Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  The term mole, however, comes from molli, an ancient Nahuatl word that the Aztecs and others used for sauces made by grinding dried spices or mashing fresh chiles and herbs in a small stone mortar. The threelegged stone mortar, or molcajete (from the Nahuatl term mulcazitl), commonly seen throughout Mexico today dates back at least fifty-five hundred years in the Sierra Madre Oriental range, which runs from the Texas border to the state of Puebla. Just as moles and guacamoles in Puebla and Oaxaca have long been prepared by mashing spices, herbs, or fruits in a molcajete, other kinds of moles and recaudos have been prepared in a similar fashion on the Yucatán Peninsula. The Yucatecan sauces and marinades typically share one ingredient that hints of a linkage with the ras el hanout and baharat spice mixtures of al-Andalus and North Africa: the juice of citrus (typically lime or bitter orange) to help “cook” the meat, fish, or fowl to which the spice mixture is applied.

  In addition to chiles, the predominant ingredients in traditional moles are largely Old World herbs and spices: almonds, aniseeds, bay leaves, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, garlic, marjoram, onion, peppercorns, raisins, thyme, sesame seeds, and walnuts. Of course, a number of New World herbs are used in moles as well, such as allspice, avocado leaves, chocolate, epazote, hoja santa, peanuts, pecans, and pumpkin or squash seeds, but they are not used in the same pot of mole as their Old World counterparts.23 As noted by many Mexican food historians, from Sophie and Michael Coe to Rick Bayless, chiles, chocolate, or pumpkin seeds are typically the most conspicuous flavors in any mole. But they appear to be “add-ons” to a mixture of Old World spices that have been used together for more than two millennia, including cumin, coriander, black pepper, cinnamon, garlic, cloves, and sesame seeds.

  When I began to structurally compare the moles and recaudos of Mexico with the more ancient ras el hanout and other baharat-style spice mixtures of North Africa and the Middle East, I immediately noticed that they all share several key elements. First, each has one ingredient that offers brilliant color as well as flavor. In the Old World, this is typically turmeric or saffron, and in the New World it might be chocolate, chile, achiote, or pumpkin seeds. Second, all of them have an oily matrix, shaped by sesame seeds, almonds, walnuts, pistachios or olive oil from the Old World, or by peanuts, chocolate, or pumpkin or squash seeds from the New World. Third, they share a truly “biting” peak flavor, whether from black pepper, Sichuan pepper, melegueta pepper, ginger, or chile. All of them also have undertones of warm savory herbs and spices, such as allspice, cassia, cloves, cinnamon, coriander, epazote, and oregano, that harmonize the entire mixture. And finally, in the aftermath of the Columbian Exchange, nearly all of these Mesoamerican “spice composites” carry the currents of onions, garlic, chives, or shallots from the Old World in their streams of flavors. All in all, these foods are straightforward indicators of a culinary imperialism and gastronomic globalization of major proportions. Blood, tears, and trauma are hidden within their legacy of flavors.

  I once had a chance to spend time among Mexican cooks as they prepared their homemade sauces and home brews for the Feria Nacional de Mole, held that summer in the Nahuatl-speaking village of San Pedro Atócpan, high above Mexico City. Around the fairgrounds, maize and amaranth were flowering in the nearby milpas, and on the edges of the fields, giant prickly pears and enormous agaves lined the stone terrace walls. Elderly women meandered down the rows of agaves and gathered their sap, known as aguamiel, just as New Englanders might tap the sap of maple trees for making syrup. I followed them back to their field houses and watched as they prepared the aguamiel for selling at the fair. Their product was not some sugary syrup sold in jars, but the fermented beverage known as pulque, which they flavored with herbs or fruits.

  I helped them carry their pots and vats over to the fairgrounds. We arrived just as the booths and tents had been set up and the ollas of mole poblano, mole pipián, and a dozen other variants had been set atop wood fires. Next to them, ollas filled with purple ayocote (runner) beans flavored with epazote and cumin simmered over the same fires. Many of the mole pots had chickens embedded in their thick, savory sauces, while others had turkey meat from heritage breeds soaking up the flavors of a heady mix of herbs and spices.

