Across Mexico, chunks of bacalao are sitting in water, being de-salted for dinner at midnight on the 24th.  The middle class Christmas dinner reflects the Spanish tradition.  A dish of bacalao a la vizcaína (salt cod Biscay-style) is an indispensable part of this meal, along with spaghetti or cannelloni, and either a turkey or a leg of pork stuffed with meat, fruits, and nuts.

-

The most upmarket bacalao in the "deli" Europea at about $22 a kilo

Discarded boxes outside Europea

Display of bacalao in Superama, the upmarket branch of Walmart

Norwegian bacalao in Walmart along with the necessary olives

Once the bacalao is de-salted, it is boiled in fresh water, drained, broken into pieces, and the spines are picked out.  The onion and garlic are sautéed in olive oil, tomatoes are added, and the sauce simmered for a while.  Then to finish, the cod, small peeled potatoes, olives, parsley, pepper, and salt if it is necessary are stirred in and the whole heated gently.

To learn more about bacalao, I consulted Ove Fossa who is President of the Norwegian commission for the  Slow Food Ark of Taste to preserve the traditional ways of making the very finest bacalao. Here’s a link to his brochure which is quite fascinating.  None of the bacalao in Mexico is of this quality, I fear.

For the grade of bacalao that ends up in Mexico, he recommended the Wikipedia articles.

For bacalao, salted and dried fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dried_and_salted_cod
For stockfish, dried, unsalted fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish
The two articles seem to be fairly accurate.
Both kinds are most often made from cod, generally considered the best quality, but several other species are used as well.
Due to climatic differences, the two are made in different areas. Drying unsalted fish can only be done in cold weather in the north, mainly the Lofoten islands, and Finnmark. Bacalao (klippfisk in Norwegian) is made in the south, near the towns of Ålesund and Kristiansund, where the fish would easily spoil unless salted.

Ove also kindly passed along export figures. Although at this time of year, it’s easy to think that Mexico must be gobbling up the entire Norwegian supply, in fact it’s a fairly small market.

The major buyers of Norwegian bacalao are Brasil (35.9 %), Portugal (30.5 %), the Dominican Republic (6.4 %), Jamaica, Congo, Angola and Italy (each 3-4 %) and then Mexico (2.8 %). The numbers are from 2010, they vary a little from one year to the next.

Norwegian stockfish on the other hand is sold almost exclusively to Italy (57.1 %) and Nigeria (30 %).

The export value of Norwegian bacalao in 2010 was 3.6 billion Norwegian kroner (610 million USD), and stockfish 450 million (76 mill USD). In comparison, the export value of farmed salmon was 30 billion (5,1 billion USD).

There’s a huge market in Mexico, though, for something cheaper perhaps because the rapidly expanding middle class wants to taste the kinds of Christmas dishes that once only the wealthy could afford. Last week Buena Mesa, the food page of one of Mexico’s main newspapers, Reforma, gave hints on how to detect imitation bacalao.  Any so-called bacalao without spines was not authentic.

I’d seen lots of imitation bacalao myself in early December in La Viga, the wholesale fish market in Mexico City.  It was made of robalo (Centroponus undecimalis), of sierra (in the mackerel family), and, as below, manta ray (aletas means wings).

Bacalao of manta ray in wholesale market at about $3.00 a kilo

Five foot cube of shark "bacalao" from the state of Campeche in the wholesale market

Sharks' fins in the wholesale market

What are restaurants using, one wonders?  What controls, if any, are there on the sale of endangered species in the wholesale market?  What controls, if any, are there on the naming of bacalao?  What is the connection between the rise of shark fin bacalao and the controversy over shark’s fin soup, descrbed here by Fuchsia Dunlop. Clearly as the Reforma article shows, some people are worried about imitations.  I would love to know more if any readers have any comments.

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident.

This from a nice blog post over at The Historical Society by Heather Cox Richardson.  It’s framed as a plea for maritime history but it’s equally relevant to food history.  She continues.

