown in Mayaland, but is not so popular there, and does not yield so well.
Sweet corn, in Mayaland, is popular; it is eaten at a chewier stage than American sweet corn.
When cutting sweet corn off the cob, cut close to get as much of the germ as possible.
Normally, however, maize is grown to full maturity. The kernels are then hard and tough, thanks to thousands of years of activity by seed-eating weevils (family Bruchidae; gorgojos in local Spanish). The weevils ate the softer kernels, and Darwinian selection took its course. The kernels must therefore be boiled with lime (calcium oxide, not citrus) to make them soft enough to grind. This produces a commodity known in Nahuatl, and Mexican Spanish, as nixtamal. It is ground to produce:
Masa, a thick, solid paste. It is the raw material for tortillas and tamales. Usually, the Maya grow their own maize—it is sacred, or was until recently, and even people who do not depend on farming will often grow as much of their own as they can. However, they can buy lime-processed corn meal, and many now do.
In the United States, masa is easy to find; all markets in neighborhoods with Latino population have it.
Epazote. This common Mexican plant (closely related to lambsquarters) is now found in Southwestern markets and gardens. There is really no substitute for it. If the recipe calls for it and none is at hand, people simply leave it out. It is called epazote (its central Mexican name) in Yucatan as well as in most of Mexico, but it has its own Maya name, kok’omo, in highland Chiapas.
Fish. Vernacular Spanish has very few fish names, and they are used over and over, in all parts of the Spanish-speaking world, for various different species. In Yucatan, common names include mojarra and sierra for various seabass-like fish; huachinango for various red snappers and relatives.
Some fish names are more specific.
One of these is robalo, which usually, in southeast Mexico, means fish that would generally be called “snook” in the United States. (In other parts of Mexico, robalo means various completely different types of fish.) Several related species are called “snook”; I am not sure which is the common robalo of southeast Mexico. Snook of whatever type have firm, white, rather oily flesh with a delicate, rich flavor. There is no perfect substitute, but for the recipes in this book any good fish steak will do.
Another is cazón, which means “dogfish or other small shark.” In Campeche, it usually means small hammerhead sharks. These are very popular. They are sold cut up, roasted and salted. Originally this was apparently to preserve them; now it is the taste. It is definitely an acquired taste. Among other thnigs, sharks concentrate urea in their tissues.
Shrimp and lobster still abound.
Fruit. Most of the better fruits of south Mexico can now be gotten in the United States in markets that carry Caribbean products. Often, they are in the convenient form of frozen blocks of fruit pulp. These come from Central America and are excellent. They are perfect for making fruit ices and ice cream. Guanabana, mamey, chicosapote, granadillo (passion fruit), caimito, cherimoya, and tamarind are among the ones to watch for. Guanabana and mamey are particularly good.
Among the common and important natives is the chicosapote (Spanish spelling, chicozapote; Manilkara zapota). This plant not only produces excellent plumlike fruit; it also is the source of chewing gum. (Today, most chewing gum uses an artificial latex.) Chewing gum was, in fact, introduced to the world by the Maya. Less influential in the world, but a much better fruit, is the Mexican mamey (Pouteria mammosa, a relative of the chicosapote and the Caribbean mamey). It is a tall tree that bears a huge fruit with the flavor of candied sweet potato. In ancient times, and even within living memory, chicosapotes and mameys were grown on such a scale that their fruit was sliced and dried as famine food (see above).
Another fruit of note is the abal (Spondias mombin). This fruit is simply called “plum” (ciruela) in Spanish and goes by the unlovely and unfair name of “hog plum” in English, because the Spanish found it good for fattening hogs. The abal does resemble a small sour plum, but in a good sense. Many varieties ripen to an exquisite plumlike or cherry-like flavor. Others resemble green olives, and are used like olives in pickling and cooking. (The great popularity of olives in Mexican cooking is mostly due to Spanish influence, but the pre-Columbian popularity of the abal must have given the olive a ready market.)
Other fruits are the waya and k’aniste’ of the lowlands and the capulin cherry and wild hawthorn of the highlands. All deserve more attention than they have gotten. Unfortunately, they and the abal do not enter into this cookbook, for they are normally just eaten off the tree.
