Five hours sound too much. You don’t need an almost an hour to grind 1 kg. I did fieldwork in Tlaxcala in the beginning of the 80′s, and maize was sometimes ground by hand on a metate, usually between 5 and 6 or 7 in the morning. And I’ve tried it out myself, too, though to rather uneven results. Yes, it was hard work, but five hours? And there were more than six family members, plus the dogs that were also fed tortillas. Considering all the other stuff a rural housewife has to do, apart from the tasks you mentioned – wash clothes by hand, cook, feed the domestic animals, go out to buy stuff, keep the house and patio in working order, look after kids, help with the field work, it also sounds unrealistic.

From the way Heike phrases it, it sounds as if this village already had a mill so that the metate was used only on special occasions.  So was the dough (masa) for the day or just for a special meal?

Grinding (pineapple in this case, not maize)

Getting a clean measure of the time to grind for a family is hard.

• Family size and family appetites vary.
• Children interrupt or grandma pitches in to help.
• It is hard to grind continuously because it is such hard work.  In my experience, at first it goes really quickly because a metate plus woman is a very efficient machine.  Then it gets harder and harder as you tire. So do the breathers the grinder takes count as part of the time?  I would say so. For tortillas, you usually have to make five “passes” across the metate, that is starting with a handful of nixtamal (maize heated with alkali and drained) you move it from the top to the bottom of the metate with a series of back and forth strokes.  Then you gather it up with your fingers and move it back to the top, a small breather.  Then repeat four more times, with a few seconds’ rest leaning back on your heels between each repetition. Then a slightly longer breather as you put the dough (masa) in one container and take nixtamal out of another.
• Some women are better grinders than others, producing a consistent dough quickly.  Why there should be differences I am not sure, but it is a widely repeated claim.
• The dough for tamales and gorditas takes less time than the dough for tortillas (though tamales then take longer to make than tortillas).

Even given these problems, I’m pretty certain that grinding was the dominant task of the day, day after day, for whoever it was that did the grinding, taking not just an hour or so but hours and hours.

What about the other chores Heike mentions?  In the past washing would have been less of a chore because there were fewer clothes and yet fewer bed linens.  Keeping the house and patio clean (largely endless sweeping) was often handed off to girl children (who did not go to school), as well as the care of chickens, dogs, pigs, and younger children.

Child care, I think, often got very short shrift as women had to balance turning out the tortillas with spending time with the kids.   It’s purely anecdotal, but I remember being very taken aback in the mid 1990s to hear Eugenia Ricaud, then working for DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, the government family welfare agency run by politician’s wives) in San Miguel de Allende, say that the very best way to improve childrens’ lives was to put a mill in the village.  This allowed women to spend time with their  children (or take paid employment or develop handicrafts).

Of course, the ladies of DIF varied in their grip on life in the villages so I went back to Eugenia several years later to find out if I had really understood what she was saying.   Her answer was yes.

Leaving Mexico for a second and going to western Eurasia where simple grindstones were the main way of reducing grains to meal until Roman times (and in backwaters long after), grinding was work reserved for the lowest in society, usually slaves/prisoners so far as I can see.

The Roman army adopted rotary mills, I think largely because they ground more rapidly.  Even so it took a hefty legionary an hour and a half to grind enough meal to feed his group of eight for a day. And not only was the mill faster and less tiring because it was not driven by the weight of the grinder, the meal was almost certainly not as fine as the dough for tortillas. (Anyone who can get me a rotary mill so that I can do some comparative studies with the simple grindstone will win my unending gratitude).

But this is to get into Nick Trachet’s questions which will have to wait for tomorrow.

Heike also asks where I got my information on maize processing.  The answer is from observing, cross-questioning and working with women in different villages in Guanajuato: Margarita Muñoz Ramirez, who started grinding at the age of twelve in a village outside San Miguel de Allende, AltaGracia Sanchez Torrez and Maria Jesús de Cabrera Parra of Rodeo San José and Emily Bonilla of El Capulín, both outside Guanajuato.  I am also grateful for the input of the metateros (metates/grindstone-makers) in Comonfort, Guanajuato, particularly Manuel Olalde and Rafael Hernández Laguna and families.  Comparing notes with José Rodriguez of Mexico City who is finishing a Ph.D. thesis on Mexican metates and grinding for the University of Barcelona was also very helpful.  And of course my own experiments.