The crisis over the pigs illuminates an ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries.

If you’ve ever wondered how all those eighteenth and nineteenth century navigators and whalers were able to keep going in the deep oceans, particularly the south Atlantic and the Pacific, one of the keys is that they took with them European domestic animals, dropping them off whenever they made landfall.  Here’s my description in The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage of the process.  Pigs had been brought to Hawaii centuries before by the orginal settlers. Cattle, horses, sheep and goats had not.

Taking a steer ( Hereford not longhorn) out to ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

In 1793, Captain George Vancouver sailed H.M.S Discovery into Kawaihae harbor on the Big Island and altered forever the diet of the Hawaiians, for with him he brought six cows, a bull, four ewes, and two rams. It was a tense time. Just 14 years earlier, Vancouver had been with Captain Cook when he was clubbed to death under the cliffs at Kealakekua Bay a few miles to the south. . .

The animals were in sorry shape, having had little water for days and no green forage for weeks as the little vessel plowed its way across the vast Pacific Ocean.   . . . Kamehameha [the chief who using British firearms had captured all the islands except Kauai] oversaw landing the animals. Vanouver’s account does not elaborate, but hoisting cattle, ewes and rams, even in weakened condition, into canoes lined with paddlers must have been quite a game.  The cattle, after all, were longhorns.

Vancouver made Kamehameha promise that the animals woud be taboo (except for the king’s table) for a decade so that they could multiply. He made him promise that women as well as men would then be able to eat the meat as long as it was not from the same animal (a big concession as women were subject to a fierce set of taboos and most appealing food was off limits).

The animals multiplied.

Mexican cowboys (paniolos from espanoles) and their horses  were imported to manage them from California, then still part of Mexico. Native Hawaiians also became fine cowboys.  Hawaiian cowboys compete on equal or more than equal terms with mainland cowboys in rodeos.

On horseback in front of Hawaii's Iolani Palace, 1980s. Rachel Laudan

Whalers over-wintered in the islands. Beef appealed more than fish and taro.

The biggest cattle ranch in the US in the twentieth century was on the Big Island of Hawaii, founded by one of those  New England whalers, John Parker Palmer, who jumped ship in the islands in 1809 at the age of 19.

Winching steer into ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930s. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

Hawaiians became aficionados of cecina (jerky), called pipikaula (pipi apparently their pronunciation of beef). Chinese and Japanese indentured laborers who stayed in the islands became enthusiastic beef eaters, enjoying Chinese oxtail soup and Japanese sukiyaki (and I believe in the latter case encouraging its popularity in Japan via back migration).

In short, I concur with Heather Cox Richardson about the importance of maritime history.  And there’s always a food story to accompany it.

Cruz Ortiz (Universidad de Puerto Rico en Humacao) talking about the culinary shifts accompanying the change from a Spanish to an American colony. In background Miguel Felipe Dorta (UCV, Venezuela), Sergio Zapata (Universidad de San Cruz Ortiz (Universidad de Puerto Rico en Humacao), in background Sergio Zapata (Universidad de SanMartín de Porres, Peru) and Sarah Bak-Geller (Universidad de Guadalajara-CIESAS)

Last night I returned, exhausted, from three days at the conference on 200 years of culinary nationalism in Latin America in Guadalajara. It was excellent, even better than I expected.  The organizers, Sarah Bak-Geller and Esther Katz, had done an excellent job selecting the speakers.  Although very few of us knew each other before the conference, although we came from or talked about Bolivia, Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Peru, the panels hung together beautifully. Of the approximately twenty five papers delivered only one was a dud.  All the rest had a lot to contribute and I have pages and pages of notes that I will try to summarize in successive posts.

Guambiano kitchen in Columbi. Photo of photo by Carlos Humerto Illera Montoya (Universidad de Cauca, Colombia)

The topics tended to converge around three themes: indigenous cuisines; the symbiotic relationship between cookbooks, restaurants, and culinary language and nationalism in Latin America; and what in the world is going on with contemporary efforts to patrimonialize national cuisines (UNESCO) and the attempts by chefs to present their work as simultaneously drawing on national tradition and as bridging cultures.