  I wandered around with a small notebook, trying to record all of the variations in mole making, not only the ingredients themselves but also the various sequences in which they are combined. As I interviewed some of the best home-style cooks from all over southern Mexico, their husbands would hand me clay cups filled with pulque, then tip their hats and urge me to drink.

  As I slowly became inebriated from drinking cup after cup of the viscous, mildly alcoholic brew, I desperately tried to tally up all of the spices and chile varieties that I had recorded. My list grew longer and gradually less intelligible. At one point, I looked down at my notebook, now stained and smeared with mole sauce, and realized I could no longer read any of what I had written. So I gave up on the research and just stayed around for another two hours, savoring sips of mole sauce and consuming beans with tortillas to try to counteract the buzz from the pulque and the pungency of what I was eating.

  Near sundown, as I stood before the only pot of mole poblano that I had yet to sample, I realized that the history of mole could not be written, because it could only be known through the mouth and the nose, the lips and the tongue. It no longer mattered to me whether the first recorded making of mole was in the seventeenth century when it was prepared for the visit of an archbishop to the Santa Rosa convent in Puebla or for the arrival of some government dignitary to the same city.

  I no longer worried whether mole was invented by Sister Andrea, or by Brother Pascual, whose sous chefs accidentally spilled all of the spices into an open cazuela when a windstorm wreaked havoc in their outdoor kitchen. (Cazuela, I did remember, was from the Arabic qasūla.)24 All of those legends of local origin suddenly seemed equally apocryphal and completely irrelevant. What mattered was whether the spices themselves in each pot of mole could speak to me, hinting of the many places and cultures from which they have historically derived.

  With my eyes half shut from the warm light of sundown and the prolonged effects of the pulque, I tasted one last spoonful of mole. It began to whisper a litany of places and spices: allspice from Jamaica, aniseeds from Syria, chiles from Puebla and Oaxaca, chocolate from the lowlands of Mexico and from Brazil, cloves from the Moluccas, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, coriander from Egypt and Sudan, onions from China, peanuts from the Brazilian Amazon, and sesame seeds from India.25

  Long ago, some exiled Muslim and Jewish traders had brought a near-complete world of flavors and fragrances with them to the highlands of Mexico, where they encountered a few others that made perfect complements to their treasure trove of fragrances. The descendants of the Aztecs liked what they smelled and tasted. In fact, they liked them so much that they made them their own.

  • • •

  • CHILE PEPPERS •

  It is ironic that Christopher Columbus accidentally encountered chile peppers on his first expedition to the New World, a trip in which he searched in vain for the East Indies and the black pepper and other aromatics the islands promised. The irony comes from the fact that the five domesticated Capsicum species soon eclipsed black pepper as the most widely cultivated piquant spices in the world, and perhaps the most widely traded as well.

  Archaeologists confirm that Columbus could have encountered one or perhaps two species of Capsicum on Hispaniola that had been domesticated on the American mainland. Chiles had reached what is now El Salvador at least nine hundred years and Hispaniola at least a century before the arrival of Columbus, probably through trade with farmers on the Yucatán Peninsula or with seafarers from the northern coast of South America. When I worked with geneticists, archaeologists, linguists, and geographers to pinpoint the origin of chiles, we estimated that Capsicum annuum was first domesticated in or near the Sierra Madre Oriental range in central Mexico between 5,800 and 6,500 years ago. According to lin
guistic analyses accomplished by my friend and colleague Cecil Brown, prehistoric gardeners and farmers in the Oto-Manguean language family, then spoken in the indigenous communities in the sierras of Puebla and adjacent Mexican states, likely domesticated it.

  The first cultivated chile was not used as a vegetable, but rather as a spice to complement staples such as maize, which had been domesticated for at least a millennium before the chile. But the harvesting, protection, and management of wild chiles as a dried spice, condiment, vermifuge, and medicine may have gradually begun several hundred years before that. As soon as chiles were domesticated in Mexico, they became associated with the molcajete, the three-legged stone mortar used to mash fresh or dried chiles, salt, epazote, wild oregano, tomatillos, and onions together to create the precursor of salsa. When rubbed onto meats as a marinade, this pungent mixture, rich in antioxidants, helped keep the meats from spoiling.