I also know the article by Arnold Bauer that she mentions originally published in Agricultural History 64 (1990), 1-17 and updated in Enrique Florescano and Virginia García Acosta, coord., Mestizajes tecnológicos y cambios culturales en México (Mexico: CIESAS, 2004), 169-99.  He suggests five to six hours, and cites various studies going back to one by Miguel María de Azcárate in 1837 that come to similar conclusions.  Jeff Pilcher has a good discussion of the mechanization of masa grinding and tortilla making in chapter five of ¡Que vivan los tamales! (University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

While we are at it, here is my response to the question “Why didn’t Mexicans abandon the metate?  And if you search under grinding you will find lots more.

I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels.

In passing, he gives these figures for the labor involved in growing maize in Mexico ca 1940. A hectare is roughly the area inside an athletic track.

Cultivating a hectare of maize by hand.   1,140 man hours

Cultivating a hectare of maize with an ox. 380 man hours (plus 200 ox hours)

His figures come from Cornell entomologist turned agricultural economist, David Pimentel “Energy Flow in the Food System,” in Pimental and C.W. Hall, eds.,  Food and Energy Resources (London, 1984).

They reminded me that I have always been frustrated that the “food system” so often ignores what happens after the harvest.  So here’s my effort to get an order of magnitude figure of the relative work expended by men and women in putting tortillas on the table prior to oxen, mules, tractors and mills.

In 1970, maize yield per hectare was 1,194 kg ( INEGI, 1999 cited in “El maíz en México,” by Massieu Trigo and Lechuga Montenegro).  Assume that you needed 1 kg of maize per adult per day when it was providing 65% of the calories, allowing for seed corn and wastage in storage.  Assume a family of two adults and four others, say three children and an old person (probably low), with the four others needing 1/2 kg of maize a day.  Multiplying 4 kg by 365 days and dividing by 1,194 you find that a plot of 1.2 hectares was needed.  And that means 1,368 man hours to grow maize for the family.

Now what about turning all that maize into sometime you could put in your mouth.  Assume that it took about 5 hours a day to grind the maize for a family of six.  Add in time to collect firewood, de-grain the maize, haul the water to nixtamalize it, and shape and cook the tortillas.  Say another hour a day for this (a low estimate I think).

That means 2190 woman hours to turn maize into tortillas for the family.

That is to say, processing maize took more time than growing it even prior to animal power. Once the man had the help of an ox or a mule, the woman spent four to five times as much time processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

Given what hard work grinding is, I would guess the woman spent at least four times as much energy processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

These are just back of the envelope calculations. Does anyone have any corrections or modifications to make?  Or any pointers to studies on the  relative energy involved in farming versus processing and cooking?

The succulent [literally juicy from the Latin succus] food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.

But the Indian peasant’s dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise. 

Beast and Man in India, first published in 1891, 137.

I think it is easy to forget how much chewing had to be done with traditional whole meal dishes and, if they were baked, how dry they were. Most societies have something to help it down, in this case ghee, or to soften it, soup in the case of French peasant breads.  And what Kipling does not mention is that this unpalatability was true of many European breads until pretty shortly before he wrote.  Sheila Hamilton (thanks) sent along this comment about The Long Affray, a history of poaching in Britain by Harry Hopkins.

It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):

“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”

For a perspective on maize in South Africa here is an extract from White Food by the interesting blogger Tangerine and Cinnamon.  Worth clicking on the link to read the whole thing.

A recent article published by the magnificent Mail and Guardian explores South Africa’s taste for whiter, finer maize meal:

“In the poorest communities a bag of maize meal is often the only way of satisfying a family’s hunger, and the cost factor plays a role too. An 80kg bag of maize meal is about R400: on a 500g portion a person a day, an extended family of 10 people would consume an 80kg bag in about 16 days. The daily total consumption of maize meal in South Africa is about 10 000 tonnes.

But these maize-meal consumers demand a product that is white – stripped of roughage and nutrients – and manufacturers have remodelled their businesses to serve this demand.

South Africa’s best-selling brand of maize meal is White Star, produced by Pioneer Foods. White Star is whiter and finer than other brands. Premier Foods and Tiger Brands, the country’s other two big producers of maize meal, have also invested in technology which produces this whiter maize meal.”

For me the bottom line is this.

Either you assume that those who lived largely on grains were deluded or driven by an irrational desire for status to prefer white.  This seems an act of enormous condescension since neither I nor, I suspect, the readers of this blog have ever lived largely on grains.

Or you assume that they had good reasons.

Edit.  I did not intend to suggest that Tangerine and Cinnamon was being condescending.  Apologies to her for phrasing the last three sentences poorly.   I have now changed the wording.

Threat to the supply of basic products

The ad was posted by the National Chamber of Industrialized Maize, which it turns out is the association of enterprises that turn maize into edible products: masa for tortillas and tamales, snacks, and animal food.  Since the half dozen points where these robberies occur are well known, the Chamber is demanding that the government do something to stop this “leakage.”