After having in the last year suffered something of an overdose in Mexico of talks and publications declaring the necessity to save and promote a supposedly timeless and homogenous national cuisine, it was a huge relief to be in a group that skilfully dissected this rhetoric laying bare its underlying political and economic motivations.

Hence what a pity we did not have before us  the Lima Declaration, a letter to future chefs about their responsibilities, issued a couple of days ago in Peru.  Oh boy, would the group have had a field day with that!

Dear chef,

In relation with nature

1. Our work depends on nature’s gifts. As a result we all have a responsibility to know and protect nature, to use our cooking and our voices as a tool for recovering heirloom and endangered varieties and species, and promoting new ones. In this way we can help protect the earth’s biodiversity, as well as preserve and create flavours and to elaborate culinary methods.

2. Over the course of thousands of years, the dialogue between humans and nature has created agriculture. We are all, in other words, part of an ecological system. To ensure that this ecology is as healthy as possible, let’s encourage and practice sustainable production in the field and in the kitchen. In this way, we can create authentic flavour.

In relation with society

3. As chefs, we are the product of our culture. Each of us is heir to a legacy of flavours, dining customs and cooking techniques. Yet we don’t have to be passive. Through our cooking, our ethics, and our aesthetics, we can contribute to the culture and identity of a people, a region, a country. We can also serve as an important bridge with other cultures.

4. We practice a profession that has the power to affect the socio-economic development of others. We can have a significant economic impact by encouraging the exportation of our own culinary culture and fomenting others’ interest in it. At the same time, by collaborating with local producers and employing fair economic practices, we can generate sustainable local wealth and financially strengthen our communities.

In relation with knowledge

5. Although a primary goal of our profession is to provide happiness and stir emotions, through our own work and by working with experts in the fields of health and education, we have a unique opportunity to transmit our knowledge to members of the public, helping them, for example, to acquire good cooking habits, and to learn to make healthy choices about the foods they eat.

6. Through our profession, we have the opportunity to generate new knowledge, whether it be something so simple as the development of a recipe or as complicated as an in-depth research project. And just as we have each benefited from the teaching of others, we have a responsibility, in turn, to share our learning.

In relation with values

7. We live in a time in which cooking can be a beautiful form of self-expression. Cooking today is a field in constant evolution that includes many different disciplines. For that reason, it’s important to carry out our quests and fulfill our dreams with authenticity, humility, and above all, passion. Ultimately, we are each guided by our own ethics and values.

My goodness.

I can’t imagine anything that should do more to stimulate research than this comparative initiative.  Talking about the culinary histories of these nations in isolation just misses so many of the common features: how to create post-colonial cuisines in the nineteenth century; shifting attitudes to indigenous cuisines; the creation of national cookbooks; the contribution of different immigrant groups; the back and forth between export agriculture and self-sufficiency; and the recent work on cuisines as patrimony.

That this is happening is the result of the vision and hard work of Sarah Bak-Geller from Guadalajara who is about to receive her dotctorate from EHESS, the École de hautes études en sciencias sociales in Paris and Esther Katz of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement also in Paris, and the support of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) (Guadalajara branch).

Here’s the program for those of you who read Spanish.  There are other events linked to the conference: a maize festival, an exhibition of cookbooks, and an exhibition of photographs of traditional Latin American cuisines (I sent photos of the uses of cactus).

«De los primeros recetarios nacionales a las cocinas patrimoniales:

200 años de nacionalismo culinario en América latina»

Guadalajara, México, 12 a 15 de septiembre 2011

Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS)

Programa

12 de septiembre

9h-11h30:

Consuelo Sáizar (Presidenta del Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), Renaud Fichez (Representante del Institut de Recherche pour le Développement), Virginia García Acosta (Directora General del Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social), Susan Street (Directora Regional del CIESAS-Occidente), Esther Katz (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement), Sarah Bak-Geller Corona (Universidad de Guadalajara-CIESAS)

Conferencia inaugural:

Marie-Danielle Demelas (Representante del Institut de Recherche pour le Développement en Bolivia): «Los nacionalismos latinoamericanos».

