In the Mayan lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, allspice, chiles, and vanilla regularly flavored ritually consumed chocolate beverages. When I have had the opportunity to drink Mayan-style unsweetened chocolate drinks that include allspice, I have been struck by how well the two flavors complement one another, perhaps more so than even chocolate and vanilla.
Allspice was first noted by Columbus on his second voyage to the West Indies, but it didn’t catch hold in Europe until the seventeenth century. It appears that Sephardic Jewish refugees living in Santiago de la Vega (Spanish Town) and Port Royal in Jamaica shipped allspice to other Jewish traders residing in Old World ports, such as Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, and London. When it arrived in London, the English named it newspice and became its most fanatic consumers in the Old World, using it in pickling brines for vegetables and for flavoring stews. Because the bulk of its commercial production continued to come out of Jamaica, allspice became known as Jamaica pepper in many of its new destinations. It also grows on other West Indian islands, including Cuba and Barbados.
The natural range of allspice extends over to the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala and then southward into Central and South America, where I have witnessed robust trees fifteen to twenty feet tall. The Yucatecan allspice berries that I have sampled have an altogether different flavor complex from Jamaican berries, though they are in no way inferior to the island’s harvests. Within the tropical and arid subtropical climes of Mexico, allspice has been known as pimienta gorda or pimienta de Tabasco and traditionally traded throughout the country. The latter name may in fact be the origin of the term Tabasco pepper, which was introduced to the United States around the time of the Civil War by a Confederate soldier who mistakenly applied it to a particular chile.
In Jamaican jerk pastes and rubs for meats, allspice is the key ingredient that complements black pepper, chiles, cinnamon, garlic, lime juice, and vinegar. It appears that Arabic-speaking moriscos and conversos in Mexico and the Caribbean may have also been involved in the allspice trade, since it became one more kind of “pepper” on the Old World trade routes. In fact, the majority of language groups to which allspice was introduced initially described it as just that: one more kind of pepper (piment, piperi, pjerets, pepe, Pfeffer), with allusions to it being a sweet pepper in its Arabic (filfil infranji halu), Mandarin Chinese (ganjiao), and Cantonese Chinese (gam jiu) names. The Berbers in Algeria call it fulful mexik, or “Mexican pepper,” suggesting that it may have entered the Maghreb through early Mexican exports to Andalusia and Morocco. Bulgarians and Georgians simply treat it as one more Turkish- or Arab-introduced spice (bahar) suitable for adding to spice mixes such as baharat and ras el hanout.
Bengali and Hindi cooks view allspice as a spice-rub ingredient for Chinese kebabs (kabab chini) that was originally accessed through Silk Road trade with Muslims from western China. It is also used by my cousins in Lebanon in their rubs and marinades for various kebab, kibbe, and kefta preparations. In fact, in much of the Middle East, allspice from the New World is now so completely integrated into the local cuisines that it is easy to presume that it is native to the region. Today it is also present in ketchups, meat marinades, pickles, rum cocktails, and spice cakes around the world.
Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.
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.
Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006.
• VANILLA •
Unlike most of the orchids of commerce, the vanilla orchid (Vanilla planifolia) emits a rather slight scent. Nevertheless, the vanillins in its long, thin pods and oily black seeds offer a flavor intensity that rivals that of saffron and an aroma that outdistances that of cardamom in its complexity. The taste of fermented vanilla has been described as sweet, smoky, and caramel-like, though it is so potent and enigmatic that a single drop in a carbonated beverage is sufficient to elevate the name of the drink to “vanilla flavored” and to command a higher price.
The economic value of this tropical vine was well established in the pre-Columbian era of Mesoamerica, with vanilla pods already a recognized form of currency in prehistoric Mexico. The conquistador Hernán Cortés witnessed Aztec rulers demanding vanilla pods as a tax from the Totonac people, who were the primary harvesters of the pods along the Mexican coast of Veracruz. Vanilla vines historically ranged though the wet tropical forest habitats of eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Costa Rica, but most of these have been logged, fragmented, and degraded over the last three centuries, so much so that wild vanilla orchids are listed as critically endangered. The native bee (Euglossa viridissima) that serves as their most allegiant pollinator is also of concern to conservationists.
It was the indigenous people of eastern Mexico rather than those of Central America who initiated the management and harvesting of vanilla orchids and the diffusion of their dried pods to others as a highvalue culinary and medicinal product. It appears that the Totonacs were the first to bring this orchid out of the rainforest and cure its pods, calling them xa’nat. Their extra-local trade to the Aztecs was facilitated by pochteca, long-distance traders and merchants who saw the value in mixing tlilxochitl (vanilla) with kakaw (chocolate) for a luxurious after-dinner drink enjoyed by the Nahuatl-speaking elite of Tenochitlán.
