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.

The girls of San Antonio

Are lazy at the metate.

They want to walk out bobbed-haired,

With straw hats on.

The harvesting is finished,

So is the cotton.

The flappers stroll out now

For a good time.

This reference that foreshadows so much of the twentieth-century history of the metate was sent to me by  Bea Misa whose blog I’ve quoted  before. I really recommend it  (see this post on Filipinos in Hong Kong).  She in turn located it on History Matters, the indispensable history web site run by George Mason University.

They in turn take it from The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant (New York: Dover, 1971), 308 first published in 1931 by Manuel Gamio, the ¨father¨of Mexican archaeology, promoter of the idea, still so important in Mexico, that the indigenous cultures were the basis of Mexico, arguing for mestizaje in the wake of the early twentieth-century “Revolution” that tore the country apart, advocate of a changed education, diet, etc for the contemporary indigenous, and here turning his attention to Mexican Americans.

We’re eighty years on.  The terms of the debate have not altered that much.

Pain shot through my knees as I attempted to get up from the floor. My legs wobbled. The backs of my knees felt slick with sweat, and my T-shirt was damp. I shuffled the four paces to the jar of agua like an arthritic old woman. A blister was starting to form on my left palm. Why was I doing this to myself?

Of course, as you will see when you read her full account, she was using the physical motion of grinding to heat the metate.  Remember your physics lessons.  Mechanical work as force exerted over a distance.  That´s what Lesley was up to.  Maybe physics classes would be more immediate if students had to force the stone over the grindstone time and again to create heat.   It would have been easier, though not a whole lot easier, if the metate were heated. And of course it would have been hotter.

Anyway compare Lesley’s reality with this oh-so-cool gentleman, not a suspicion of sweat on his brow, not a hint of the weight of the body forcing that stone along.

Finally in a tweet, Lesley said she would never look at dark chocolate the same way again.  Well, even Lesley’s final puddle of chocolate was a long, long way from the dark chocolate so popular now.  That kind of smoothness can never be created with a grindstone.  It took the Industrial Revolution to produce that.   Another post coming soon on that.

Third or fourth pass grinding barley on a metate

Lots more questions than I can take up.  But one that several commentators have raised is “Why did the simple grindstone survive until now in Mexico when in many parts of Eurasia it was abandoned about two or three centuries BC?”

First, the Mexicans did take up the rotary grindstone at the time of the Conquest.  Water mills were constructed at great expense wherever there was water sufficient to run them.  So it was in no way ignorance of rotary grinding.  Rotary grinding was for wheat though.

Which raises a point that I think has to be borne in mind all the time we are talking about early grain techniques.  To most of us, grains are things in bins in the whole food store, pretty much of a muchness.  In the past, what now appear to be small differences among grains made huge differences in how you processed them and what you turned them into.

And, thus second, the differences between wheat and maize were big differences.  You can of course grind maize with a rotary grindstone.  That’s how it was done by the American colonists, by Europeans and by most of the others who accepted maize.  That gives you corn meal.  And unless you add other ingredients that is most easily eaten as a gruel or porridge.

But Mexicans had at least five hundred years of eating tortillas (and many more of eating other maize products).   And the maize for tortillas is treated with alkali, brought to boiling, cooled and drained before grinding.  That is it is wet ground (a technique also used in South India).

I believe that it is impossible to wet grind on horizontal rotary stone mills.  I have been trying for years to get a rotary mill to test this hypothesis but no luck thus far.  Any ideas gratefully received.  But it is my belief that instead of flowing out through the grooves cut in the lower stone, it would simply gum up.

Since tortillas are so central to Mexican ways of eating, they kept using the metate.

Third, the “simple” grindstone or metate has lots of advantages over rotary grindstones more or less whatever you are grinding. It is cheaper.  It does not require a highly skilled professional (a professional nonetheless) to make it and keep it in good condition.  It’s best made with basalt of which there’s lots in Mexico.  It produces a better product I am almost certain.  And it can be used for lots of things.

It’s really only in efficiency that the rotary mill wins.  A big consideration of course but mainly if you highly value the labor of the grinders.  Otherwise it produced a product thought of as cheap and nasty.

_____

As an aside, many, many thanks to the many Mexican women who have shown me what they can do with a metate and patiently watched my fumbling efforts to imitate them.

Hands up.  Who can really say what grist, pottage, meal, flour, gruel, and dozens of other words meant in the past?   Well, I can’t either, at least not without a bit of research.

We are so far from the first thousands of years of grain eating that words like this just crop up as oddities in the Bible or Homer.  We are so far from familiarity with grindstones and pestles and mortars that we have no real way to talk about them.

And thank goodness.  Grinding and pounding are some of the heaviest tasks humans have ever undertaken.   So much best left behind unless you an obsessed historian.

Several commentators have said that they are sure people pound grains.  And they are absolutely right.

