Mole and the Mediterranean: Some Reflections

Thanks to all who have brought mole poblano and the medieval Mediterranean up again and for the clarifying comments.

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.

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