Let’s leave to one side the fermenting and cleaning and just think about the grinding of cacao. Because of the oil content, grinding cacao beans is a whole lot harder than grinding grains. In Mesoamerica the grinding of cacao was done by sheer brute force on a simple grindstone.

Yet in the sixteenth century, chocolate as a drink spread quite widely from Mesoamerica to Spain and other parts of Europe on the Atlantic side and to the Philippines on the Pacific side.

(The rest of Asia never accepted chocolate, largely still doesn’t), an interesting question in itself).

Neither the Europeans nor the Filipinos  were still using a simple grindstone.  They’d given it up hundreds of years earlier for the more efficient (if less flexible)  rotary grindstone. Hopeless for cacao because they gum up.

So where did the simple grindstones (metates) and the grinders come from?  A non-trivial question because this is one of the few culinary technologies that go from the New World to the Old World.

First, I assume the grindstones/metates went from New Spain to the Old World by ship.  Making the kind of metate that is good for grinding chocolate (and shown in pictures) is a skilled job.  It’s not something that any old stone mason can just knock out.  And it needs a knowledge of which rock formations are good and these are not necessarily or even normally the same as those for rotary grindstones.

Second, the grinders.  These poor folk had not only to do the work of grinding but hump the 30-50 lb grindstone around with them.  When I bought my chocolate grindstone (a specific size and shape), the metatero and his son, neither of them weaklings, used a wheelbarrow to move it.

In Spain and southern France, according to Marcy Norton, it was usually Separdic Jews who did this, though painting also show “Moors.”

And Beatrice Misa sent me this about the Philippines.

I was talking to a friend who is also doing work with cacao and apparently, before the stone grinders were used here (the ones you turn around, for grinding rice and corn), there were metates (at least he described them to look exactly like that, but no local name was given). It was a surprise to me, because I have never seen pictures or read accounts.

There were Chinese who would walk around and provide the service to families who wanted their cacao ground. Obviously the metate was more portable. It was said that the Chinese (who were abundant in the Philippines at the time, working as cooks or street vendors, also marginalized considerably) were the best cacao grinders, and would get them very fine despite the manual nature of their work. Every family would have their own beans “timpla” or mixed the way they wanted, and then the individual tableas would be stamped with their family seal.

Both the Sephardic Jews and the Chinese must have learned how to do it from migrants from New Spain, if what normally holds in technology transfer also applies here.  It almost always happens when there is someone to show you.

I wonder if we will ever find manuscripts that shed light on who taught Sephardic Jews and the Chinese in the Philippines to grind?  And where they got their beans?  And how all this functioned as a business?  And why and how it kept going until it was mechanized two hundred and fifty years later?

Not easy, technology transfer.  And meantime, I would like chocolate stamped with my personal seal.

I subscribe to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s daily feed, highly recommended.

So a couple of days ago I was delighted when the title that popped up was “cider.”   Now I have a long term fascination with cider, above all with the fermented cider that in so much of France, Spain, England, the United States, perhaps even parts of Mexico, was the alcoholic drink through much of history. Food and art in one.

And above you have the painting that appeared.  Date 1865.  And French.

My goodness, what in the world is this?  Figures in classical costume feeding apples into mills, while sheep (the white blobs) snooze under the apples trees in the background.

Well, it just shows how little I know about the history of French art in the nineteenth century.  This is by the major muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), in itself a surprise since I didn’t know there was a school of muralists in France.  Nor did I know that he influenced, among others, Seurat and Gaugin.

So let me quote part of the story that the Met tells.

In a career that spanned fifty years, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes played a seminal role in the resurgence of mural painting in France during the nineteenth century. His first decorative paintings, “War” and “Peace,” exhibited at the Salon of 1861, led to the 1864 commissioning of the monumental mural “Ave Picardia Nutrix” (Hail, Picardy the Nourisher) for a large stairwell in the newly constructed Musée de Picardie in Amiens. “Cider” and “The River,” respectively, are studies for the left and right sides of the mural.