Receso: 11h30-12h

12h-14h30:

1.  Cocinas nacionales en construcción, siglo XIX

Moderador: Aristarco Regalado (Universidad de Guadalajara)

Cruz Ortiz Cuadra (Universidad de Puerto Rico en Humacao, Puerto Rico): «Recetas sobre papel. El libro de cocina como producto cultural, Puerto Rico, 1859-1948».

Sergio Zapata Acha (Escuela Profesional de Turismo y Hotelería, Universidad de San Martín de Porres, Lima, Perú): «Los recetarios peruanos  del siglo XIX  y la construcción del patrimonio gastronómico».

Sarah Bak-Geller (Doctorante EHESS. Universidad de Guadalajara-CIESAS, México): «El libro de cocina en México y la invención de un género narrativo nacional».

Miguel Felipe Dorta (UCV, Caracas, Venezuela): «La arepa: entre lo nacional y lo popular. Representaciones de un pan en Venezuela entre 1830-1931».

16h30-19h:

Moderadora: Diana Carrano  (CIESAS Occidente)

Beatriz Rossells (Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia): «Chorizos, yuca y ají en Bolivia. De los siglos coloniales a la cocina “nacional”».

Almir El Kareh (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – UERJ, Río de Janeiro, Brasil): «El cotidiano culinario y gastronómico en Río de Janeiro, siglo XIX, y la construcción de la identidad brasileña».

Tim Wätzold (Universidad de Colonia, Alemania): «A proclamacao da cozinha brasileira como parte no processo da formacao da identitade nacional no imperio do Brasil (1822-1889)».

Horacio Biord Castillo (Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas/  Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas, Venezuela): «Desmenuzando el mestizaje: aproximaciones al nacionalismo culinario en Venezuela».

19h: Inauguración de la exposición fotográfica «Los saberes tradicionales en las cocinas de América Latina».

13 de septiembre

9h-11h30:

2. Narrativas nacionales y patrimonialización de las cocinas de América latina 

Moderadora: Susan Street (CIESAS Occidente)

Janet Long (IIH-UNAM, México): «Las leyendas culinarias nacionales».

Raúl Matta (Investigador post-doctoral en la red desiguALdades.net, Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Alemania): «La construcción patrimonial de la cocina peruana. Posibilidades y límites tras la candidatura a la Lista Representativa del Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial de la UNESCO».

Renata Menasche (Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil): «Produtos e sistemas culinários locais, entre a certificação e a patrimonialização. Uma visão a partir do Brasil meridional».

José de Jesús Hernández (CIESAS Occidente, Guadalajara, México): «El versátil tequila: aperitivo y digestivo, bebida y alimento, maridaje y coctelería».

Rachel Laudan (Investigadora independiente, Ciudad de México, México): «Haciendo espacio: Inmigrantes y nacionalismo culinario en México».

Receso: 11h30h-12h

12h-14h30:

3. Saberes culinarios locales: ¿Marginalización o inclusión?

Moderadora: Julia Preciado (CIESAS Occidente)

Esther Katz (UMR 208 « Patrimoines locaux » IRD/MNHN/CDS-UnB, Brasilia, Brasil): «Las cocinas indígenas en América Latina: ¿ignoradas, despreciadas o reapropiadas?»

Marcos Sandoval (Promotor cultural, Chicahuaxtla, Oaxaca, México): «Políticas culturales y marginalización de las cocinas indígenas en México».

Carlos Humberto Illera Montoya (Departamento de Antropología, Universidad del Cauca, Popayan, Colombia): «Las cocinas de Guambianos y Paeces: Marginalización de dos identidades culinarias indígenas  colombianas».

Ariela Zycherman (Doctorante, Applied Anthropology, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, Estados Unidos): « Shocgdye: ¿la cerveza ritual Tsimane? y el impacto de desarrollo regional en su consumo (Amazonia boliviana)».