Pounding grains can do several things but the most important thing it can do is to remove the protective (that is tough as all get out) hull of the grain.  When humans first began to use grains, almost all of them had one of these tough outer coverings.  Thanks to clever genetic modifications by early farmers (thank you, thank you) most wheat, for example, no longer has that tough outer covering that deterred all the predators except humans.

We charged in with pestles and mortars, no not the dinky little things in our kitchens that aren’t much good for anything, but hollowed out tree trunks and pestles higher than the pounder herself.

They raised the pestle in their arms, letting it fall, catching it after it crushed the outer covering but before it smashed the grain.

Then they winnowed, getting rid of the hulls.

Only then could they grind.  Pound, then grind. Yes.

Wait for a couple of archaeologists’ diagrams.

Really, grinding’s no sweat.  Put on a pretty dress, find ribbons for your hair, layer on the jewelry, hang your hat in the corner of the kitchen and buckle down to several hours at the metate (grindstone).

This mid-20th century print of a happy grinder in the collection of the Soumaya Museum would be reason enough to buy the latest special edition of Arqueología Mexicana, always a fine magazine put out by the Mexican National Institute for Archeology and History.

But the reason to include this print is not the maize (nxtamal) being ground but the dried chiles in the bowl in the left front of the picture.  This special edition is dedicated to chiles.  Just when you think that there’s nothing new to say about chiles, the editor Enrique Vela, manages to pull together all kinds of interesting stuff:

sculptures of chiles from prehistoric sites, photos of growing, selling and preparing chiles from the twentieth century, a really good visual catalog of chiles with all their names and the parts of Mexico where they are now grown, chile history, chile cartoons, chiles in the world, chiles in Mexican cooking.

Well worth picking up a copy if you are in Mexico.

And sorry, all these sites are in Spanish as is this special edition of the magazine.  I know that’s frustrating for many readers.  But I do want to spread the word about all the very interesting publications on Mexican food that appear in Mexico.

Now, you might say, who in their right minds would get down on their knees to grind a pineapple. Well, it’s all part of a big project to get a better handle on “simple” grindstones. They weren’t actually either simple or primitive as I will explain at great length shortly.

But for now I’ll just say that I want to explore (a) the huge number of ways grindstones were used in Mexico until about a generation ago and (b) to understand the variety of grindstones used around the world.

I should really describe this project up front and will soon. But the pineapple grind snuck up on me because of the posts on aguas frescas.

And here’s a blow up of the pineapple grinder down on the bottom right. To her right is the metate (grindstone), behind that a pot for what I know not, below the metate a bowl to collect the juice of the pineapple (I assume) while she is straining what I assume to be pineapple pulp through a traditional strainer

And here’s my kitchen floor ready to go: metate, pineapple in chunks, bowl to catch the juice, bowl for straining the pulp (you’ll see the strainer a couple of photos down).

And here I am starting to grind.

Grinding pineapple is a cinch. Compared to grinding grains it takes no effort at all. The only problem is that with grains the ground material, whether its wet or dry, grabs the surface of the metate and offers some resistance. Not so with the pineapple. You start your downward stroke and the mano slides forward all too easily. But the juice comes out easily.

Here’s Rufina doing the second batch. You can see the puddle of juice (what looks like a bright blue trapezoid is actually a reflection of her top in the pool of juice).

What turned out to be tricky, as I’d rather expected, is getting the juice into the bowl. The lower lip of the grindstone turns up so that ground maize won’t fall off (at least that’s my theory). But that means the juice puddles. We heaved the metate up by its back leg and even so the juice tended to dribble around the bottom end and on to the floor.

Hypothesis. Perhaps there were special juice making metates with a different bottom. Even today metates have different sizes and shapes for different uses. Must ask an older generation about juice.

But they would have to be the wealthy. The poor weren’t grinding pineapple for themselves. It was a luxury fruit. Don Bruno, my gardener, now in his mid 70s, remembers how in his youth the arrieros, muleteers, walked three days down to the tierra caliente (the warm regions) to buy fruits like pineapple and mango and then three days back. Not cheap.

Anyway, that’s drifting off. Here’s Rufina tipping the metate. Heavy work.

And there you can see the traditional strainer on the right. Here’s a better view with the pulp.

So what’s the bottom line? or lines?

1. With the metate it was really easy to juice a pineapple. Of course in Europe (or in Mexico) you could use a pestle and mortar but it’s much fiddlier. The eighteenth and nineteenth century Mexican kitchen could do lots of things a European one either couldn’t or, if it could, only with much more effort. Of course both depended on servants.

2. I’m still not clear whether the grinder tried for maximum juice and tipped it off the metate or whether she simply crushed the pineapple and extracted the juice with the sieve. No way of telling from the experiment, I think.

3. Rufina has the last word. She thought this was hilarious. “Muy eficaz la licuadora,” (the blender’s very efficient) she said as she left.

Well, here’s the answer.

