In the market in Silao, Mexico, the very geographic center of Mexico, ten miles south of the the city of Guanajuato in the State of Guanajuato, the semilleros (seed shops) sell black eyed peas (Vigna unguicalata) along with all the usual Mexican beans. They call them veronicas.

You can see them in the sack at the back.  When you ask the vendors how they cook them, they indicate that they “guisar” them, that is they put them in stews as they would habas or garbanzos.  They do not eat them alone and simply boiled as they would the huge variety of Mexican beans.  This makes sense because all three are Old World not New World legumes.  It’s a boon to me because my husband loves black-eyed peas and I can nip down and get a supply from time to time.

But this leaves the bigger puzzle. To see black eyed peas in Mexico is, to put it mildly, odd.  You simply don’t run across blackeyed peas in markets in Central Mexico.

But the hypothesis that I have to consider is that these are a legacy of the African heritage in Guanajuato.  As I’m sure all readers know, blackeyed peas have been closely associated with African cooking.

And in the sixteenth century–yes, that early–Guanajuato had a substantial African population that was described as hailing being Angolan, Congan, Biafran, Biafaran, Baran and Araran, that is from the River Niger basin and Angola.  They were mainly slaves though cross-marriage, particularly with indigenous, began almost immediately.

Guanajuato in the sixteenth century was an immigrant community with no large settled indigenous community.  Apart from Africans, it consisted of Spaniards, particularly Basques and Castellanos, migrant indigenous particularly nahuas, michoacanos, otomis, and chichimecas, Portuguese (possibly crypto jews), and French.

According to a document that appears to date from the 1580s, in the mining area of Guanajuato there were 400 Spanish, 500 horses, 800 slaves (presumably African) and 800 mules.

Silao was where the runaway slaves took refuge, seeking out broken country to the south of the town.

If there’s anything to this, it suggests that looking for traces of African foods in Mexico is going to be a case of looking for tiny little clues.

“Why can’t we put simple medicines or supplies into Coca-Cola crates? So wherever you can get a cola, you can get rehydration salts, malaria tablets, water purifiers, mosquito nets, whatever.”

Here’s the link.

If the Coke distribution network penetrates as far in Africa as it does in Mexico, this would certainly get into remote areas. Seems an idea worthy of a trial.

But lots of readers of this blog know more about the situation on the ground than I do. What do you think?

PS. Thanks Kay.

Second, several people have said they would like this book to add to their collection.  I’d be happy to take orders and send them.  The book is cheap, about $7 US for 160 pages nicely produced paperback, the mailing is not, probably at least $20 US unless you want to wait until I am in the States in January 2010.  But let me know and I will be happy to round up copies.  In Mexico you grab books when they appear.

Now to the recipes.

The author gives no indication of who gave her the recipe, whether this was a dish for a special occasion or everyday,  and certainly makes no effort to place them in context of the other cuisines of Africans in the Americas.

There are a hundred recipes, divided into maize, beans, pork, barbacoa, beef, deer, moles (no not the animal, the style of dish), iguana, tamales, fish and shellfish, pozoles, drinks, bread, sweets, postres, and various.

I started listing them all. I’ve given up.  Their names will mean nothing to many readers even when translated and be misleading to others (totopos are made of a mixture of nixtamal and lard, for example).

They are highly regional versions of Mexican standards, stamped by the poverty of the region, the climate of the region, and the abundance of fish given that these communities live on the coast.  There is more hunted meat than you would normally find: deer, rabbit, squirrel (under iguana), turtle eggs, armadillo.  The moles, pipianes, etc are simple with few spices.

I perked up at frijol con arroz but this is not a hoppin john type recipe.  Here it is.

You put the 1/2 kilo of beans on to boil without salt, when they are soft you add salt to taste, then you put on the fire a clay pot with 2 big tablespoons of lard and onion cut in rounds, when that is golden, you take the pot off the fire and add the beans without their broth, you let them season for about 15 minutes and then you crush them and you add broth to the required thickness [refried beans, essentially].  Put on the fire a pot with three times as much water as 1/2 kilo of rice.  When it is hot, add the rice, stir it, and let it cook on a slow fire.

Serve with pickled chiles and dry cheese.

This is a pretty liquid boiled rice, if the measurements are to be believed, with refried beans.

Or at least I am having a shot at translating because the region is known for many local words and expressions and the glossary does not explain all of them.  I have also broken up the text where I take it the author is offering alternative menus.

“In the morning,

black coffee with a tamal or a pan dulce (slightly sweet roll, bun in English English),

aporreadillo of beef (I could use help with this one),

fried fish or fish in broth,

dried beef (cecina) fried with a sauce of chile costeña and tomato.

For midday,

beans fried with lard accompanied by boiled rice, pickled chiles and fresh cheese (queso fresco),

beef broth cooked with chile rojo seasoned with leaves of yerbasanta  and ripe plantain (plátano macho camunco) boiled with salt,

pork (marrano), turkey or chicken mole, accompanied with boiled white rice

and for the heat a glass of chilate (basically a kind of atole, recipe later) prepared with cacao, huapataxtle (a wild cacao), panocha (raw sugar cone), rice or ground maize (masa de maiz).

For the weekend, dried beef  (una carne de res oreada) cooked over the coals or in a clay pot with hot memelas (thick tortillas) and green chile pounded with tomato en cajete (in a box?).”

This is not metropolitan Mexican food.  But it does not seem much out of line with many of the other very regional country cuisines described in other books in this series.  Of course rice and beans and plantains suggest possible connections with the Gulf of Guinea and the Congo Coast so we’ll turn to those in the next post on the subject.  Plus some recipes.