Engracia Pérez Castro (Promotora cultural Mixe-Ayuuk, Oaxaca, México): «La tradición alimentaria del pueblo ayuuk».

16h30:

Sesión constitutiva para la red de investigadores de cocina y alimentación en América Latina.

14 de septiembre

9h-11h30:

4. Reinvención y apropiación de cocinas tradicionales

Moderador: Ricardo Ávila (Universidad de Guadalajara)

Doris Sayago (CDS-UnB, Brasilia, Brasil): «Los mercados populares en Venezuela en el gobierno chavista».

Steffan Igor Ayora Díaz (Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida, Yucatán, México): «La cocina yucateca: entre el regionalismo y el cosmopolitismo».

Charles-Edouard de Suremain (IRD, UMR 208 “Patrimoines locaux” IRD/MNHN, París, Francia): «‘Comer tradición’: creación, aprendizaje y oportunismo. La interpretación del patrimonio alimentario por dos chefs de cocina (Lima, Perú)».

Aline Hémond (CREDA/CNRS-Université de Paris III)/Université de Paris-VIII, Francia): «Procesos de apropiación de la comida sacrificial indígena hoy en día: forjando lealtades y mexicanidad».

Susanna Hoffman (Investigadora independiente, Hoffman consulting): «Yes, The United States Has a Cuisine».

Receso: 11h30h-12h

12h-14h30:

Relatorías de mesas de trabajo

15 de septiembre

Visita a Tequila y discusiones grupales.

In Mexico, the search for the Mexican tradition, for indigenous and colonial Spanish traditions, sucks all the air out of culinary commentary and culinary history, something I will be writing more about.  And my friend, Nick Gilman, savvy explorer of Mexico City dining, is ambiguous about the Jewish delis etc  in Mexico, which didn’t match his New York memories.  And he found only one cookbook, a collection of Sephardic recipes.

Outside Mexico, Claudia Roden, who in her wonderful Book of Jewish Food, managed to get as far as India and China, left the Jewish cooking of Latin American countries out of the story (somewhat to the consternation of some of my cuisine-minded Latin-American Jewish friends).

The failure to recognize Jewish Mexican cuisine is changing at least in the United States. And as this branch of Jewish cuisine becomes better known in its own right, there is no need to measure it (or Argentinian or Panamanian or other Latin American Jewish cuisines) against the American.   I wish I could speak about it with more authority but being neither Jewish nor related to anyone in the community I have to rely on others.  Not such a bad fate, actually, given the interpreters coming along.

First came the lovely and exuberant Pati Jinich, determined to make Mexican food a little less a matter of daunting rules, at least as she explained to me when we had breakfast last year.  Ending up in Washington D.C. with her banker husband she has forged a career as interpreter of Mexican cooking, first with classes, then a blog, and now a cooking program on American Public Television.  Many of the dishes she talks about are standard Mexican fare.

Pati does not forget Jewish Mexican dishes though.  Here is an article by Joan Nathan in the New York Times on her Mexican-Jewish classes, including gefilte fish a la Veracruzana. And here she is talking about it on The Splendid Table.

And on her website for the television series (which incorporates her earlier blog) here’s this fantastic tamarind-apricot-chipotle chicken recipe, (presumably derived from a Sephardic dish) now firmly in my repertoire of favorite dishes.  Here’s the story she tells.

My Lali, as we called my grandmother, was an extraordinary cook. I could write down pages and pages listing the dishes she made that I loved. My favorite ones always had a sweet spin to them. The roasted duck with the plum sauce, the chicken paprika with sweet pimientos, the stuffed cabbage with that heart warming sauce…

If I could have my Lali over for Rosh Hashanah next week, I would treat her with the Chicken with Tamarind and Apricots I learned to make from Flora Cohen right before I got married. A cookbook writer and teacher from Syrian ancestry, who like my grandmother, was an immigrant who made Mexico her home bringing along exotic flavors from her birthplace. Flora was known to turn ignorant brides, who did not know how to boil an egg, into competent cooks who could bring bliss to the tummies of their new husbands (hey, at least my husband didn’t starve in those first years…)

And now we have a book by Susan and Alex Schmidt which I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on,  and an accompanying  blog Challa-peño. Here’s their story.