This 1860 oil by a wonderful Mexican painter, José Agustín Arrieta, shows horchata vendors. The girl behind the table is pouring horchata into a glass. Also shown are the mechanics of this. On the left is a water seller presumably delivering the water to make the horchata. On the right is a young girl kneeling behind her metate (grindstone). Given the pineapple and pineapple tops scattered about she has actually been grinding pineapple, not rice. The pulp would have run off into a bowl like the one at the bottom of the metate. And she is straining the pulp of a pineapple into another bowl.

Very hard work but much more effective than, say, trying to push rice or pineapple through a sieve.

Well, it’s not, not until women don’t have to spend all day processing those crops. Mexico was pretty lucky. In the 1940s and 50s, crop productivity went way up, largely thanks to Norm Borlaug and his team funded by the Rockefeller Foundation with Mexican co-operation. (Not everyone agrees with that statement today but I’ll be happy to defend it).

At the same time, and for different reasons, the simple grindstone (metate) was replaced by the mechanized tortilla mill. Lots to say about this transition but that’s for another time. The key thing is that women were freed up from grinding about an hour a day for every adult to be fed (that is about five hours a day for a family).

The tortillas weren’t as good. The life was infinitely improved. I had a friend who worked for DIF (Desarollo Integral de la Familia, the main government agency dealing with family development) in the late 80s, early 90s. She told me that when they went into a village the first and most effective thing they could do to reduce child abuse was to put in a tortilla mill.

It was a casual statement but I’ve checked back with her and I am not misremembering. I just think of that mother. No grinding, no food for the family. Along comes her child. She just has to shove that child out of the way so she can feed her later.

And then along comes this from Diana Buja about home cooking in Burundi. It speaks for itself.

“A reality check on ‘real’ home cooking / sloooow food: On my most recent trip upcountry; we were working with women in a pretty remote area to help them organize basket-making, in which Burundian women excel. Problems in basket-making and sales include inputs and market access – problems also found in food production. In the colline ['hill'] where we were working, an extended family was preparing for a wedding ceremony and of course food preparation was central. Everything, except the tomato paste, salt and palm oil, is grown – harvested – processed – cooked by the family:

- Rice [dryland], which had been harvested and dried in the sun, was being de-hulled by being pounded by two girls in large wooden pestle / mortars [there's no near-by rice-processing available]. It will then be sifted and the chaff saved for feeding to livestock.

- Manioc had been soaked / dried in the sun / pounded into flour, which was being made into thick pate to eat with the sauces and meat.

- Manioc leaves were being chopped and then pounded in a mortar to make sombe, to which garden eggs [indigenous eggplants] and wild amaranthus and onions and red peppers would be added, making a tasty vegetable.

- A family goat had been slaughtered; meat was being chopped into chunks, for making into a thick stew laced with onions, tomatoes [from the homestead] and wild greens. Innards all were being prepared for use of one kind or another and the hide was being scraped by some boys, to be stretched and dried for sale in the local market. The feet and lower legs would be used by very poor to make meat broth.

- Plantains were being peeled and then fried in palm oil and then salted. Plantain peels go to the goats.

- Banana juice had been made from sweet bananas, and we were offered cups to sip on, while we talked about baskets. Banana peels go to the goats.

- Sorghum beer had alread been made by women in the family, from their own sorghum [of course!] and was read for serving.

Back to baskets: All grasses are locally collected and only the coloring is purchased. But market access is lacking. Same with crops and livestock – market access both for goods and services [milling; etc] are just too far away for people who must carry everything on their heads; the closest rural market being about a 2 hour walk one way. And the head woman in the family is crippled and so must rely on other family members for crop and meal preparation. But, being crippled, she’s become an excellent basket-weaver by way of gaining income for the family…

Oh, and water for the homestead is about an hour round-trip.

Bucolic notions of returning to simpler times? Ask these folks: they would LOVE to have their food-preparation even minimally improved!”

OK, you may say we have overshot the mark in the modern Western kitchen, not doing enough cooking.  Perhaps.  But let’s tread very carefully when we wax nostalgic.

I’m always looking out for anything that sheds light on grinding with a saddle quern (or a metate as it would be called in Mexico). Museums often have some dusty exhibits in a corner. Just a couple of days ago I was in the marvelous Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In an exhibit of Greek artifacts, there was a charming little model, just about six inches high, of a Greek woman grinding in the 5th century BC. Actually the sign said she was kneading but that was clearly wrong. She is leaning over a saddle quern holding the muller in both hands. Or at least I think she is. Assuming the sculptor got things right, it’s actually rather a puzzling little model when you examine it closely.

Some preliminaries. First, the woman is grinding standing up. Grinding worldwide seems most commonly to be done on the knees but there are lots of interesting exceptions. This is one. Second, the metate is placed in a footed tray. This means that the ground product could spill down on to a clean surface. Collecting is always a problem with grinding.

Now the puzzle. What is coming off the grindstone appear to be big lumps. What can they be? Clearly not barley or wheat meal. Cheese? In Mexico metates are used to smooth cheese but the result is a smear not a lump. Same with meat. Could she be breaking down balls of dried barley meal and milk?