  Diego Álvarez Chanca, a physician who accompanied Columbus on his second expedition to the New World, may have been the first European to take chiles back to the Old World to grow and study them for their medicinal properties. Soon after that, official reports of their transport as a spice to Europe become scarce, perhaps because they were far too pungent for Western Europeans to use with food. As Flemish physician and botanist Charles L’Écluse would write in 1564, the ferocity of chile peppers amazed Europeans, who feared that their “sharpness would burn the jaws for several days.”

  Chiles appear to have been rapidly adopted by the Berbers and Arabs of Ceuta, however, perhaps because they were already accustomed to the pungent melegueta pepper that had been part of their trade with West Africa for centuries. How chile pepper seeds arrived in Morocco in 1514—so soon after Columbus’s expeditions to the West Indies—is anyone’s guess, but mine is that crypto-Muslims and crypto-Jews like Rodrigo de Triana took seeds or pods with them when they fled the tyranny of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Columbus. From the ports of Lisbon and Cádiz, larger quantities of chiles and their seeds could have been smuggled in the ballast of ships headed to Ceuta on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Once in North Africa, chiles would have little problem being diffused along Arab and Sephardic Jewish trade routes to countries where pungent spices were already welcomed, including Algeria and Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, Yemen and Turkey, Persia and India.

  Amazingly, chile peppers made it to the Malabar Coast of India as early as 1542. As a possible explanation of this, my late, great friend Jean Andrews offered the following hypothesis in The Pepper Trail: “It could have been that these first Columbian [i.e., American] foodstuffs, including capsicums, came to Turkey from Spain via the Ottoman contacts with exiled Spanish Moors or expulsed Spanish Jews, who conceivably distributed them throughout North Africa all the way to Egypt” (21). From there they traveled Arabian caravan routes to India.

  Although she ultimately preferred another hypothesis—that chiles reached most of Europe through Turkey, after entering Old World trade routes from the ports of India!—Andrews did claim that one element was common to both hypotheses: “By whichever route, Aleppo [Syria] was a key point. In 1600, Venice operated sixteen trading posts and a consular office in Aleppo . . . [and] European traders rarely went beyond the cities at the edge of the desert. . . . The realm of caravans was dominated by Moslem traders” (22).

  Halaby fulful, one of the first distinctive chile varieties developed in the Old World, originated in and near Aleppo. Perhaps nurtured by the Sephardic Jewish spice merchants in Aleppo (Halab) and the Arab farmers near the Mediterranean coast, the coarsely ground, sun-dried Aleppo pepper receives high marks today from chefs on both sides of the Atlantic. Its flavor has been described as having a “deliciously deep, cumin-like earthiness and sweetness,” and a “complex, slow, gentle heat” that is followed by a “pleasant warmth” or “a lingering ting of sweet and sour.”

  Virtually all terms for chile in Asian, African, and European languages are derived from the previously existing terms for black pepper or for various peppers or pepperlike fruits in general (melegueta, long, Sichuan, and so on). Most, though certainly not all, are cognate with one another: pilpili (Swahili), felfel (Farsi), felfel (Maltese), feferon (Croatian), biber (Western Turkic), berbere (Amharic), and bghbegh (Armenian). There is a break in the use of these cognates when you arrive at the Indian subcontinent, suggesting to me that chiles did not diffuse into Turkey and eastern Europe from the Malabar Coast: mirch (Hindi), marichiphala (Sanskrit), marchum (Gujarati), and murgh (Pashto). Most European languages use variants of the words pimento and paprika for the sweeter vegetable peppers that developed later and for mild chile powder.

  Andrews, Jean. “Around the World with the Chile Pepper: The Post-Columbian Distribution of Domesticated Capsicums.” Journal of Gastronomy 4 (1988): 21–35.

  ———. “Towards Solving the ‘Anatolian’ Mystery: Diffusion of the Mesoamerican Food Complex to Southeastern Europe.” Geographical Review 83 (1993): 194–204.

  ———. The Pepper Trail: History and Recipes from Around the World. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1999.

  Kraft, Kraig H., Cecil H. Brown, Gary Paul Nabhan, Eike Luedeling, José Luna Ruiz, Robert J. Hijmans, and Paul Gepts. “Multiple Lines of Evidence for the Origin of Domesticated Chili Pepper, Capsicum annuum, in Mexico.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (U.S.). Forthcoming.

