Mr Keys* and his Spanish friends located in the United States dedicated themselves to promoting the benefits of a [Mediterranean] diet that was only strictly followed in Crete and that . . . with the passage of time . . . became transformed into the Mediterranean “style of life.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, what quality did the famous olive oil, the basis of our dietetic panacea, really have?  What quality of red wines from the jug were the ordinary people consuming in that Mediterranean? Kilograms of vegetables, yes, but surrounded by huge hunks of anti-dietetic bread and hefty portions of bacon . . . succored the insatiable stomachs of the Spanish. . . .

Dietary evolution  . . . in the second half of the century diverges absolutely from the Mediterranean diet . . . However such divergence and perhaps the noted increase in the ingestion of proteins, parallel an increase in life expectancy, in height,  . . .  and also . . . in gastronomic enjoyment.  This poses a serious problem for Mr. Keys and his mariachis.

*Ancel Keys, the American nutritionist who studied starvation, publicised cholesterol, developed the K ration, and promoted the Mediterranean diet in the 1950s.

From Líneas maestras de la gastronomía y la culinaria españolas (siglo xx) (Outlines of Spanish Gastronomy and Cooking in the Twentieth Century) by Francisco Abad Alegría and a number of associates. Abad Alegría, when not writing on food history, is Head of the Neurophysiology Clinic of the University Hospital of Zaragoza in Spain.  Here’s an interview with the author (in Spanish).

Title page

Among the other topics he tackles.

• The major cookbooks of the twentieth century, the professions and aims of their authors. This includes an analysis of the relation between the Sección Femenina del Movimiento Nacional and Franquismo.

• Analysis of menus of different social classes at the beginning, middle and end of the century (including home cooking, restaurants and fast food).

• Changes in kitchen technology, particularly the sources of heat, refrigeration, and the pressure cooker.

From Líneas maestras. Title page of A. Simmons. 6th edn. Buenos Aires. 1951

• Changes in foodstuffs, particularly the increase in the use of chicken, frozen foods, and stock cubes (for a separate post).

• Spanish cooking in the last third of the century.

I appreciate the tables, surveys, and numbers.  Invaluable if you want to understand the evolution of Spanish cuisine in the twentieth century, especially if you want to get behind the restaurant hype.

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.

Only rarely is it by the natural growth of the original group that speaks the language (the Pacific Island case).

More often it is by military or spiritual conquest.  Take the spread of Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world and their transformation into different varieties, Barranquenho, a Portuguese variety on the Portugal-Spain border, Portuguese- and Spanish-based creoles, Andean Spanish, and so on.[i] Clearly this expansion was closely connected with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  So too the English language spread with the British Empire in the nineteenth century.

Cuisines too  spread with the Portuguese, Spanish and British Empires.  In the case of the British Empire, it was most successful in the settlement colonies, less so in the African tropics, and even less so in India with its own vigorous culinary traditions.

Sometimes language change is forced by political powers. Consider the imposition of written Aramaic in the Assyrian and Persian empires in Antiquity. Is it possible that this, by making inaccessible the written recipes of the high cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia, led to their demise?

Or consider Algeria where rapid political changes have caused rapid changes in language so that three generations of the same family may speak Berber, French and Arabic respectively  (thanks to Susan Park for the example).  Are there culinary equivalents?

In short, is it possible to make any generalizations about the expansion and contraction of cuisines?

I am taken back to English pubs in the west country before urbanization and gastropubs hit, when there was bread and cheddar and scrumpy.  Scrumpy, a local cider, alcoholic of course, actually very alcoholic sometimes, had that tingle that taste.

But I’m drinking tepache. So what’s tepache?  It’s a Mexican drink.  If you are a visitor, you might see it on the outskirts of towns, a wooden barrel with TEPACHE in wobbly red letters, under the awning of a little cart, or in a market as here, with the 30 cent offering in plastic bags and  and the rather more expensive in plastic glasses.

The signs say “Tepache 100% natural de piña”  or made from 100% natural pineapple.  It comes from the signature barrels under the table.  It’s been sweetened, I think with piloncillo, raw sugar.  It’s tasty but a bit sweet for my taste.

Tepache is also commonly made at home.  It’s not difficult and it’s actually a great trick for using up that mountain of trimmings and core that always result from preparing pineapple.  You just take the lot (making sure of course that you washed the outside before trimming), put them in a glass container (plastic is not good for this), add water and wait four or five days.