Frying. “Fry” inadequately translates a wonderful range of Spanish words. Usually it translates mean freir, which in south Mexico normally means to sauté‚ in a little oil, stirring only to prevent sticking; the word also refers to frying in general. Sometimes I mean sofreir: to fry lightly, in rather low heat, cut-up seasonings and vegetables This step is basic to many dishes; it produces a sofrito or fritanga. Usually the ingredients are chopped finely, but a very distinctive feature of Spanish cuisine, extremely common and important in south Mexico, is blending up the vegetables into a smooth paste and then frying it. A little oil is heated in a pan and the paste is stirred around in it for a short time. Saltear means to stir-fry (more or less as in Chinese cooking) and is so translated. Deep-frying is rare. It is always so labeled in the following recipes.
These styles of frying (except the rare deep-frying) use very little oil–even less than Chinese cooking. In stark contrast to fast-food “Mexican” food in the United States, good Mexican cooking is not greasy. Boiling and roasting are common. Frying most often uses only a bare skin of oil in the pan. Tamales, which have to have a lot of lard to be edible, use “Maya lard” (see below), with far less fat than pure lard. Only a few dishes are fatty.
Even so, some readers may want to reduce fat still further. This can quite legitimately be done by leaving out the sofreir step, as oil-sparing cooks quite often do. The chopped or blended vegetables are simply cooked in their own juices in the pan. Many other recipes involving light frying are perfectly good without the frying step.
Game. South Mexico used to be a paradise for game–perhaps the richest hunting and fishing territory in North America. Deer and peccaries (javelinas; small wild pigs) abounded. Two large rodents, the agouti and paca, were especially relished. Rarer animals like tapirs and crocodiles provided some variety. Game birds—quail, wild turkeys, grouselike guans and curassows (miscalled “pheasants”), and others—occurred in vast flocks. Today, all these animals are depleted by overhunting, and are generally protected—probably too late to save them. The Yucatan subspecies of white-tailed deer is acutely endangered and carefully protected. Thus game is no longer a significant food, except in the most remote forest communities. Depletion of game has become a major hardship for the small cultivators and rural folk.
Thus, never eat game meat in southern Mexico, unless you know it is legally obtained from a viable population! The rare animals (all the large ones) are protected by law. This does not stop many restaurants from serving them, many people from hunting them commercially, and, most shameful of all, many cookbooks from incorporating them. Even the excellent Banrural-Conaculta series in its 2000-2001 editions is full of recipes for game, without a word about the fact that the animals are acutely endangered and illegal for food.
These animals, if sustainably managed, could be a major staple for the Maya and for the economy.
Even now, however, there are enough small animals such as coatis, rabbits, and armadillos—all humorous as well as edible to the Maya (cf. Taube 1989b)—to provide welcome dietary relief. Even the lowly gopher is not despised (Hovey and Rissolo 1999). Minor animal resources are not neglected: Iguanas, turtles, fish (where available), even insects such as wasp larvae. Early dictionaries record a special word for fat iguanas, showing how important they were in the diet.
Hojasanta. This bushy plant (Piper auritum) is a relative of black pepper. It is grown for its leaves, which are up to a foot long and edible. They have a wonderful taste of fennel and black pepper. This plant goes by a variety of local names: acuya (the Nahuatl name) in Veracruz, momo in Tabasco, mumu in Chiapas, mak’ol or mak’olan in the Yucatan Peninsula. (It is not even remotely similar to the plant we call yerba santa in California.)
It is now grown in Florida, Texas, and California by people of Central American and Caribbean background. If you can’t find it, use finocchio–the Italian thick-stalked or bulblike fennel–or tender young fennel leaves, with a little black pepper. Hojasanta finds its highest use as an edible wrapping for tamales. Wrapping fennel leaves around food and then wrapping the whole in banana leaves or cornhusks is a good substitute. A few fennel seeds can be mixed into the tamale for extra flavor. It’s not the real thing, but it’s good.
Honey. Unlike most indigenous peoples of Mexico, the Maya do not eat a wide range of insects, but they truly relish wasp and wild bee larvae. Once I was riding with several Maya men in a remote area. They saw the nest of a particularly favored species of wild bee. “A royal hive!” And they were out of the car in a minute, building a smoky fire to drive away the adults and toast the larvae. We ate the latter, which tasted like bits of underdone bacon.