 On that table in the middle of Mexico City, on a Sunday afternoon in 1962,  there sat, nokedli, those Hungarian dumplings, toltotkaposta, my Grandma’s famous stuffed cabbage, or Hungarian chicken paprikash.  Without fail, on the side, there were  hot tortillas, guacamole, bright green serrano chile peppers, and a shallow bowl filled with fresh cilantro leaves.

Excitedly we’d all sit down to eat to the din and clang of Hungarian, Spanish and English being spoken, with Sinatra playing in the background.

So next time you want a change of pace, here’s another of the world’s ever-increasing number of cuisines to try out.

He approached me after a session on the Afro-Antillean cuisine to be found in Panamá.

Pastry chef Lastino Apochito

He was, he said, worried that his people, the Embera, were losing their traditional culture, their dances, their clothing, and most of all their cuisine.  They played their music in hotels but not in the community.  Would it not be possible to save the cuisine if it were made accessible to tourists?  Would it not be possible to refine the dishes to make them appealing to a wider audience?

I had to tell him that this was really far outside my area of expertise but that I would love to know more about the cuisine of the Embera and about his own story. So we settled down on some hard chairs in the entrance to the exhibition hall where I struggled to take notes as the band that was circulating inside played under the echoing corrugated iron roof.

Lastino Apochito’s story

And how did Lastino Apochito come to be a pastry chef and instructor in Panama City?

He came, he told me, from a settlement of twenty to forty houses, small straw houses with a balsa frame, thatched with bihoy and then covered with rice straw, set in the mountains and rivers of the Darien peninsula, a place that echoes back to my childhood.

“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

As Robin Hanbury-Tenison explains here, Keats got it wrong.  It was Balboa, not Cortez, who stared at the Pacific.  And Darien remains a wild area, the one uncompleted section of the pan-American highway.

Lastino’s family was very poor so he left home at 15 to make his own way in the world. He was taken in by an uncle in the big city.  A friend encouraged him to learn to make sweets, both national and international.  In the mid 1980s, there were no culinary schools in the city so he learn the old-fashioned way by working in hotels, often with professional European chefs until he had mastered pastry making and bread making.

Bollos and tamales of rice, maize and cooking bananas: Embera cuisine

The Embera’s basic crops were a varietiey of kinds of rice and maize, as well as bananas and sugar cane.  The rice, for example, might be three-month rice, silver rice, purple rice, or garrapatitatas (which I would roughly translate as little clawed feet rice).

Varieties of rice and maize from the Darien Peninsula

This selection of rice and maize came from an exhibit at Panamá Gastronómica.  I asked lots of people where the rice came from, from Asia in the east or Africa or the Mediterranean in the west but no one had an answer.

The rice was hulled by pounding it in a large pilón (a section of tree trunk hollowed out). This was women’s work (why is that not a surprise?) with one to three women doing the hard labor.  Then it or the maize were ground on a standard simple grindstone.  The meal was mixed with water, wrapped in the leaf of the nahuala palm (Carludovica palmata) from which Panama hats are made (these are not really Panamanian but Ecuadorian as everyone in Panamá hastens to tell you), and steamed.  This made a bollo, a dumpling essentially, a dish found in, say, Columbia as well.

A number of variants were available.  The maize could be made into tamales stuffed with fish or chicken (quite how these differed from bollos I was not exactly sure). Green bananas could also be grated and made into tamales. The rice could be cooked with chicken and bananas.  Or for sweets, the banana or the purple rice could be cooked with cane sugar.  The cane sugar itself was extracted with a trapiche, a contraption with two vertical rollers that was invented in the mid seventeeth century in Asia or in the Americas, no one knows, but that spread like wildfire.