“Cider” and “The River” present an idealized vision of Picardy’s distant past, and their subjects would have resonated particularly in the 1860s, a time when each region of France was rediscovering its unique history, character, and culture as part of a broader movement toward decentralization.

One of those “aha” moments.

Picardy in the north of France was a land of apple trees and sheep and cereals.  But from the Parisian point of view it was part of the outer darkness, the regions of France that did not speak the cultured French of the Isle de France, the language of diplomacy. Like almost all the French regions it was foreign territory, to be brought into the territory and culture of the French nation.

Puvis de Chavanne’s painting is thus the advance guard in the huge French effort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to make the motley collection of peoples and languages in the territory that was now France really and truly French.  (The problem of making diverse ethnicities and language groups into a nation was a problem facing many countries of course, not just France). Speak langue d’oc in the south of France.  Well, we’ll collect some recipes.  Speak Basque or a version of Catalan, ditto. Speak German, OK.  And so on.  It’s an early attempt, before the Franco-Prussian War (1870-72).  The effort to make different regional cuisines part of a coherent French whole picks up after that and comes to full momentum in the 1930s.

So this is part of a pattern: the wine makers who added a tower to their farmhouse and Chateau to the name of their wine; the cheese makers who invented heritages going back to the Revolution or before.  Now we have cider makers going back to classical antiquity.  And all part of the French nation.

A few concluding thoughts.

1.  I think Puvis de Chavannes has the technology wrong. The mills he shows are for dry grinding not wet grinding.  Most apple juice extraction was based on grapes or olives, hence roller mills or presses of some kind.

2. On cider, look at a wonderful book by Roger French, The History and Virtues of Cyder (including preceding illustration) that, among other things, talks about the growth of the cider industry in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an alternative to importing wine.

3. So desperately sad that a little more than fifty years after Puvis painted this tranquil ode to the antiquity of Picardy, the Battle of the Somme reduced Picardy to a sea of mud, rats, and misery.  Now it’s back, celebrated as terroir.

Even if you have a grindstone, though, even if you know how to grind, it’s tricky to work with cacao because as you grind the mixture seizes up.  The time-honored Mexican way of dealing with this is to heat the grindstone.

Here in this classic engraving from Nicolás de Blegny´s 1687 Le bon usage du thé, du caffé et du chocolat an aproned gentleman is shown gingerly wielding the mano of the grindstone.  Underneath you can just see the brazier that is warming the stone. Cristina Potters, always informative on Mexican customs,  has a series of photos showing Doña Lupe of Patzcuaro in the state of Michoacán in Central Mexico grinding beans.  Since Doña Lupe says she processes 20 to 30 kilos a day, I suspect there are actually a number of other (and perhaps less elegantly dressed) women helping her.

Because given the hard work of grinding as I discovered here or as Lesley Téllez is now discovering, grinding over a heated grindstone is work indeed.

Now back to some archaeology.  A recent article in Nature pushed back the origin of chocolate consumption to 500 BC.

The first chemical evidence of cacao use came about 15 years ago after the analysis of residue from a vessel found at the Mayan site of Rio Azul in northeastern Guatemala and belonging to the Early Classic period of Maya culture—approximately A.D. 460. But Michael Coe, co-author of The True History of Chocolate, believes based on a slew of evidence, some linguistic, that the roots of chocolate go much further back to the great Olmec civilization, which preceded the Maya.

Mayan teapots have always fascinated Terry Powis, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin, which is how his investigation began. “Spouted vessels are very distinct from other Mayan ceramics and quite rare, typically associated with elite burials,” he explained.

Fortunately for Powis, fourteen such vessels were excavated in 1981 from a site at Colha, which lies close to the Caribbean coast in northern Belize, and have since been housed at the University of Texas, Austin. The Maya occupied Colha, which is known for its production of stone tools and its Preclassic spouted vessels, continuously from about 900 B.C. to A.D. 1300.