This is day one.  Day two sees bubbles, day three and four the jar looks increasingly murky, and perhaps even develops bits of mold on the top.  Never fear, carry on, strain the liquid and throw away the pineapple.

What you have is this: a nice glass of unsweetened tepache.

Tingly, sour, refreshing I much prefer it to the sweetened version.  And so reminiscent of scrumpy.   But it seemed to me just coincidence–a Mexican pineapple drink and English cider–until I was pulling everything together for this post.

I went back to the original recipe that Dr. Ramiro González of  Guadalajara gave me.  Along with his note that the enzymes in tepache made it excellent for drinking with heavy food, he added, words to the effect that it could also be made with apple or quince peel, something I have never seen in a Mexican cook book.

And then I remembered the bottle of cider from the north of Spain that I buy in the wine store chain Europea occasionally when I am homesick for scrumpy at the ridiculous price of US$ 7 a bottle.

.

Bingo.  there is the barrel.   We’ll never know.  Did the Spanish find an indigenous pineapple drink that they liked because it reminded them of cider?

Or did the northern Spanish cider drinkers begin making their drink in the New World, first with the familiar apple and quince that could be grown in the mountains of Central Mexico, then as an economical way of using all the pineapple brought up from the hot country on mules and hence very expensive.

Influence or convergence?

Anyway, tepache is great stuff.

And PS.  If you leave it a bit longer, you have a nice mild pineapple vinegar.

An ah ha moment.  I was re-reading the best book we have on the history of pasta, Pasta The Story of a Universal Food, by Silvano Serventi and Francoise Sabban when I ran across this sentence.

What was generally called . . .  “Italian pasta” was actually pasta from Genoa and Naples; pasta from other Italian regions was virtually unknown outside Italy.

Between 1550 and 1850, according to the many pages these authors spend on the matter, the centers for dried durum wheat pasta were these two towns (the centers for egg pasta being Alsace and Bologna).  Also important were Sicily and Sardinia.

So why ah ha?  Well, let’s remember that Italy was not unified as a country until the late nineteenth century.  And let’s rethink the geography of Europe in these centuries.   Naples, Sicily, Sardinia? All part of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire along with all of what is now Spain.  The Republic of Genoa?  An ally of the Spanish Hapsburgs.

In short, the political home of dried durum wheat pasta was the Spanish Empire, even if it’s geographic home was the Italian peninsula and nearby islands. And that is crucial for understanding who ate vermicelli or fideos as they are called in the Spanish speaking world.

What we have, I propose, is two global expansions of dried durum wheat pasta.  The first was with the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth-eighteenth century and consisted of fideos, vermicelli, made by machine in small workshops.  (We’ll leave tallarines to one side for a moment).  The second was with Italian out-migration 1880-1920 and consisted of the spaghetti family made and dried by machine in small factories.

The delightful and informative illustration of a fine pasta (vermicelli or fideo) maker in from Paul-Jacques Malouin’s Description et dètail des arts due meunier, du vermicelier  (1767).   On the right, a man is working the “brake” the lever for mixing and kneading the dough.  On the left, his companion is pushing the pole that moves the screw press that extrudes the vermicelli or fideos.

Compare my photo of a Mexican fideo press.

It’s in the huge and stunning sixteenth century fortress monastery in Yuriria in the south of the state of Guanajuato, the entry point to the rich agricultural region of central Mexico (the Bajio) for the Spanish.

Ensaimadas are a pastry associated chiefly with Mallorca and to a lesser extent with Minorca, two Mediterranean islands to the south of Spain with very interesting histories. Pastries called ensaimadas also crop up in Argentina, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Ensaimadas today in the Balearics (the joint name for Mallorca and Minorca) are a delicious coiled flaky pastry. They come in large (like a couple of feet across) and small (individual) sizes. Today you can buy them plain or stuffed with a rich conserve or with the sausage of the islands. The large ones are tourist haul from the islands, the small ones are widely available now in Spanish bakeries.

Here’s the official line from Mallorca with a photo.

Adam Balic has kindly provided the proportions he uses for making ensaimadas.

“I should say that the ingredients are:

500gm strong flour
75 gm sugar
2 eggs
250 ml milk
2 Tbspn melted lard
salt
15 gm of fresh yeast or equivalent

Make the dough (mix it very well) allow it to raise once, knock it down and roll out into a long sausage. Roll the sausage out to give a long ribbon. Spread lard on this (about 200 gm), then carefully stretch the dough to paper thinness on a table (if you have a special floured table cloth for this, so much the better). Roll it up like a jelly roll, cut into lengths then coil these into the typical shape. Let raise overnight. Cook.”