  Perry, Linda, et al. “Starch Fossils and the Domestication and Dispersal of Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas.” Science 315 (2007): 986–88.

  Wright, Clifford A. “The Medieval Spice Trade and the Diffusion of the Chile.” Gastronomica 7 (2007): 35–43.

  • ANNATTO • ACHIOTE

  The crimson pigments and sharply perfumed, earthy flavors of annatto emerge from the pulp that surrounds the seeds, which are secreted in spiny, scarlet heart-shaped pods. The pods grow in clusters that stand out above the broadly fingered leaves of this widely distributed tropical shrub or small tree (Bixa orellana). The seeds are best known by two names, annatto, from indigenous Caribbean languages, and achiote, from the Uto-Aztecan language family, with the latter derived from the Nahuatl term achiotl. The plant, also known as annatto, is believed to have originated in the lowlands of South America and then, perhaps with the aid of early cultivators, spread northward to the Yucatán Peninsula and the West Indies.

  Currently surpassing saffron, turmeric, and paprika as the world’s most widely used food colorant, annatto seeds, when soaked in water, deliver both yellow-orange and bright red pigments. The seeds are also used for achiote paste, which originated in the Yucatán and is made by grinding the seeds with other spices and flavorings. For manteca de achiote, a popular cooking fat in much of Latin America, the seeds are heated with oil or lard until the liquid turns a beautiful orange, then the seeds are discarded.

  I first saw cultivated annatto plants in the dooryard gardens of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the Jivaro, Tsáchila, and other local tribes still plaster their hair with the brilliant dye derived from the seeds; hence the tribes’ nickname Colorado, or “reddish colored.” The Aztecs added annatto to their thick, syrupy chocolate drinks to strengthen the brilliance of their brews, and today in the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, it is used to flavor and color codfish cakes.

  The early Spanish, Berbers, Arabs, and Jews who immigrated to the Yucatán Peninsula used yellow-orange achiote as a substitute for turmeric and saffron in their recaudos. These marinades and pastes typically combined achiote with more savory and pungent spices in vinegar or in sour orange or lime juice. The blends, influenced by the newcomers’ own culinary traditions, eventually evolved into the sauces and pastes that brighten such Mayan-adapted dishes as cochinita pibil and múkbil pollo. In Mayan villages I have visited on the Yucatán Peninsula, the crimson, pink, and green profile of the annatto tree brightens the walkways of nearly every dooryard garden, doubling as both an ornamental and a kitchen staple.

  Crypto-Jewish spice merchants who helped to colonize M
exico may have been the first traders to send the seeds into the Old World spice networks, for achiote moved along the same trade routes that had long been managed by Sephardic Jews and Arabized Berbers. Traders in Martinique appear to have passed what they called annatto on from Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonies to Europe, Africa, and Asia, which is reflected in the fact that loan-word cognates of achiote are far less common in Old World languages than are cognates of annatto and bija, both derived from the Caribbean language family. Urucul, another indigenous term for annatto, may have originated in the Amazon Basin. It is likely the root of ruku, the term now used in Curaçao for annatto oil, an ingredient that is commonly combined with blue Curaçao liqueur in mixed drinks and marinades.

  Today, annatto enjoys a pan-tropical distribution, being cultivated as far away from its natal grounds as China, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines. Once valued primarily as a hair dye, aphrodisiac, and digestive, the utility of annatto as a colorant, in everything from lipsticks, cheeses, sun screens, and red sun dresses and shawls to chewing gums, now trumps all of its other uses.

  Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.

  Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.

  Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 4, 2013.

  • ALLSPICE • JAMAICA PEPPER

  Profoundly aromatic, the small, brownish, seedlike fruits, more commonly known as berries, of the allspice tree (Pimenta dioica) offer a sharp piquancy followed by notes of cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg—a heady mix that some Americans recognize as pumpkin pie spice. The clovelike fragrance and flavor arise from the presence of eugenol, methyl eugenol, and beta-caryophyllene, three key chemical compounds present in the essential oil of the berries. Although ground allspice has become the mostly widely used form of the spice, the foliage and wood of P. dioica are still used throughout the tree’s Caribbean area of origin. The leaves, which are employed in marinades and in stuffings for meats, carry far less of the clovelike flavor than the berries do. Wood pruned from the trees is used as fragrant fuel for traditional barbecues.