He scraped residue from the vessels and sent the samples to W. Jeffrey Hurst, who has a delicious job as an analytical biochemist at the Hershey Foods Technical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Using “high performance liquid chromatography coupled to atmospheric-pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry,” Hurst analyzed all the samples. The first instrument separates all the components of the mixture and the other measures the molecular weight of each. Cacao is a blend of more than 500 chemical compounds. Of this tasty compendium the signature chemical is a compound called theobromine—the chemical marker of cacao.

Of the 14 samples analyzed, 3 were positive for theobromine, “chocolate, that is,” said Powis.

OK, well and good.  Theobromine in pots from 500 BC.  The trouble is that, if my memory serves, metates on legs do not appear until the Classical Period in Mexico, that is, until around 200 BC.

So whether you take Powis´s proven 500 BC or Michael Coe´s plausible earlier date of something close to 1000 BC, how were they grinding the chocolate? Or were they?  Were they just simply making nibs?

I’m sure some archaeologist has addressed this.  I just haven’t run across it.

It’s one of the few native American foodstuffs to make it immediately to the Old World.

And now, when anyone who has any pride in their foodie credentials praises the fresh and natural, chocolate, one of the most elaborately processed and industrialized foods around, is given a pass and allowed into the hallowed company of heirloom vegetables and fruits and grass fed meat in the foodie ranking of goodies.  That, and the fact that several new articles and books about chocolate have come my way, are the reason for this and three or four upcoming posts.

I’m going to start with contemporary artisanal processing. I’m re-posting (with permission and a little light editing) a lovely and non-technical blog post by Beatrice Misa in the Philippines about how she processed some beans from her family’s backyard–with one important modern innovation.  It’s about as clear and well-illustrated as anything I have encountered on the subject.

And it reminds us that cacao went east to the Philippines as well as west to Europe, along with the techniques for getting from pod to tablea (tablet of drinking chocolate).

Home-Processing Cacao

A thick cup of home-dried, home-roasted cacao with coconut milk from the garden. Sarap.

Three pods. You can tell if it is ready to eat when you shake it and the mass moves around, there is a layer of air between the skin and the fruit.

Cutting the pod up to share with friends.

Cacao arrived in the Philippines during the galleon trade.

The fruit has thin but fabulous sweet flesh.

Seeds drying.

The cacao tree is a humble one, not particularly beautiful, growing well only under canopies. Taken from the forest basins of the Americas, they have traveled well into our muggy, tropical island setting, cultivated in some large plantations and agroforestry areas, and in numerous backyards all over the country. There is still considerable backyard production and kitchen processing going on to turn cacao beans into tableas (tablets for making hot chocolate) most especially in the province.

All dried and ready to roast.

I took my fruit from my great-uncle’s house in Metro Manila. The pods had been given all these years to the gardener, whose mother would do the tedious processing. As I am not schooled in these matters, I enlisted the help of Wilma, who is from Zamboanga and has been eating and growing the stuff since childhood. I have read about cacao processing in books, but I wanted to get an idea of how it is processed by normal people for everyday consumption.

Seeds roasting on an iron skillet.

The pods at the top of this page yielded many seeds, covered by fruit pulp that is absolutely delicious. I would describe the taste as sweet yet tart, like a mangosteen or a nice yellow mango. The “beans”, which look a bit like rambutan seeds, were set out to dry. After they were suitably devoid of moisture (a few weeks, given the rain), they were roasted. I thought them to be a bit burnt, but Wilma insisted that was how they liked it.

An old brandy bottle.

Just as our house was filled with an aroma good enough to marry, we took the beans off and put them on a bilao (bamboo tray). Wilma used a glass bottle to crush the crunchy beans and force the skin to separate. She did this in a hurry, before everything cooled off.

Almost nibs, with motions like making pie dough.

More crushing.