A video of ensaimada making in Palma, Mallorca.

I’m interested in them because

1) Presumably given the name (ensaimada or en-larded) the fat traditionally used is lard not butter (though I would bet many today are made with hydrogenated vegetable fats).

2) The modern ensaimadas have a flaky texture made by treating the dough as shown above.

3) They have a curious world wide distribution cropping up in Puerto Rico, Argentina and the Philippines.

So the destination of this winding ensaimada trail is to get clearer about the history of these pastries: when they took the shape and flaky texture they now have, why lard is used, and how we explain their global distribution.

And why would I want to do that? Because the history of wheat products is at the heart of European food history. And because therefore it is tangled up with histories of imports of ingredients and ideas, with the movements of people, and with the class structure.

So needless to say, I have some hypotheses coming up in a future post.

Pedro Ballester was one of those many Europeans who in the early twentieth century recorded folkways that they believed to be disappearing.  A native of the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean,  Ballester worked as a lawyer. In his spare time he recorded the customs of the island. He published De re cibaria: Cocina, pastelería y reposterìa menorquinas in 1923. I have the sixth edition that appeared in 1995. It is a quite wonderful compilation full of detail about the island’s cooking.

Under pastas (that is doughs) he begins with ensaimadas. He praises those of Mallorca as perhaps more succulent than those of Minorca but also more indigestible.

Then he goes on to the recipe. This is a free translation. To make it more comprehensible I’ve divided sentences into smaller units and added paragraphing.

Before you start trying it read my notes at the end.

Proportions. One almud of flour, ten ounces of sugar, 4 ounces of fat (suet and lard), six or seven eggs and the leavening.

You make this as follows. You take one ounce of bread yeast (levadura de pan) and you put it to soak in cold water for a while to get rid of the bitterness (el agrio), you throw out the water, you dilute the yeast in warm water ( about one coffee cup full). If the dilution does not end up smooth, you pass it through a sieve, and then you ad a little flour, and you let it rest, with a cover, so that it can rise.

When you have the leavening (levadura) ready, you put the eggs in a basin (lebrillo), you beat them for a while, and you add the sugar, mixing the two substances really well.

You break up (desmenuza) with your fingers the leavening in little bits and you mix it, also carefully (esmeradamente), with the eggs and sugar. Then you add the flour, but not all at once, so that you don’t end up with too hard a dough, not worrying (perjudicando) if some of the flour is not mixed in.

Once you’ve made the mixture, you grease the lebrillo and hour hands, and you continue kneading and adding fat until you have incorporated half (five ounces en la proporcion fijada). The other half will be needed in the other operations of kneading and to grease the sheets of tin on which you place the ensaimadas to be baked.

When the dough is well kneaded you form it into a ball and you put in in the greased bowl in such a way that the dough (masa) stays bien finita and not squashed down. Grease its surface and leave it to rise covering the bowl with with another upside down and over both of them a cloth.

I will explain–said the person who gave me the recipe–how and how many times the dough has to rise (fermentar). Let’s suppose that I had it kneaded and covered one night. As a general rule, the next day, you will find it’s risen a lot and I will knead it, leaving it well covered again. At midday I will find that it has risen again and I knead it again. By nighttime it has risen again, and I knead it again.

And the next day I make ensaimadas without kneading and put them on the baking sheets (planchas) placing them in boxes (cajones, cajas) or other containers so that they rise againand I put them in the oven.

If when you go to knead the dough the last time, you notice that it has risen a lot, you knead it and instead of letting it rest, you make the ensaimadas and you put them on the baking sheets so as to put them in the oven the next day.

There are two ways to make the ensaimadas. One consists in simply making a ball, squashing only a bit, because it will expand by itself. The other consists in taking a piece of dough, lengthening to form a cylinder, and rolling it then forming a torta (cake, presumably round cake-like shape).

Whichever system, the hand must be spread with lard. In the second, before putting the ensaimadas the the oven, you take a spoon and with it you raise the cracks which have formed rolling out the piece of dough, so that when it cooks they are not stuck together and the turns you have given it separate well.

There are another couple of paragraphs devoted to trouble shooting in cold weather and other methods of fermentation.

