Your argument is well and good until you look at the bigger picture. You don’t need a liberal attitude toward multiculturalism for ingredients and techniques to spread between cultures. Were the European colonial powers not trying to enter into the markets of the East Indies to access their spices?

Just look at the history of chocolate. The Mesoamericans had their own native cacao drinks, which the Europeans tweaked with sugar and milk to produce the renowned European chocolate-making traditions we see today. The fact that mole recipes include indigenous ingredients such as cacao and chili peppers indicate that there were definately influences coming from the Mesoamerican side.

In fact, your entire argument is based on cross-cultural influences between Hindu, Muslim, and Christian cultures. Why is it such a stretch to suppose Mesoamerican influences into the picture?

Thanks Tim.  Comments always help sharpen ideas.  Here’s the short answer.

I do not deny that Mesoamerican ingredients such as cacao and chiles slip into mole.  In any culinary exchange, ingredients are the very easiest things to include (see current fusion cooking).

My point is that the Spanish brought an entire cuisine to Mexico–ideas, ingredients, techniques, plants, farming.  One of the parts of this cuisine was a way of making a rich spicy stew.  If they added cacao and chile to that, fine.  It was an easy change to make.  But it does not change the point that the cuisine was from al-Andalus and ultimately from the center of Islam.

And I don’t see the adoption of cacao in Europe as being something as easy as tweaking.  It was a transformation.  Hot not cold, sweet not savory, embedded in a different religion.  And I think the milk was a long time coming.  But the drinks are another discussion.

Thanks again for an interesting commentary.

“In a Mexican manuscript cookbook dated 1908 which I bought at a flea market in Mexico, I found a recipe for banana peel stew. The fruit was not used, only the peel, which was chopped up and fried in lard and then ground up with cloves and cinnamon. Other ingredients in the stew include tomatoes, onions, garlic, beef stock, wine, raisins, almonds, chiles, fried bread crumbs, oregano and parsley. I have never heard of this before and wonder if you have any idea where the dish originated.

The 90- page manuscript, which is charmingly chatty and enthusiastic and full of misspellings, contains recipes for a variety of moles and other traditional Mexican dishes.”

Lucky you.  I wish I ran into manuscript cookbooks in Mexican flea markets. What is the Spanish for the stew? Guisado?  Is the banana called simply platano or platano macho (plantain, which I assume it is). And how is the peel identified.  Is it fresh or dried or is that not specified?

I’ve never heard of banana peel being used this way but I will ask those who are more expert than I am.  Or perhaps a reader has run across such a recipe.

The peel appears to be a thickener along with the almonds and the breadcrumbs, but I wonder why.  Flavor? Economy?  The rest of the recipe appears to be fairly standard. As to provenance of the recipe (if not the recipe book), the hot country of the Gulf coast, I’d guess.

Love these mysteries.

“When an Indian looks at a mole, we see, deconstructed, the following parts to the gravy: 1) a garam masala, the sweet spice paste 2) the chile/chile seed paste + any chocolate 3) nut/bread/plantain paste thickener, raisin 4) fried onion base, thickener [optional] 5) any tomato or other souring + liquid agent

So the construction seems very familiar, its origins pre-Arabic, Indo-Iranian in fact, with the onion base + sesame/nut paste thickener+sweet spices. Brought by Arabs to the Mediterranean, this became a fried bread +nut paste thickener so loved in Spain. The complex chiles and chile seeds and nightshades are Mexico’s very own contribution, not just to moles but back to Indian cookery as well! Mexico had its own “nut thickener” in the form of pepitas, though! Almonds provide an extra touch. Try some lightly roasted cashews, almonds, sesame, in your mole paste and see what texture and taste you get. But be careful: anything with cashew paste will stick and scorch easily, so use non-stick and keep it moving. If you use garlic, fry it in big cubes earlier and paste it.”