We then ran out into the garden and got rid of the skins directly into the soil by the same movements that people use to winnow rice. The instructions of blowing the skin away with a fan seem quite comical and devoid of integrated daily exercise, once you see how gracefully the skin floats to the ground for decomposition.

Winnowing cacao.

What we are left with are cacao nibs, the much-hyped “superfood” and relative newcomer to the culinary world. A whiff at this point is pretty sublime.

Skinless nibs.

We decide to grind this for drinking chocolate. We first used a mortar and pestle, which proved to be too much even for our idle, chatty selves. A coffee grinder works nicely.

Too much work.

The moisture is coming up.

Cocoa fat ahoy.

Once the paste was finished, we scouted the kitchen for a suitable mold. This we found in an old spice jar cap. We washed the paprika out of that and pressed the paste in.

Standardization is important to us.

You can tamp it out with a bit of difficulty. Cacao, at this stage, becomes the consistency of your high school experiment of baking soda and water. It seems solid, but when you press your finger against it, there is a slow melting that occurs. Thus, you cannot scoop it out of the mold without damaging it, you must pound it onto a solid surface with some force.

From three pods, we get five 1-inch tableas.

My excitement was barely enough to contain, so I plunked two of these still-soft tableas into a pot and whisk them with water into tsokolate, kakaw, cacao, chocolate-eh, whatever you may call it if you are from these islands. I feel I’ve come a bit closer to the holy grail of my cacao-loving conquest.

Ready to drink.

Some things to change next time: It was a bit darkly roasted, more so than I am used to. Though delicious in its own way, I think I will decrease the roasting time. I was left with bits of the bean at the bottom of my cup, which I ate. Yes. I ate them, but it could have used a finer grind, so I may as well invest in a Turkish coffee grinder.

Now notice the one place where Beatrice cops out and abandons traditional methods.  The grinding of the roasted beans.  She puts them in the coffee grinder and presses the button.

But for now, from readers, toasted ground chia, toasted ground soy beans?  More ur-food toasted flours.

From Margaret Conover. But what about chia seed? Most of what I’ve read about pinole states that parched chia seed was an important ingredient in pinole.

http://www.chiativity.org/2009/03/an-historic-article-on-the-use-of-chia-seeds-by-indians-and-mexicans-in-1891.html

Also here on my blog.

From Susan Yi-Young Park.

At first glance I thought it was Korean roasted soybean powder. http://www.maangchi.com/ingredients/roasted-soy-bean-powder

I love the stuff, so does my daughter. It’s used for making drinks (more extravagant versions add a dozen or so other toasted grains, seeds and nuts. And rice cakes are also sprinkled with toasted soybean powder.

And why not boiling?

From Sandy D.

I still think that boiling the grains is even easier – saves all that pounding or grinding.

In the early history of grain use, most grains were hulled, that is they had these tight and inedible coverings around the grains and inside the chaff.  Boiling would not do anything to make that edible. You’d still have to pound.

Second, in the past people had lots of needs, just like we do. Even if you could make a good boiled grain dish, it wasn’t much use to travelers.  So my instinct is that they would have wanted not one but several grain dishes.  Not either or.

14,000 mules is a lot of mules.  Some were in the mines. Some were blindfolded to drag the heavy wheels that crushed the ore. Some carried the semi-refined ore the hundreds of miles to the coasts.  And some carried in the food for the town which doesn’t grow any being in a crack in the mountains.  And the food for the town included food for the mules.

OK, I’m backing into this post.  Even if only half the mules were in the transport business, even if each muleteer tended to several mules, there were hundreds of muleteers in just this one town.

And they spent most of their life on the road.  Transport workers weren’t just a Mexican specialty.  There were camel caravans across the Sahara and along the Silk Roads.  There were mules over all of Latin America.  There were the ox drovers in Europe.

In short there were lots of precursors to the long distance truck driver.  And what did they eat?  Well in Mexico they ate pinole, the mystery substance of the photo the other day.  Here it is again.