Not until it arrived in Spain during the reign of Philip II did this spice take on the name vainilla, which refers to the slender or diminutive pods (vainas) of the orchid. The first written announcement of vanilla released in the Old World described it as a black-flowered orchid. It appeared in a 1651 natural history of herbs that was initiated by the Castilian court physician Francisco Hernández, who had been sent to Mexico to document the local flora, but was written and published by others long after his death. Eight decades after Hernández’s visit, a Portuguese Jewish immigrant to what is now Guyana learned the traditional techniques for vanilla harvesting, extraction, and drying from Arawak-speaking natives of the Pomeroon River basin and began to modernize the process for higher yields of better quality. Dried vanilla pods were soon being sent across the Atlantic. For decades, this intercontinental trade was facilitated in part by crypto-Jews in Mexico City, the port of Veracruz, and Port Royal in Jamaica who had retained contacts with Sephardic Jewish refugees in major trading ports in Europe, Asia, and Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, vanilla and cocoa were regularly being shipped from Mexico and Jamaica to Old World bakers and confectioners.
Given its high value, its habitat specificity, and its rarity, it is no wonder that horticulturists soon endeavored to cultivate vanilla in the Old World. Although live plants were carried from Mesoamerica to European gardens and greenhouses, they did not immediately flower or set seed. It was not until 1806–07 that vanilla vines finally flowered in Charles Grenville’s greenhouse in England. This singular event triggered widespread dissemination of his cuttings to other greenhouses, most of them in southern Europe. However, it was the handful of cuttings from Grenville’s plants that eventually made it to the island of Réunion that changed the trajectory of vanilla production forever. There, on the plantation of Féréol Bellier-Beaumont in 1841, a slave named Edmond Albius accomplished the first quick, practical means of cross-pollination of vanilla orchids by hand, thus eliminating the need to have Euglossa bees present to ensure the fertilization and full development of vanilla pods. By 1898, vanilla production on Réunion and nearby Madagascar and the Comoros Islands had far outstripped that of Mexico, and today there is also cultivation of a distinct vanilla orchid in Tahiti. Although the production of Mexican vanilla continues, the orchids are more likely t
o be tended by Italian immigrants than native Totonacs. What is harvested in its homeland competes in the global market with the pure vanilla extract from many other tropical nations, as well as with many imitation vanilla flavorings.
Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.
Ecott, Tim. Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Rain, Patricia. Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance. New York: J. P. Tarcher, 2004.
• CHOCOLATE •
Although a web-based fable gently jokes that chocolate was discovered by an Arab Muslim scholar named al-Khakolati, it is clear that the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) is native to the Americas. Most wild members of the genus Theobroma appear to have evolved in the tropical lowlands of South America, but only T. cacao seems to have spread northward, traveling from the Amazon Basin up to and across Central America and into Mexico. Some botanists suggest that the cacao tree arrived in eastern Mexico and adjacent areas of the Yucatán Peninsula on its own; others claim it came through cultural diffusion and was independently domesticated there as well as in South America.
My good friend and fellow ethnobotanist Charles Miksicek identified the oldest wood remains from cacao trees in Mesoamerica at the Cuello site in Belize, where they were estimated to be at least twenty-nine hundred years old. Cacao plant artifacts have also been found among archaeobotanical remains in Honduras that date back to 3100 BCE.
In prehistoric times in South America, the theobromine-rich pulp was made into a fresh, fruity beverage or fermented into a mildly alcoholic one. There, cultivated varieties were initially selected for their edible pulp, while selection for the seeds was stronger in Mesoamerica. Cacao pulp is still used to ferment alcoholic beverages and vinegar in Panama and perhaps in Colombia as well. Depictions of cacao pods on Peruvian pottery vessels have been tentatively identified and dated as being twenty-five hundred years old. Cacao seeds were not used to make caffeinated beverages there, perhaps because other South American beverage plants, such as yerba maté, guaraná, and yoco, pack a much more potent punch of caffeine.
In contrast, Mesoamericans greatly valued the effects of both the caffeine and theobromine in the seeds of their four prehistoric cacao varieties. The Nahuatl-speaking Mexica tribe also used the larger pods of three of the varieties as a form of currency. After the arrival of Europeans and Africans in Mexico, the two gene pools of cacao were hybridized, so that both the edible pulp and seeds found in cultivated cacao have qualities not found in their wild and semicultivated precursors. Nevertheless, it was the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica who devised elaborate means of fermenting and extracting chocolate from cacao seeds that underlies how cacao is processed today.
Kakaw, the oldest known term for this plant and its products, appears to have come from the ancient Mixe-Zoque languages now spoken in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Tabasco, and Veracruz. From there, it diffused into many languages, including those in the Mayan family. Choko-atl, the rather problematic Nahuatl term, was not recorded until the sixteenth century and may not have been used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica at all. It is also unclear when chocolate became one of the signature ingredients in the sauces for meats that evolved into moles, which have peculiarly Old World formulas and ingredients, as discussed elsewhere in this book.
Remarkably, it has been recently confirmed that the Anasazi of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, which reached its peak as a trade center between 900 and 1300, were ritually consuming chocolate-based drinks in Mayan-style cylindrical pottery vessels thousands of miles north of where chocolate naturally occurred. That means that chocolate may have entered the cuisines of the southwestern United States by 1000 to 1125, well before the use of domesticated chiles there, which may not have occurred until after 1450.