This analysis of basic sauce-making techniques is right up my historian’s alley. I have lots of thoughts which I’ll save for later. Meanwhile, any comments?

Last night I was lucky to attend a reception with Patricia Quintana prior to the mole festival here in Guanajuato. Not surprisingly in her eloquent history of mole, she affirmed that the basic techniques were  indigenous with some Islamic ingredients added later. No chance, of course, in the crowd, to pursue this further.

Just a couple of days ago, though I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the second issue of a new Mexican culinary magazine, Sabor (highly recommended by the way). The banner headline on the title page was mole and curry, backed by photos of the kinds of spices used in these dishes. The culinary editor, Marina Skipsey, had been to India and come back with wonderful photos. These preceded analysis of ingredients common to mole and curry and those that were unique to each, and then photos of the making of a mole amarillo and a rogan josh. One of the references cited was the book Mulli by the eminent Mexican culinary entreprener, Patricia Quintana.  The other, I was delighted to see, was my article on the Mexican Kitchen’s Islamic Connection. An honor for me.

Should you just happen to be in Guanajuato on 27th September, there will be a mole festival in the delightful Plaza San Fernando. MN$ 100 to get in, book signing by Patricia Quintana, tastings of different moles, music, wine tastings, and artesania. Roughly 12-5.

Here are my thoughts on what I take to be Tim’s three main worries.

Worry 1. Since many families in rural Mexico have their own mole traditions, since these families often tend to the indigenous end of the Spanish-indigenous spectrum, and since they share many customs with pre-hispanic cultures, doesn’t that point to an indigenous origin for mole.

Point i. Let’s assume here that we are talking about one of the highly elaborated moles of the mole poblano type, not, say, mole de la olla for example. These, just to make things clear, are not common dishes even today in Mexico. They are prepared for weddings, festivals, and other special occasions.

I don’t take the fact that rural families have such traditions to be necessarily a sign of their pre-hipanic origins.

Consider beef bourguinon, the classic beef stew of Burgundy. I would bet that there are lots of rural families in Burgundy who have their time-honored recipe. Yet there is every reason to suspect that this tradition goes back only about a hundred years at most (thanks to Adam Balic for correspondence on this).

In short, I don’t think the widespread use of a particular dish in a community is (a) either evidence that it originated in that community or (b) evidence that it is particularly old.

Point ii. I think lurking behind Tim’s point here is the belief that cuisines begin with the peasants and are gradually “built on” and or refined. This belief is one of the most widespread assumptions there is about culinary history.

I happen to think it’s more or less completely wrong. The more I read about the lot of the poor around the world until about 150 years ago is that they ate an incredibly meager diet.

Furthermore I believe that those who ate a high cuisine (of which mole poblano is unquestionably a representative) intended at all costs to show their distance from the poor and therefore were extraordinarily unlikely to refine “peasant” cuisines. It was far more likely that the poor would try to imitate a high cuisine than vice versa.

In short, I believe that most culinary evolution from, say, five thousand years ago until the last hundred and fifty years has been top down not bottom up.

Worry 2. Thick spicy sauces are found world wide. So are salsas. This does not mean a common origin.

Point i. This is simply a point of clarification. I’m not clear, Tim, whether you are referring to salsa in the Mexican sense or the American. As you know, when Mexicans talk about salsa, it is usually a thick, spicy sauce. When Americans talk about it, they are talking about a pico de gallo type thing: mixed, chopped, raw veg. But leave that to one side.

Point ii. Obviously not all similar dishes all over the world are part of families. Some must have been independently developed. But the more we investigate the history of food, the more I believe that we find dishes/sauces/relishes do fall into small numbers of families. Take Hawaiian inamona. For anyone not intimately familiar with indigenous Hawaiian food this is a relish made by crushing the kernels of what in Hawaii are called kukui nuts (the nuts they polish to make those shiny black bead leis). But I would put this in a family with similar relishes in Southeast Asia from whence the tree was introduced to Hawaii by the native Hawaiians. I would not be blown away to find family relations between egusi stew and pipian–there was a lot of back and forth between West Africa and colonial Spain. See also Ji Young’s comments on harissa on the thread already linked, or Holly Chase in the thread on carnitas and their possible Turkish cousins and Adam Balic’s post on shrimp pastes.