It’s maize that has been toasted and then ground on the grindstone (metate).  The toasting makes it easier to grind and makes it smell and taste quite delicious.  It also turns it into an instant food.

The muleteers could carry along a bag of the stuff and just nibble on it when they wanted. It’s a bit powdery and hard to swallow but it tastes delicious.

They also took toasted and ground beans or so I understand, though I’ve not experimented with those.  Or if they were settled for the night they could mix the pinole with water to make a gruel, again no cooking required.  It’s has a fine granular texture, not at all unpleasing.

Cheap, tasty, lightweight.  What more could you want?  Yet in the US apart from outdoorsy types who once asked me to send some so they could experiment with it (and never paid up, grr), you just don’t see these toasted, powdered grains.

In Guanajuato you can still buy pinole outside the markets, sold by poor elderly rural women from plastic buckets.  Usually they doctor it up with a bit of ground orange peel and a bit of sugar.  Great drink on a cold morning, but how much longer it will survive, goodness knows.

Once you start looking you find little hints of these toasted powdered grains all over the world.  I’ll talk about some more of them in the coming days.

So to go back to bread and beer, I can’t help thinking that here’s a whole extra category of foodstuffs that grains would have been good for.  Lots of people would have needed lightweight instant foods.  This is the jerky of the plant kingdom. More soon.

The very possibility that we brewed beer before we baked bread sounds–well–it sounds sexy.  How titillating to think that people rushed to make something intoxicating.  How mind bending to think that farming was all in aid of a bit of tipple.

When I first heard the idea, I was as titillated and mind bent as could be.  Over the years, though, I’ve come to think it’s actually the wrong way to go about the early history of cereals.  It’s a barrier to asking the kinds of questions that will yield interesting answers.

One of the truisms of the history of technology, a field I labored in for many years, was that asking who invented something, or when something first appeared was asking the wrong question.

Let me take a modern example from food. “Who invented the pineapple upside down cake?” It’s the kind of question food editors in newspapers get asked all the time.  The immediate response is to scurry around searching through magazines and cookbooks for the first pineapple upside down cake recipe and then annoint Mrs. X of Cakeville the inventor of the cake.

What have we learned?  Zilch.  Well, more likely we’ve learned that Mrs. X has staked her fame on a dubious priority claim.

Now suppose we ask different questions.  Why were people interested in cakes?  What were the preconditions for these kinds of cakes? What problems did pineapple upside down cakes solve?

Now we can begin to talk.  Oversimplifying a bit, the preconditions for cakes are molds, enclosed ovens, chemical leaveners, fine white sugar, and fine white flour.  When did these become available?  At the tail end of the nineteenth century.

Why does anyone want to make cakes?  The housewife wants to look cool, modern and sophisticated, her family like the treat, the  big millers in Minnesota want to sell more flour. Cake hits all those notes.  There’s a nice alliance of interests between the housewife and industry.

Just a little later,  Jim Dole began an advertizing blitz for a cool new ingredients, canned Hawaiian pineapple, that combined  cosmopolitan sophistication and tropical exoticism. Bingo.  Lots of people were going to simultaneously invent some kind of pineapple cake.

So back to bread and beer.  If I were tackling the question of why we turned to grains or cereals, I be asking questions like these:

What problems did grains solve, what tools did humans have?

The problem they solved was one of how to get enough fuel (calories) in the human body. Because as food for young plants grains are dense little packets of calories with a wide range of nutrients.  Provided you can process them using fewer calories than you use digesting the processed product, they are some of the best sources of fuel to be found.

Breads had other advantages too that we might not think about if we think of bread as being like our puffy white loaves. Breads  were probably more like the bannock in the photograph, something that Gilgamesh or Plato might have called bread. They were baked pastes which can be produced in a  variety of ways.  They are are portable, dividable into equal portions, act as spoons or plates, keep you satisfied for a long time, great for people on the move.