It’s well known that large quantities of gasoline and crude ($2-4 billion’s worth) are stolen from Pemex, the national company and sold nationally and internationally (including the US).

Now Mexico’s other fuel, the raw materials for the tortillas and meat that keep humans going,  is being ripped off.   Assuming the facts in the ad are correct (and I can hear the conspiracy theories beginning to buzz) here are a couple of thoughts:

• It’s not clear what kind of maize is being stolen, imported maize (largely for animal feed essential for the rapidly growing consumption of meat, poultry, and eggs) or national white maize (for tortillas).
• Few people grind their own maize in Mexico.  Processors of some kind must be buying this (I think even if it’s imported maize). This quantity may be tiny in terms of total Mexican production. It’s quite enough to need some sophisticated logistics.
• I can’t help thinking of the poem in the Confucian Book of Songs composed by Chinese peasants several hundred years before Christ in protest at the way the aristocrats took substantial portions of their harvest by force. The refrain is:

Large rats! Large rats! Do not eat our grain.

Who are these large rats?   And where do they fit in the Mexican economy in all its shades from white through gray to black?

Breakfast! Arepa stuffed with butter and white cheese

Maize is getting such bad press at the moment in the United States.  But it is such a wonderful grain, so flexible, so many appealing products.

Arepas, as you doubtless know, are the national dish, the daily bread of Venezuela (and other parts of Latin America).  I’d had the Panamanian variety last year and was rather underwhelmed.  They were silver dollar sized, rather tough, and rather greasy half inch pancakes.  I only had the hotel version so I may have completely missed what may be wonderful Panamanian arepas.

Arepas and Venezuelan culture. Photo of photo by Miguel Dorta

The arepa above, however, made by Miguel Dorta of the University of Venezuela in Caracas, with arepa flour he had brought with him to the culinary nationalism conference in Guadalajara, was stunning.  He simply mixed flour, water and a bit of salt into an English-muffin sized patty and toasted it on each side in a frying pan (the only implement available in the hostel where we were staying).

Miguel Dorta stuffing arepas

The outside, the concha or shell is crunchy.  The soft, white inside (on the right of the photo) is scooped out to make room for the filling of butter and mild white cheese. Miguel used queso oaxaca.   A wonderful mix of textures and flavors.  Especially with the agua fresca of lime and piloncillo (raw sugar) that you can see front left (I need to ask him the Venezuelan name again). Edit. Papelón (piloncillo) con limón. Thanks to Ana in the comments.

Miguel explained that the soft inside is given to small children and old people. When he was young, he and his siblings fought for the crunchy outsides.

Arepas are eaten with all meals with and without stuffing and with all kinds of different stuffing.  Their texture is quite unlike cornbread and corn cakes. Much finer.  And no, Wikipedia to the contrary, this is not like a Mexican gordita except in size and shape.  The taste (not nixtamalized) and texture (much finer), and color (much whiter) are distinct.

Miguel has a fascinating book in draft about the preparation of the meal (flour) for arepas and its complex historical development that involves pounding, grinding, African techniques, and Venezuelan and American manufacturers.  That’s for another post.

I’ve not seen arepa flour on sale in Mexico but you can certainly get it whereever there are Venezuelan immigrants. I saw it in Spain and it must be available in many parts of the United States. Edit.  It is. Again thanks to Ana.

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

Mexican peasant walking to town with a donkeyload of firewood for sale

The New York Times a couple of days ago had a long and well researched article on the slowing of Mexican migration to the United States. Yeah.

Mexican is getting wealthier.  In fact Mexico is now 80% urban, something that has a lot to do with this.  Peasants eking out a living on the land are disappearing. Instead they are taking jobs in towns. Just this morning the newspaper Reforma reported that in the last eighteen months, Mazda, Volkswagen, Pirelli, and Proctor and Gamble are opening huge new plants in Guanajuato, the state in the center of the country where I used to live.

Many might think this sad.  But life as a peasant is not a bundle of fun.

So I thought it might be worth linking to earlier blog posts about Mexican peasants, maize, farming, and migration to the United States.

Why it’s not worthwhile for Mexican peasants to go north.

How Mexican peasants are escaping rural poverty.

Why Mexican peasants don’t want to grow maize.

Mexico’s maize production and importation (2008).

How Mexican peasants came to be growing maize in the twentieth century.

Of course, the great unknown in all this is how much drug money is contributing to prosperity.