In short, I believe that most techniques (the basis of these families), however obvious they may look in retrospect (just grind oily seeds, just salt shrimp) in fact required considerable know how. Therefore independent invention was much rarer than we might think.

Worry 3. If they didn’t eat mole, what did pre-hispanic Mesoamercians eat?

Good question. We really don’t know much about what they ate for all the vast literature on pre-hispanic cuisine. The fog may clear, thanks to two developments. (1) all the recent scientific techniques, such as residue analysis and (2) a comparative study of colonial cuisines across the Americas and in Spain.

What is clear is that even if there was something that resembled mole, it would have been for the wealthy.

Anyway, thanks to any of you who plow through these ruminations. Your comments are so helpful to me in thinking through these issues. And Tim, thanks for the comments that provoked this.

Just one last personal note. It so happens that I went to a friend for coffee this morning and she introduced me to someone I’d wanted to meet for ages on the recommendation of many different mutual acquaintances, a woman famous as one of Mexico’s best cooks.

As the three of us chatted about pre-hispanic ballparks (which crop up in a novel the hostess is writing partly based on her work with archaeologists), the famous cook remarked how impatient she got when people presented “pre-hispanic” meals for the public. Games and foods alike, to her mind, were based on such different concepts of the world, such different tastes that we could barely fathom them. Then followed a discussion of the effects of the Conquest.

Later the hostess remarked that one of my theses was that mole poblano had Spanish and ultimately Islamic origins. Oh yes, side the renowned cook, a few years ago I was reading Ruperto de Nola (the 14th century cookbook in Catalan) and thinking so many of these recipes could be Mexican.

Is a soup such as mole de la olla (a soup of vegetables and meat with a seasoning of rehydrated, ground chiles) a mole?  Are mole-like dishes with other names such as tlatonile, or pascal, or remole, or texmole (no, that’s nothing to do with texmex food) moles?

I tend to think moles are not what philosophers would call a natural kind.   Nor do I think they are all descended from some original technique or dish.  I tend to think they are a heterogenous collection of dishes with different histories, some of which at various times and for various reasons have been called moles.

But that’s just a guess.  Until we have a much more thorough investigation of older and regional Mexican cookbooks and of other historical sources, we simply don’t know.  And even when we do there may not be enough evidence to decide this question.

Perfectly good question. And I think there is an answer to this question. In a word, the servants.

Talking about servants is not particularly politically correct in the English-speaking world. It is a reminder of a time that we would like to forget.

Consider though. A nun in one of the well-to-do Mexican convents had perhaps six servants. The lady of the hacienda probably a whole lot more. The servants were the people who did the actual cooking with their mistress doling out the ingredients, teaching techniques, dictating the recipes, and making the final taste adjustments.

The world of the elite and the world of the village were not completely separate. They were linked by the to and fro of servants.

My suggestion is that that the servants made the high cuisine of their employers the festival cuisine of their villages. This is a very common pattern worldwide. I have no direct evidence so it’s just speculation. But it seems pretty probably to me.

Here’s are the reasons why the mutual influence theory is tempting to me.

Mutual influence fits with contemporary sensibilities. We live in a world where multiculturalism is admired, where it seems natural to have mutual interchange with other cultures.

Mutual influence fits official Mexican history. There’s much that could be said about this but in brief since the Revolution, the idea of mestizaje, of mixing of indigenous and Spanish, has been the official line in Mexico.

Mutual influence is a priori probable. The number of Spanish in New Spain in the first century or so was tiny compared to the indigenous population. From Cortez on, many Spanish had indigenous wives or mistresses. Moreover it took time to import all the elements of the European kitchen, from wheat to pots, from citrus trees to cattle.