Beers, too, have lots of calories, as well as that appealing buzz. They are as unlike our beer as early breads are unlike our bread. They were probably thickish soupy slightly alcoholic things that again can be produced in a variety of ways.  They can be stretched with water to serve lots of people. The downside is that they are not easy to move around, to take when hunting or traveling or foraging at a distance.

If people wanted a high, there were other options. There are many psychotropic plants from mushrooms to datura.  Alcohol can be prepared from honey where there are bees, from saps from palms, agaves, and perhaps teosinte (palm wine, pulque, etc), and from sweet wild fruits (though many wild fruits weren’t sweet).

Why, though, was the choice one of beer or bread?  If people were going to all the trouble of tackling tiny, fiddly seeds weren’t they going to try everything they could? Gruels, porridges thick enough to scoop up with the fingers, pottages cooked with roots, greens, and perhaps a bit of meat, toasted grains, powdered toasted grains, soaked grains, sprouted grains, chewed grains, grains with molds?

By about 20,000 years ago when humans began tackling grains, one of the most difficult of food resources to turn into something edible, they were  smart experimenters.  They had been surveying the earth for things to eat for thousands and thousands of years.

They had all kinds of  techniques at their fingertips–different kinds of hearth cookery; pit cookery;  probably treating with mud, water, weak acids, and strong alkalis; probably various kinds of rotting and molds.  They knew about pounding for sure.  They had been grinding rocks for pigments (and like rocks, grains are hard).  They had super sharp stone knives and a wide variety of containers. They came to the grains with lots of technical baggage.

So I assume people were going to boil grains, toast grains, pound grains, grind grains, sprout grains, rot grains, dunk grains in acids and alkalis to see what were the best ways of making them digestible.

They were going to be satisfied only if the results were reproducible (another lesson I gleaned from the history of technology).  Making an alcoholic brew (which can be done in at least three radically different ways) or a bread, both fairly tricky operations, is only worth it if you can do it on a regular basis.  Sitting around remembering that lovely thing you produced that made you feel so good isn’t much use if you can’t pull the trick off again.  Most ways of making bread and beer are multistage operations and from earliest records were done by professionals.

So instead of asking bread or beer, I’d rather ask: What can you do to grains with grindstones, mortars, acids, molds, rots, alkalis, and so on?

Which is why I like to fiddle around with grindstones and mortars.  Until we get a grip on what you can and can’t do with them, it’s all just idle speculation.

___

“Symposium: Did Man Once Live By Bread Alone,” American Anthropologist 55 (1953), 15-526;

Solomon H. Katz and Mary M. Voigt, “Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet,” Expedition 28, 23-34.

Solomon H. Katz and Fritz Maytag, “Brewing an Ancient Beer,” Archaeology    (1991), 24-33.

Thomas W. Kavanagh, “Archaeological Parameters for the Beginnings of Beer,” Brewing Techniques (1994);

Delwen Samuel, “Rediscovering Ancient Egyptian Beer,” Brewers’ Guardian 124 (1995), 26-31.

This packet of sugar mixed with ground almonds makes a quite lovely almond drink (milk). It comes from Sicily (thanks Kay).  And Sicily, of course, is the repository of many different stages of food history.  This is at the intersection of the Muslim, the Muslim-influenced Norman, and modern marketing.

You can buy it made with either peeled or whole almonds.

As you can see it looks like marzipan.  In fact the ratio of sugar to ground almonds is higher, a bit too high in fact for my tastes.

You simply put half one of these cylinders in a liter of water and stir occasionally for about half an hour until it dissolves.  In this photo, though you can still see a lump on the bottom of the pitcher, it is nearly dissolved.

Even if on the sweet side, I could drink this daily.

Orzo. An Italian dried pasta, the size and shape of a cereal grain.

Horchata. A cool, milky-looking drink made of rice, chufa, (or perhaps melon seeds, coconut, or condensed milk).

