Have you ever eaten a tartuffel? Or an apple of paradise? Most certainly! Because these two crops are the potato and the tomato, both initially viewed with skepticism by immigrants from South America, but today it is impossible to imagine European cuisine without them. Likewise corn, chili, vanilla and many other lesser-known edible plants. Mexico seemed like paradise to the conquistadors coming from famine regions in Europe like Extremadura.
“It looks like a truffle and when cooked it’s as soft on the inside as a roasted chestnut. Like the truffle, it has neither a shell nor a core, because like them it grows underground.” This is how Pedro Cieza de León, a Spaniard who came to Peru in 1533, described the potato. From his works, Europe learned much more about the way of life and diet of the indigenous population, which was soon to be almost wiped out by European aggression. For example about quinoa, which is available in every health food store today, or about the tasty guinea pigs, called “rabbits of the India”, which have never made it onto the plate in Europe, but only into the children’s room.
The variety of Peruvian potato varieties.
(Photo: Arvind Jayashankar/mauritius images / Alamy Stock Photos)
Michi Strausfeld, connoisseur and publisher of Latin American literature, is not only concerned with the products in her enlightening and sensual book, but above all with what the violently initiated mixing of European and Latin American cuisines has produced and still produces in terms of culinary excellence, especially in Mexico and Peru as well as in Brazil.
After the Cortés conquest, Mexico with its wealth of plants and animals quickly became a melting pot of Latin American, European and Asian culinary cultures. Because soon the galleons came to Acapulco from the also Spanish Philippines, they had loaded pepper, cinnamon, cloves and ginger. Overland, cargo was brought across to be shipped from Veracruz to Europe, along with Mexican produce such as potatoes, corn, or tomatoes. Incidentally, the Spaniards contributed garlic, beef and citrus fruits. And of course, in the transit country Mexico, the products and the tastes mixed into something completely new.
Michi Strausfeld: culinary delights. A culinary cultural history of Latin America with recipes by Sabine Hueck. Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 2023. 160 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Wagenbach Verlag)
Strausfeld’s expert explanations, which are peppered with many literary cross-references, are supplemented by recipes by the Brazilian cook Sabine Hueck. She shows, for example, the preparation of the Mexican national dish Chiles en Nogada, stuffed peppers with walnut sauce and pomegranate seeds, while Strausfeld explains how this dish experienced its ups and downs between colonial times, independence and the Mexican Revolution, so that it is now a staple on every banquet table in the country. Similarly, the Aztec pozole, a sophisticated white corn and pork stew, might or might not be in demand depending on political developments: while the white upper class preferred French cuisine as superior to indigenous and mestizo, the populace did after independence in 1821 a strong return to the Aztec cooking tradition.
Many recipes are relatively simple and make you want to cook them, also because you get to know ancient dishes that you always thought came from Italy: the conquerors, on their advance to Tenochtitlán, the magnificent capital of the Aztecs, feared that to end up in a saucepan, “cooked in an unfamiliar sauce made of tomatoes, chili peppers and salt, called chimole”. The Mexicans know many variations of it, sometimes with smoked chilies (chipotle sauce), sometimes with lime and coriander (pico de gallo). Trying them out is definitely a win.