The Maya are world-class beekeepers. Honey is one of the major exports of the Yucatan Peninsula, which, in fact, is one of the top world suppliers. This is not because the Peninsula is especially favored in flowers—though it does have magnificent displays—but because the Maya have a genuine devotion to bees and apiculture. (A large and excellent, but unfortunately hard-to-get, book has been written about this: The Land of Corn and Honey by Harriet de Jong, 1999.) They, or their neighbors, domesticated the native stingless bee Melipona beecheii in very distant pre-Columbian times. This little bee produces a superior honey—exquisite in flavor. Stingless bee honey was widely used as medicine and for ceremonies until recently, but now it is produced by only a few intensely tradition-conscious people.
Stingless bee honey was also made into baalche’, a mead produced by adding water and the bark of the baalche’ tree. This bark was believed (correctly, from my observations) to prevent spoilage through antibiotic action, thus serving the purpose that hops originally served in beer. The Classic Maya waxed inordinately drunk on the stuff, though its alcoholic content is low. More recently, it was solely ceremonial, being necessary for traditional rituals. Most notable were its uses in the ceremonial prayers for rain (cha’chaak) and the various prayers and sacrifices to field spirits, forest spirits, and other local guardians. Today, the ceremonies survive, but the baalche’ used is often made with European bee honey, or even with commercial sugar.
The stingless bee cannot compete with the European honeybee (Apis mellifera), being hard to raise and producing less than a tenth as much honey per unit input. Africanization of honeybees has, meanwhile, made them dangerous to manage. The future of honey in the Yucatan is cloudy. Several projects to rehabilitate the stingless bee have received new life from the fear of Africanization, but stingless bee honey costs so much to produce that it has to be sold for prohibitively high prices.
Lard and oil. Lard in Mayaland–at least in Maya home cooking–does not mean the white, refined fat sold in cans or blocks. It means the fat and juices that cook out of roasting pork or pork boiled down. To make it, one gets a fat pork shoulder or similar piece of pork, and roasts or boils it. People are creative about spicing the shoulder with bitter orange, cloves, oregano or other favorite flavors. The difference between this rich-flavored gravy and the tasteless white pure leaf lard of the supermarket is the difference between great Maya cooking and dull restaurant fare. This is especially true in making tamales, where the masa must be mixed with lard. A home-style Maya tamale made with pork-roast drippings is an experience.
Tamales with chicken stuffing are made with the chicken stock, boiled down to a fatty liquid, instead of “Maya lard.”
For frying vegetables, pan drippings are not usually used. Leaf lard was traditional, but now vegetable oils are used, and the result is really better than with lard. Almost everybody uses commercial vegetable oils now.
A few Spanish-derived recipes call specifically for olive oil, but as a flavoring, not a cooking medium.
Masa: See under Corn
Mashing. Traditionally, mashing ingredients is done with a basalt mortar and pestle. This is still common. Blenders are now also common and perfectly effective, but old-time cooks swear by the mortar and pestle, especially for grinding spices and flavorings (where blenders don’t always work). One must “mill up” (moler–to mill; to grind up in mortar and pestle) the ingredients.
Onions. Onions should be white onions unless otherwise specified. White onions are stronger and more flavorful than yellow ones. Purple (or red) onions are common in south Mexico and often used; they are called for in some recipes and are often used in many others, especially the stews.
Oregano. The oregano of Yucatan is Lippia dulcis, a native plant. It is related to ordinary oregano (Origanum sp.) and tastes similar. Apparently the ancient Maya used it–at least, it has long been domesticated and cultivated. The Spanish took to it in place of their traditional Origanum. Other Lippia spp. are used in other parts of Mexico, and are widely marketed in the United States under the general name of “Mexican oregano.” Use them if you can find them. The “orégano” of the little cellophane bags in Hispanic markets is usually some sort of Lippia. Yucatan oregano has large leaves, so when a recipe calls for only 4 oregano leaves, it is asking for a lot of the spice–a couple of teaspoons of dried oregano.
Platanos or plantains. These are large green bananas that do not ripen soft. They must be cooked quite a long time to be edible. They are a starch food, like potatoes–not a sweet. They are available (usually under the name of plátanos machos) at most Hispanic markets.