Mutual influence did occur in some instances. Apart from the examples Juan mentions, there are clear traces of indigenous craftsmanship in the churches, well-to-do Spanish women did wear huipiles from time to time, and so on.

So here are the buts.

It’s rash to assume that our multicultural sensibility existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It’s equally rash to assume that a historiography created following the Mexican Revolution describes what went on in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Spanish were conquerors. Although it seems a priori likely that as a small group in a strange land, they would accept a lot of the local culture I’m not convinced that this is what happened. They were very picky about what they accepted and what they didn’t. For example, it made sense to play up the sophistication of Tenochtitlan to persuade the King of Spain that, even if they had not reached the East, they had at least found a prize worthy of capture. They were prepared to accept certain luxury goods, chocolate being a clear example, though they re-invented this to fit their own preconceptions of a luxury drink, preparing it as they would have prepared hot spiced wine. In short, the Spanish admired and accepted certain aspects of indigenous culture on their own terms and for their own uses. Otherwise they went right ahead and built their churches on top of the existing temples and pyramids. And in culinary terms, they imported their own kitchens, their own ingredients, their own techniques, their own dishes.

The Spanish came from an intensely class conscious society. Many of the early settlers wanted to improve their standing in the Spanish social hierarchy. They were prepared to go to considerable lengths to do so. Accepting the foods of the conquered (and hence lower in the hierarchy) was not what a social climber would do.

For these reasons, then, and some others I will post about later, I find it more useful to think of mole poblano as a dish with Moorish origins being made in New Spain than to think of it as one aspect of the mutual influence of two cuisines.

But the whole issue of cuisine and conquest is a fascinating one.

Yes, clearly there was. Muslims conquerers had begun entering India around 1200, 300 plus years before the Mughals. The traveler Al-Biruni describes (more or less accurately) meals at the sultans’ courts. The Sultans of Mandu (central India) ordered the recipes for their exquiste sweets to be recorded in the fifteenth century (Look for a translation by Norah M. Titley, The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu, Routledge-Curson, 2005). The accompanying miniatures offer a stunning glimpse of palace kitchens.

All of which, of simply strengthens the core argument of the article that it useful to think of a belt of Islamic Persian-inspired Cuisine that stretched from India to Spain (and then in the sixteenth century to Mexico). Obviously it varied from place to place and time to time, variations that at the moment we don’t have the historical research to tease out.

That said, I think that there are various clues that suggest that the Mughals made more difference to cuisine in India than earlier Muslim invaders. Here are a few speculations.

1. When the Mughals arrived in India, they did not say “Ah ha, our cuisine is already here.” Instead their diaries are full of complaints about how they miss the foods of their homeland in Central Asia. They go about importing the culinary package: cooks, plants, gardens, irrigation systems etc. What had happened to the cuisine of the Sultans? Had it vanished? Was it so different that the Mughals did not see it as their cuisine?

2. Both are possible. At the end of the fourteenth century, Tamerlane had sacked Delhi and it took a long time to recover. The cuisine of the Sultans in the northern part of India which depended on wealthy courts could well have more or less disappeared from that part of the country. Again the Mongols had conquered Persia in the 13th century. By the 16th century when the Mughals enter India, Persia is again a major power. If only we had a decent history of Persian cuisine (any history in fact) we might find that Persian Cuisine and Persian-influenced Central Asian cuisine differed significantly from the Persian Cuisine of two or three hundred years earlier.

3. The Mughals adopted a different pattern of rule from earlier Muslim invaders. They gave a bigger role to the Hindu population. While the Sultans remained rather remote from their conquered subjects, the Mughals succeeded in making Persian (or its successor language Urdu) the diplomatic language, Persian dress the standard, Persian poetry a preferred taste, and Persian ideas of monarchy melded on to Hindu ones. Why not a much greater influence on food too?