The Embera extracted oil from a couple of palms (one of them the Coroso, the other I didn’t catch but it was believed to have commercial potential) and from squash seeds.  The fruits of palm were pounded , cooked, and then the oil was collected from the top.

For meat, the Embera had chicken, they fished in the rivers, and they hunted deer, rabbit, birds (including toucans), iguanas, peccaries, and monkeys in the forest.  It was preserved by cutting into strips, salting with sea salt, perhaps seasoned with ginger, and smoked.  As I understood it, this kept for several days even in the tropical rainforest.

And for feasts. Pork!

And all the while as I am trying to get this down, the band plays on, and I am wishing, wishing I had a couple of extra days in Panamá to go and see all the things Lastino is describing.

 My thoughts on Embera cuisine

Clearly over the centuries there has been a lot of interchange between the Embera people and both the African and the Spanish populations of Panamá since many of the implements (the trapiche or sugar mill for example, and the pilón), the ingredients (rice, maize, banana, sugar), and the dishes (bollos and tamales and arroz con pollo) have considerable overlap.  But how has that happened and who has contributed what?  Is there even enough evidence to work it out.  The history of the cuisines of the lowland American tropics is just waiting for scholars to tackle.

Culinary tourism in Embera country

Just google Embera and you will find that in fact tourism is already under way. Here is one link and another. In fact, there is a burgeoning Embera tourist industry now as you will find if you google. Here is the program for the National Association of Interpretation (never knew there was such a thing) annual meeting in Panama. Its aim “is to inspire leadership and excellence to advance heritage inter- pretation as a profession”  by forging “emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource.”

NAI_IC2011_program

I’m not sure how I feel about this kind of tourism.  I can see arguments on both sides.  I find the “let’s go and live with people in loin clothes” cringe-making and worthy of 1950s National Geographic.  Against that, the Embera need to live.  Any thoughts, readerss?

Scientists are there too. Here’s a picture of the plants of ethnobotanical interest from the Darien peninsula from a presentation by Kate Kirby of the University of British Columbia.

Celebremos_Poster

It has always stayed with me how extraordinary it is (and yet how commonsensical) that the dates groves that flourish in Mexico’s Baja California oases were first planted by the Jesuit missionaries with seeds from North Africa.

This I didn’t know.  Thanks so much.  And yes, very much part of this transfer of plants and techniques from the Islamic world to Mexico.  And don’t get me started on the role of the Jesuits in all this . . .

I don’t think there is any doubt about this.  Quite a few scholars, both English- and Spanish-speaking have looked at this.  Here’s just a start.

Irrigation and hydraulic technology from Moorish Spain.

Lots of this came over.  Scholars have a pretty good idea of indigenous irrigation techniques so that what was added from the Old World is pretty clear.

Among others, Thomas Glick of Boston University has studied this in Spain and Mexico. He is author of The Old World Background of the Irrigation System of San Antonio, Texas. El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1972. Spanish version, in Los cuadernos de Cauce 2000, No.15 (Madrid, 1988); also in Instituto de la Ingeniería de España, Obras hidráulicas prehispánicas y coloniales en América, I (Madrid, 1992), pp. 225–264. Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and its Legacy. Aldershot, Variorum,1996.

From personal experience, you see the remains of norias (wheels to lift water) all over the place.

The whole of the northern edge of the Bajío region–a key agricultural region in colonial times because it supplied the wheat, mules, etc to the mining districts of Guanajuato and Zacatecas–is riddled with hydraulic works: stone channels and damns that you run across everywhere if you roam through the hills.

I wish I could find the notes from a seminar given by a researcher at the Colegio de Michoacán. Anyway, he described how first the Spanish managed to control the aguas mansas, the gentle waters, the waters that flow year round in the two major rivers (ha!) that flow down from the north, the Laja and the Lerma.  Then they tackled the aguas torrentiales (the torrential waters) because often much of the year’s rainfall occurs in two or three major downpours.  Among the techniques were moveable woven damns to divert the waters into holding areas, and the creation of huge holding areas acres in extent where the water went from one pen to another until all had evaporated, still keeping the ground moist enough for a second crop.