Poultry: It is customary in Yucatan and neighboring areas to clean poultry (and often meat) not only by washing it but also by rubbing it well with lime halves. This eliminates any gamy flavor and provides a fresh citrus highlight.
Saffron. Saffron, where called for, is used in very small quantities. Saffron is now always sold in very small packages–boxes, tubes, or envelopes. One package is all that is needed for these recipes. True saffron is now carried only in specialty markets: gourmet, Near Eastern, and Indian. The packaged “saffron” of Mexican markets is safflower, which has no taste. South Mexico still uses the real thing, so look for it. Don’t use safflower.
Saffron in a Mexican recipe always shows strong Spanish influence.
Sikil: See Squash
Squash. The third of the famous Native American trilogy (the “CBS Network”—corn, beans, squash) is abundantly represented in southern Mexico. The common varieties are forms of the butternut squash (C. moschata). The standard winter squash (Cucurbita maxima) is sometimes seen. An unusual, and wonderful, complex of native Yucatan varieties (C. argyrosperma) are similar to the North American cushaw. Finally, the ordinary summer squash (C. pepo) appears, mostly in a grayish zucchini-like form. Oriental winter squashes (such as kabocha or nan-gua) are essentially the same as the standard Maya winter squash.
Squash seeds, usually of the butternut type, are roasted and ground whole to make sikil, a meal with a delicate flavor and a very high content of protein, oil, and mineral nutrients. It was second only to corn as a staple food in the old days, and was necessary to survival. It is now largely a flavoring and thickening agent in the most old-fashioned recipes. You can approximate it by buying unsalted “pepitas” (roasted pumpkin seeds, available in all markets with Latino customers) and grinding them up. The next best alternative is to grind up toasted, unsalted sunflower seeds. Some African markets sell a substance called egusi that is very much like sikil and ideal as a substitute. Sikil is sprinkled on food, mixed into it, or made into a paste (with water) and spread on corn breads.
Chayote is a kind of squash with a single large seed. It is used like a summer squash–preferably when it is young enough to have only a soft, edible beginning of the seed. The young leaves and the flowers are also edible. It is now easily available in United States markets.
Squash vine tips and squash flowers are both standard foods all over south Mexico, and are excellent. Few things make better soup. The best way to get squash flowers is, of course, from your own vines, though markets now sell them. Here’s how to do it without reducing your squash crop: select only male flowers. They grow toward the tip of the vine. The female flowers are less far out along the stem, and have a tiny but unmistakable squash forming at the base. If you are worried about reducing the pollen from the male flowers, just pull off the petals and leave the anthers.
Tomatoes. South Mexican tomatoes are of the sort called Roma in the United States. Don’t use the huge (and tasteless) American supermarket tomatoes.
Vinegar. South Mexicans usually use a mild white vinegar made from fruit or wine.
A Note on Pronunciation
Mayan languages used to be written in a system worked out by Spanish missionaries in the 16th century. It is adequate, though not totally accurate. Recently a more modern system has become general. In this system, the letters are pronounced as in Spanish. One exception is important: X has the sh sound (as it did in sixteenth-century Spanish and still does in Portuguese).
As in Spanish, j is pronounced as h is in English.
The following can be ignored unless you are a linguist:
K’, p’, t’, ch’, and ts’ are emphatic, almost explosive versions of those respective letters. Technically, they are “glottalized.”
Doubled vowels are long: a double o is an o held twice as long as usual, not a u sound. Jool is pronounced like English “hole,” not like “jewel.” (Oddly enough, jool actually means “hole.” Maybe the Maya settled England…?)
Other books about the Maya usually use the old missionary system, in which c is used (it is always pronounced k) and in which h is used where the modern system uses j, and u where it uses w. There are some other minor differences. Place names are always still written with this older system. For instance, Uaxactun is still written that way, though in the modern system it would be Waxaktun; Oxkutzcab would be Oxk’utskab; Chunhuhub would be Chunjujuub.
Most of the words in this book are in Yucatec Maya, but some of the Tabasco recipes use Chol (“Chontal”) words, and the Chiapas recipes often use Tzotzil. These are related languages, about as close as English, Dutch and German.