So I go to the question with experience of Ibo cuisine in the Niger Delta where I spent some time plus readings about African American cuisine including Karen Hess’s classic study of the Carolina Rice Kitchen plus bits and pieces about Afro-Brazilian cuisine gleaned from Gilbert Freyre’s equally classic work on The Masters and the Slaves, all topped off with work but more recent investigators such as Jessica Harris and Fran Osseo-Asare.

Will I find bean and rice dishes?  Bean fritters (akara balls)? Palm oil? Palm wine? Okra stews? Will there be a tradition of pounded starchy dishes accompanied by a savory sauce? Are they based in African farming techniques? How much of traditional religion still shapes festival foods? Questions like that.

Well, it’s just beginning to be possible to formulate an answer.  Although Aguirre Beltran did some pioneering work in the mid-twentieth century, followed by Colin Palmer in the US, it’s really been in the last fifteen or twenty years that studies of African Mexicans has taken off, both in Mexico and in the United States.

Now Francisca Aparicio Prudente of the Regional Unit of the State of Guerrero has published La sazón de la cocina afromestiza de Guerrero, number 56 in the truly wondrous series on Cocina Indigena y Popular of Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes initiated by José Itturiaga, himself a very distinguished writer on Mexican cuisines.

The chief message I’ve taken away as I have pored over the 100 or so recipes and the narrative introduction is that the Afro Mexican cuisine of the Costa Chica of Guerrero is not quite what I expected.

Whoops, my alloted blog time for the day has run out.  So quickly, I’ll be giving extracts of this book and commenting on the cuisine of the torrid Costa Chica south of Acapulco plus then move on the African traces in the cuisines of Veracruz and even my own inland state of Guanajuato.

For some photos of the African culture on the Costa Chica plus a great bibliography, click this link.

“Goat meat is the most widely consumed meat in the world. That’s right, goat meat! Approximately sixty-three percent of the world’s total meat consumption can be credited to goat meat and it is estimated that eighty percent of the world’s population eats goat as a staple in their diet.”

For more, go to Bob Mrotek on goats.  More on your sources would be great Bob.

For work with goats in Africa, you can’t beat Diana Buja, here.

But, and it’s a big but, Slow Food crystallizes, encapsulates and publicizes a significant body of opinion about food and cooking. The panels in San Francisco show how they could mobilize major writers and spokesmen. Thus it does have political importance.

And what worries me is that many of the brightest students in our best colleges, many of our best chefs, many of our best food writers, are taking it for granted that an industrialized, mechanized food system has been a complete failure, actually worse than a failure, a disaster.  And that the way to remedy this is not to fix the problems (which there certainly are) but to revert to nostalgia. These are people of good will who are often prepared to make considerable sacrifices to improve food and agriculture. And these are the people who are becoming the officers in NGOs, writing books, advising restaurants and businesses, and so on.

It’s creating a climate of opinion that is difficult to reverse. That’s because it’s becoming unquestioned common sense. It makes it difficult even to raise reasonable criticisms without being written off as an old fogey, out of touch with reality, and part of the capitalist, corporate alliance. Serious constructive criticism is out of the question.

This may or may not affect American food policy. But some very smart people are already arguing that such attitudes (which admittedly they associate with greens, though of course there is a huge overlap between the two groups) is having a terrible effect on efforts to improve the lot of ordinary people in, say, Africa. Robert Paarlberg makes the case strongly in his well-informed book Starved for Science. And just today there was this interesting piece in the London Times on its effects in Africa again.

So yes, that’s why I think it is really important to take on Slow Food. Here’s an important issue. It must be debated courteously, carefully, and with all the evidence we have at our disposal.

P. S. Nice short discussion of some of the complexities of local and other food issues in Ideas in food, the blog of Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot.

Thanks to a friend who just returned from a tour of southern Africa.

A couple of days ago, Diana Buja posted an interesting comment about traditional African beers and the taste of bitter. This sparked a few random thoughts.

Bitter’s not a taste that features much in our food today, except in bitter drinks such as coffee, and even then we often mask it with cream and sugar. It’s something for a screwed up expression of disgust.

That’s not so much so in Indian and Chinese cuisines where bitter is often appreciated. In Hawaii, where Chinese restaurants catered to Chinese tastes, I was thrilled to discover bitter melon dishes. To my taste, too, Mexican salsas (not pico de gallo but the red or green chile-based sauces) often have a pleasing touch of bitterness, though cooks take care not to let this get out of balance.

So from time to time, I’ve ruminated about bitter being one of the oldest tastes to appear in food. Many plants are bitter. Usually it’s a sign that they contain toxins to ward off predators. It also means that humans had better be careful with them. But they are widespread and so a readily available flavor.

Sour was perhaps, too, in certain leaves and most fruits, but fruits are more seasonal. Sweet was hard to come by–honey if you could get it, some saps, a few fruits. And even salt was scarce and valuable. It’s so hard now when salt costs essentially nothing to think of it as valuable. But it’s only in the last century and a half that it’s become “common.”

So there you are with bitter. Diana points out that the French scholar Jean-Pierre Chretien remarks that for African kirundi-speakers there is just one word that covers bitter and sweet. He thinks that bitter was the word for something that enhanced taste, and that when sugar recently became available it was just swept into the category of taste-giver.

And then of course because bitter is associated with potent chemicals in plants, it also means these plants are potentially useful as medicines. How early people dealt with these is the subject of a fascinating (if not always easy to read) book by Timothy Johns, With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat: Chemical Ecology and the Origins of Human Diet and Medicine (1990).

And soon, on to Adam Balic’s detective story about shrimp paste.