It was a huge, and hugely labor-intensive system that survived until the beginning of the twentieth century and the advent of the small electric motor for pumping out groundwater.

And I recently went to a colonial hacienda in the Bajío, close to Irapuato, which had a system for collecting the waters from the huge areas of roof and running them through channels to irrigate the huerta (orchard/vegetable garden).  I assume most of these techniques were inspired by or directly copied from Moorish Spain.

By the way I see that Simon Fitzwilliam-Hall who runs the al-Filaha site is an expert on hydraulic technology so he probably knows far more about this than I do.

Continuation of the medieval Islam transfer of plants

Obviously the Spanish picked up and brought to New Spain many of the plants that the Iberian peninsula owed to Islam. Bless their hearts, these plants, now expected to live with wet summers and dry winters instead of dry summers and wet winters, adapted and thrived, citrus for example.  William Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain tracing the transfer of the technique of growing fruits in huertas from New Spain into what is now Texas, New Mexico, and California.

Sheep, Cattle, Horses and their Management

Not perhaps technically part of agronomy but very much part of the package that arrived, even if subsequently adapted to conditions in the Americas.  And of course with reverberations in the cowboy culture in what is now the US but was once part of New Spain.

____________

Finally well-known food activist Gary Nabhan has had a shot at in his thought-provoking Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (though I wish that he was a tad more precise and analytical in his claims).

Now here’s a terrific resource, a really reliable site dedicated to medieval Arabic manuals on farming produced all over the medieval Islamic world (see map above) .  You probably already know but the medieval Islamic states transformed agriculture from Spain to parts of India, from the Sahel to Sicily.

The purpose of the Filāḥa Texts Project is to publicise and elucidate the written works collectively known as the Kutub al-Filāḥa or ‘Books of Husbandry’ compiled by Arab, especially Andalusi, agronomists mainly between the 10th and 14th centuries (see Authors & Works). These systematic and detailed manuals of agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry have been sadly neglected and remain largely unknown in the Anglophone world – apart from some of the Yemeni works they have never been translated into English.

via The Filāḥa Texts Project.

Edit.  Some more thoughts on this.  I think the title should really be “How Medieval Islam Transformed Food and How it Had to Transform Farming to get the Foodstuffs it Needed.”

Also, I had the pleasure of taking Expiración Garcia, mentioned on this site as one of the premier researchers in the area, to lunch last year when she was giving a series of seminars in the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico).  She is a meticulous researcher.  But neither I nor any of the other members of the seminar could persuade her to speculate on the clear transfer of much of this agronomy to Mexico.  Too bad, if understandable given it was her first visit, the need to be circumspect about this kind of research in Spain, time pressure, etc.

Thanks to Karen Reeds on the ASFS list for the tip.  And from there back to H-HISTGEOG@H-NET.MSU.EDU

In 2010, Malaysia kicked off Malaysian Kitchen for the World —a robust gastrodiplomacy campaign meant to create awareness about Malaysia as it creates awareness for Malaysian cuisine and recipes. The campaign has been carried out by the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (MATRADE) to promote Malaysian cuisine globally, with heavy emphasis on the U.S. and U.K.

The brilliance of Malaysia’s campaign is that it has also combined aspects of cultural diplomacy with its culinary outreach. In this regard, Malaysia has set up night markets in famous landmarks of cosmopolitan cities such as a Malaysian night market in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square. More recently, this public diplomacy campaign touched both coasts of the United States as it set up a night market on Santa Monica’s bustling 3rst Street Promenade and in the hip Meatpacking District in New York City. Such cultural and culinary diplomacy is most effective, as it plays on all the senses, not just taste.

Hat tip for both of these to Robyn Eckhardt, of Eating Asia, a must read for anyone interested in the traditional culinary scene of Southeast Asia and China.