It’s Candelaria. The 2nd of February. The midpoint between the winter equinox and the spring solstice. Originally known as Candlemas in English, for the blessing of candles in the church, it’s a day that has been reduced to a shadowy presence in the United States, eclipsed by Groundhog Day, when a groundhog from Punxsutawney, Pa., is paraded on television as a weather predictor. In Mexico, though, Candelaria is still celebrated. It’s the start of spring planting, the tail end of the long Christmas period and the commemoration of Christ’s presentation at the temple in the Catholic calendar. The Candelaria tradition springs from All Kings Day (Jan. 6), for which a sweetbread known as the Rosca de Reyes is baked with a figurine inside representing the baby Jesus. The sweetbread is eaten with hot chocolate and whoever has the slice with the figurine has to offer a party on Candelaria. And that party means tamales. Although they are eaten throughout the year, especially during the Christmas season, tamales above all are associated with Candelaria. Snubbed by the wealthy The iconic stuffed and wrapped maize dumplings that date deep into pre-Hispanic times, were not always popular with the well-to-do in Mexico. For centuries after the Spanish conquest, they preferred white bread rolls, dismissing tamales as rustic or street food, eating them only as a snack outside of regular meals. In 1901, Julio Guerrero assured his fellow citizens in the “Genesis of Crime in Mexico” that the diet of poor Mexicans — wild greens, beans, nopales, squash, fried pork skins, chiles and corn tortillas — caused social backwardness and delinquency. Tamales were nothing but an “abominable folk pastry.”

My article on tamales for Zester Daily.  To cut to the chase, one part of the story of how an abominable folk pastry became mainstream in Mexico.

And some others.  From Ruth Alegria, something of El Nino Dios (apologies to Ruth for missing the link earlier). From Lesley Tellez, strawberry tamales. From Kathleen of Cooking in Mexico, chocolate tamales. From Ben Herrera Beristain, a tamalada. From Mexico Desconocido (in Spanish) why tamales on this day.

The nights are dark and you can see even the shooting stars. The Yaquis  cover the grains of maize with hot sand. As they burst open, the grains fly up.  The children dance around, trying to catch them as they fall, como estrellas del cielo, like stars from the heavens.

The best story of our panel in the Feria del Libro in Guadalajara last week told by Jiapsy Arias Gonzalez who spends time with the Yaquis.

To reflect on in theaters with their slightly sickly smell of butter flavoring or when you pop a little paper packet in the microwave.

Edit.  Just to be explicit, I’d be very surprised if the Yaquis did not weave some cosmic tale about maize and popcorn.  For many native Americans, humans are made of maize.  So here the purifying fire transforms the earthly body to the soaring whiteness and lightness of the soul or spirit.

My parents immigrated to France (from Algeria) in the 1960s with little more than the clothes on their backs. Now I’m in Los Angeles about to open my own culinary school in a $3 million dollar kitchen. I learned how to steam couscous from my mom. She’s illiterate. Now I’m organizing a festival in honor of a food she made almost everyday.

Now if that doesn’t sound intriguing, how about this?    You’ll find Paula Wolfert, with her wonderful gift for translating Mediterranean dishes for American use, who writes so eloquently about the cooking of the Mediterranean, Faye Levy, among her many accomplishments a go to person for Jewish cooking in the Mediterranean, Clifford Wright whose Mediterranean Feast effortlessly moves between history and recipes, and Charles Perry, famous as much for for experimenting with medieval Islamic fermented bread condiments and other risky forays into forgotten foods, as for his impeccable scholarship on the cuisines of medieval Islam.  All in all, my favorite combination of terrific tastes and nerdy expertise.

Since I can’t be there, here’s a long distance contribution to the festivities.  Some time ago I gave a ca 1815 Mexican recipe for wheat couscous and a slightly tricky-looking recipe for maize couscous that tried to duplicate the texture.

Ta ta.  I recently discovered the origin of the first recipe.  Well now I know where that first recipe came from.  So simple I should have checked immediately.  It’s the the great Spanish cookbook of the 17th and 18th century, Motiño’s Arte de Cocina, Pasteleria, Vizcocheria, y Conserveria, widely used by criollos (Mexican-born Spaniards) in New Spain.  My reprint of the 1763 edition (it was originally published in 1623) has a longer recipe “Como se hace el alcuzcuz” (how to make couscous) and also “Como se guise el alcuzcuz.” (How to prepare the couscous).  Compare the wording and its clear that whoever it was in San Luis Potosi who wrote out the long recipe, this is where it originally came from.

If the Spanish stamped out heretic couscous, how come that detailed recipes were still published in mid-eighteenth century Barcelona and shortened and transcribed and adapted in early nineteenth-century Mexico?  Just around Independence.