Orgeat. An almond-flavored syrup.

So what’s the common thread? It’s the origin of all these diverse goodies in barley. Who knows barley now? Perhaps a few horse owners who feed it to their animals. Perhaps beer drinkers, though more and more beer is not barley based.

But way, way back in the past barley, a tough grain that withstood drought, and cold winters, and poor soils, was Eurasias’s favorite grain. Pernickety little wheat didn’t stand a chance beside it. Tisane, orzo, horchata, and orgeat are all barley’s ghosts, to use a great phrase of Ray Sokolov.

How is this?

Well tisane comes from the Greek ptisana for barley water. By the Middle Ages it was being flavored with figs or liquorice in Europe and eventually transmuted into the French name for all hot herbal drinks.

And orzo is one of the many words that derive from hordeum, the Greek word for barley. The pasta was named after barley.

And orgeat (or orzata in Italian or ozyat in archaic English), all names that came into these languages from the Latin hordeum again, were all originally barley drinks, then they were flavored with almond, then the barley dropped out. Now orgeat has transmuted into a trendy syrup about as far removed from workaday barley as can be imagined.

And horchata. Same Latin origin. Again the ingredients shift. And soon I will post on how horchata came to mean a milky-looking drink.

How do I know?

Well, truth in advertizing makes me admit that none of this is my research. The pioneering work was done by the English historian of food, C. Anne Wilson in her book Food and Drink in Britain (Barnes and Noble, 1974).  And it was ably followed up by Ray Sokolov in an article called “Barley’s Ghost” that appeared in the American magazine Natural History. I’m not giving the link because it is gated and that’s frustrating for those who don’t have access to the data base. If you don’t know Ray’s many books on food, look out for them. they’re a delight.

Barley’s Ghosts

So, a once-mighty grain, food of Plato and Aristotle, the Emperors of Persia and the Pharaohs of Egypt is now just a ghost. Its ghostly remains are suggestive and titillating as befits ghosts, and delicious too, something not normally associated with ghosts. But they are just shadowy remains.

And I ponder two things.

1. When looking at the history of food, never take it for granted that the same or a similar name means the same dish. It may point to links, as in this story, but not to identity.

2. When looking at the history of food never assume that the simple food of today is the food of the past. Barley vanished. It did not stay as peasant food. Its ghost wandered into the world of luxury foods. Hmm.

`Chicha de morocho:

Take hard, ripe corn (morocho is one of the several excellent species of maize that, like certain grades of the potato, has never been carried from its original Andean habitat to the rest of the world) shell, and boil for two hours. Let it cool, then grind, or crush under a stone, sprinkling from time to time with some of the water in which it has been boiled. Keep this mass in a well-covered jar. As it is needed, mix with water; one soupspoonful of the prepared mass to one liter of boiling water; add cloves, a very little vanilla, and as much sugar or rapadura as is considered necessary. Mix with an equal amount of cold water and place in jars to ferment. Once fermented, it is ready to serve.”

All this from Vagabonding Down the Andes, a book with an irresistible title that a couple of nights ago I pulled off the shelf that holds books for reading when nothing else entices. I’d picked it up second hand several years ago, a heavy 600 page tome published in 1920, but never really looked at it until now.

As always the sense of discovery has a way of evaporating when you google. There’s a wikipedia page dedicated to the author, Harry E Frank, and he even has a web page dedicated to him. An American as eccentric as any Englishman ever was, he made a living by books that described the walks he took around different bits of the world lugging the developing equipment for his camera with him. The Andes took four years.

Even if not quite the discovery I thought, Vagabonding is gripping reading.  Carefully observed, full of statements that drive home how sensitized to offense we have become. I loved this careful description of chicha making in the early years of the twentieth century.  South American food and drink is very little understood outside the regions in question and chicha which refers to all kinds of mildly alcoholic beverages is right at the top of the heap of confusion.