It appears that once Jews immigrated to Mexico and Central and South America, they quickly understood the medicinal, culinary, and even psychotropic value that chocolate had to offer. By the seventeenth century, Jewish merchants in Mexico and Jamaica were among the primary merchants moving cocoa to other Jewish spice traders in Amsterdam, London, and Lisbon. They also played critical roles in modernizing and diversifying chocolate processing. Among these innovative immigrants was Benjamin d’Acosta de Andrade, a Portugueseborn Jew who founded the first of several chocolate-processing operations on Martinique in the Lesser Antilles in the mid-seventeenth century. Later, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, American Jews such as Aaron Lopez and Levy Solomons, both living in the northeastern United States, developed chocolate processing and trade with Europe’s most accomplished confectionaires, many of whom first advanced artistry with chocolate in the Netherlands.
Crown, Patricia L., and W. Jeffrey Hurst. “Evidence of Cacao Use in the Prehispanic American Southwest.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2009: www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0812817106.
Grivetti, Louis E., and Howard Yana-Shapiro. Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage. New York: Wiley & Sons, 2009.
MacNeil, Cameron L., ed. Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006.
Minnis, Paul E., and Michael E. Whalen. “The First Prehispanic Chile (Capsicum) from the U.S. Southwest/Northwest Mexico and Its Changing Use.” American Antiquity 75 (2009): 245–58.
• POLLO EN MOLE VERDE DE PEPITA •
Spiced Chicken in Green Pumpkin Seed Sauce
Compare this recipe with the Moroccan-spiced chicken in almond sauce on page 223 and you will see the continuity among complex Moroccan, Andalusian, and Mexican sauces. It is true, as Diana Kennedy reminds us, that prior to the arrival of the Spanish, various Mayan communities were harvesting squashes and pumpkins for their seeds, which they mixed with chiles, tomatoes, and herbs to flavor stews made with turkey. But there is surely something that echoes Berber sensibilities in the mixture of spices found in some of the mole pipián versions prepared in the states of Puebla and Michoacán, or in mole verde de pepita, as it is called in Oaxaca. Substitute almonds for the pumpkin seeds and chicken for turkey or duck and you have something that looks very much like the savory tagine or gdra pot stews of Fez or Marrakech. I prefer the white seeds of green-striped cushaw squashes over the seeds of true pumpkins. Cushaws are grown as much for the meatiness of their seeds as for their dense, yellow flesh.
As a side dish, prepare a quickly sautéed succotash with fresh baby lima beans, diced red bell pepper, pearl onions, cubed summer squashes such as pattypan or zucchini, and corn kernels freshly cut from the cob. Serves 4 to 6.
6 boneless chicken thighs, about 2 pounds, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 large white onion, thickly sliced
5 small cloves garlic, chopped, plus 5 small whole cloves
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano or thyme Sea salt
4 cups chicken broth
1½ cups raw cushaw squash or pumpkin seeds
4 serrano or jalapeño chiles, coarsely chopped
10 tomatillos, husks removed, rinsed, and quartered
8 fresh hoja santa or avocado leaves, coarsely chopped or torn
3 tablespoons freshly ground cumin seeds
4 whole cloves, ground
4 allspice berries, ground
6 black peppercorns, ground
4 leafy sprigs fresh epazote, chopped
1 small bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 cup hot water
6 tablespoons masa harina
2 tablespoons lard or sunflower oil
In a large pot, combine the chicken pieces, half of the onion, the chopped garlic, the bay leaves, the oregano, a pinch of salt, and the broth. Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Cook until the chicken is cooked through and tender, about 10 minutes.
Using a slotted spoon, tr
ansfer the chicken pieces to a plate and set aside. Strain the broth through a fine-mesh sieve and discard the solids. Reserve the broth. You should have about 3½ cups.
To toast the squash seeds, place a dry heavy frying pan over medium heat. Add the seeds and toast, stirring often to prevent scorching, until they are golden and you hear them pop, about 5 minutes. Transfer the seeds to a paper towel and let cool. Set aside ½ cup of the seeds for garnish.
In a blender or food processor, combine the remaining 1 cup cooled squash seeds, the remaining onion, the chiles, tomatillos, whole garlic cloves, hoja santa, cumin, cloves, allspice, pepper, epazote, and parsley. In a bowl, stir together the hot water and masa harina until a smooth paste forms, then add to the reserved broth. Add 1½ cups of the broth to the blender and blend until a smooth puree forms.
In a large, heavy saucepan, heat the lard over medium-high heat. Pour in the squash seed puree, bring to a simmer, and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened, about 10 minutes. Stir in 2 more cups of the broth and simmer until the mixture begins to thicken again, another 20 minutes.
Return the puree to the blender, let cool slightly, then blend until it is once again smooth. Return the puree to the pan, add the reserved chicken, and season with salt. Place over medium heat, bring to a simmer, adjust the heat to maintain a gentle simmer, and cook until the chicken is well coated with the sauce, 5 to 10 minutes.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 34