Some tentative conclusions.

1. Historic measurements are a bit tricky but an almud was apparently a volume measurement of about 4-!/2 liters. Using standard web sources, an almud here would have probably been about 4 pounds of flour. So 4 lbs flour, 10 ounces of sugar, 6-7 eggs and 4 ounces of fat.

2. The honorable Pedro never actually tried this recipe. The fat proportions don’t make sense as you work through the recipe. And the dough is extraordinarily heavy. I think the sugar is on the high side.

Here’s my dough after first mixing.

This was a very heavy dough indeed. Here it is after 24 hours.

I gave up at this point. Help please from better bakers among my readers.

3. This is an egg-enriched dough but with very little fat on any interpretation. More like a regular European celebration bread than the current ensaimada.

4. There is little sign of the flaky pastry with fat-separated layers that we now associate with Minorca and Mallorca. The nearest is the second way of making the pastry by making a cylinder into a cake which I take to mean a coiled pastry such as is now made.

5. In short, if Ballester’s recipe makes sense at all, in the 1920s in Minorca, ensaimada was a fairly standard enriched bread for special occasions or for breakfast for the well to do. It had little to do with the flaky pastries that are now sold in the islands and all over Spain as ensaimadas.

What am I missing?

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/pedro-ballesters-ensaimada-recipe.html/feed 31 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/07/agua-fresca-11-horchata-de-chufa.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/07/agua-fresca-11-horchata-de-chufa.html#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:32:25 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=407

Well, the afternoon of the 4th July seems like a good time to post about horchata de chufa. It would make a perfect drink to go along with a picnic on the 4th, even though it has no American credentials whatsoever. Or perhaps you’d better stick to iced tea or lemonade or beer.

My first taste of horchata de chufa was a couple of years ago. I’d spent a placid day poking around Alicante on the south coast of Spain–the old town, the regular market (fascinating), the weekly market (a disappointment), the FNAC store for books, a series of five and ten cent stores–while my husband was off talking with the big law school there about problems in legal epistemology. The sun was setting, my feet were aching, and I still had not found the horchata I was looking for. As I made my way back to the hotel along the promenade dodging one of those dizzying inset patterns that give you slight vertigo that the Spanish seem to favor (and that are fun), there was a nineteenth century green stand selling ice cream and horchata.

A tall squishy plastic glass in hand I sat and sipped. Heaven. This is one of the world’s great drinks, rich, creamy, slightly almondy, light years better than Mexican rice versions, delicious as those are. It was a pity it was not in a traditional horchateria though relaxing among the townspeople under the trees looking out to the Mediterranean was nothing to complain about either.

Chufa (or tiger nut) as it’s called in English is a nodule that grows on the roots of a kind of sedge, probably originally from somewhere in the Near East. If you read Spanish, here’s an informative page on the how chufa is grown commercially on 540 hectares in Valencia, Spain. And here’s one in English on its use in the US in the last century for fattening pigs and now for wildlife havens ( I do rather doubt its claim that chufa is widely available in Mexico).

I’ll spare you the multitude of links to pseudo histories of chufa/horchata in which king’s daughters squeal various improbable phrases that supposedly gave birth to the name. Instead here’s the official denomination of origin site.

If you want to experiment with making this nectar and live in the US, here’s a source where you can buy chufa, at a price, of course. I did read somewhere that it’s widely used for feeding carp, a bit of a waste, I’d say, though I’m sure the carp are happy as can be. You’d have to use your own judgment about whether such sources were safe. I brought back a stash from Barcelona. This is what they look like.

I have adjusted a recipe given by Lourdes March and Alicia Rios, impeccable sources for Spanish cuisine, in the magnificently illustrated Heritage of Spanish Cooking (1992).

Take 8 oz of chufa nuts, rinse them well, and soak them overnight in water. They will soften and swell a little but don’t expect the dramatic changes you see with beans. The following day, drain off the water, and put the nuts in the blender with 4 cups of water. Give them a good long whirl.

Then drain them through a sieve into a pitcher.

Add a little sugar and taste. They may benefit from just a touch of cinnamon and lemon to heighten the flavor. Tip the sieved bits back into the blender, add the lemon or lime and piece of cinnamon stick if you want, and whirl and sieve again. I repeat this a third time because I don’t want to waste any of the precious extract.

Adjust seasonings, chill well, serve, find a lovely, calm place with a great view to sit, and sigh.

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.