Tastes of Exchange
In the sixteenth century, Spanish priests working among the Mexica peoples refused to use maize wafers in communion on the grounds that only wheat, a crop imported from Europe, could represent the body of Christ.
The conquest of Latin America is central to the writing of food history. The Columbian Exchange revolutionised eating habits with the westward export of an incredible variety of fruit, vegetables, grains, and pulses, and the introduction of European and Asian crops and domesticated animals to Central and South America. But as the case of the Spanish priests suggests, the uptake of these foodstuffs was tempered by a range of cultural prejudices and assumptions about food and eating.
In his landmark text ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998), Jeffrey M. Pilcher writes: ‘The dinner table…became a battlefield as the wheat bread of Spanish bakers challenged the corn tamales of native women for inclusion in the Mexican national cuisine.’ I think that the idea of the dinner table as ‘battlefield’ is a useful means of understanding the dynamics and nature of the colonial encounter, but it implies that food was imposed, forcefully, on unwilling and resentful colonial subjects who had little choice but to eat the cuisine of their conquerors. Rather, I suggest, food was an aspect of a colonial cultural exchange: it was a key component in the ways in which colonisers and colonised interacted, formulated relationships, and thought about one another.
Pilcher’s writing about Mexico demonstrates this particularly well. Maize was central to the functioning of pre-Columbian Mexica society. The Mexica worshipped the Young Lord Maize Cob; women’s lives revolved around the transformation of hard corn kernels into tasty tlacoyos, polkanes, and chalupas; men not engaged in military service raised maize. ‘Pre-Columbian people respected maize and treated it with elaborate etiquette. Women carefully blew on kernels before placing them in the cooking pot to give them courage for confronting the fire. … They neglected maize at their peril; a person who saw a kernel lying on the ground and failed to pick it up might be stricken with hunger for the insult’. Babies were called ‘maize blossoms’ and young girls were ‘tender green ears’. This close connection between crop and people is well expressed in the words of a Nàhuatl folk song: ‘We eat the earth then the earth eats us.’
Unsurprisingly, the Mexica were loath to adopt wheat in the place of maize. Relinquishing maize meant more than simply eating another grain: it represented a renunciation of their identity as Mexica. For the conquistadores, many of whom were drawn from the poorest sections of Spanish society and who had experienced a catastrophic famine as a result of the failure of the Iberian wheat crop in the early 1500s, wheat represented upper-class eating habits and civilisation. In Mexico they had the opportunity to live – and eat – like lords, and to emphasise their cultural superiority through their preference for wheat over maize. Spanish efforts to introduce wheat were hampered by the fact that it is difficult to grow wheat in Mexico, and by the unwillingness of the indigenous population to eat it. But wheat was taken up to some extent in Mexico City and by a mestizo class. Wheat tortillas became symbolic of an emergent creole – later dubbed ‘Mexican’ – cuisine.
Although, as far as I know, neither the Dutch nor the British instituted a determined programme of substituting one foodstuff for another in colonial South Africa, food occupied a similar position in a range of colonial encounters. Inevitably, though, its role was different in southern Africa than in Latin America. Europeans and southern Africans ate, broadly, similar plants and animals. In Central and South America, both sides ate many things which the other wouldn’t recognise as food. Imagine the first Spanish encounter with potatoes – or the first Aztec taste of pork. In fact, Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch East India Company’s first commander of its outpost in the Cape, commented frequently in his journal about the familiarity of most of the plants and animals which he found so far away from Holland. That said, though, food retained a significance that other goods lacked.
On the one hand, this significance was due to practical reasons: Van Riebeeck and the servants of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) had to eat, and the settlement was established expressly to supply water and fresh food to passing ships. But, on the other, the consumption of particular foodstuffs was a marker of identity, and food became a means of facilitating contact between indigenous peoples and European settlers. The first communication between the employees of the DEIC and the Khoikhoi centred around food: two representatives of a Khoikhoi group were invited on board a DEIC ship and the Dutch ‘generously filled their bellies with food and drink’ in exchange for information about Khoikhoi willingness to barter cattle for DEIC goods. Later, a skipper who had gone ashore to find fresh provisions was presented with ‘4 bags of beautiful mustard leaves and sorrel and also a catch of about 750 lovely steenbras’.
Van Riebeeck’s relief at the familiarity of the edible plants and animals is almost palpable. He writes that the fish at the Cape were ‘quite as good and tasty’ as ‘any fish in the Fatherland’. Even hippopotamus meat tasted ‘like calf’. This meant that the Cape was a viable place for the cultivation of fruit and vegetables grown from European seeds for European ships, and also that European settlement was possible in this part of Africa. Contact with indigenous peoples – believed nevertheless to be ‘savages’ – was possible. Indeed, the Dutch found that the Khoikhoi were as willing to accept bread in barter as they were copper wire, tobacco, and beads. Yet the Khoikhoi were not as keen as previously believed to give away their livestock. After an initial exchange of a cow and her calf for ‘3 small plates of copper and 3 pieces of ½ fathom copper wire’, the Khoikoi were considerably less forthcoming.
Cattle were not only a major source of protein for the Khoikhoi, but represented wealth and status. Even bags of copper wire could not compensate for the loss of such valuable beasts. Van Riebeeck’s journal is an excellent source on (some) Dutch attitudes towards the Khoikhoi, but records are scanty as to Khoi opinions on the European arrivals. The Dutch scholar J.G. van Grevenbroek did record one angry Khoi outburst about these settlers in 1695 and, interestingly, it centres around food: ‘You eaters of grass and lettuce. Feed it to your oxen: personally we would rather fast. Your habits disgust and sicken us: we never belch or fart. With your foolish values, you treasure a woman’s necklace of tiny beads above sheep.’
Here, the Khoikhoi – accused by white settlers of being dirty, smelly, and uncouth – turn the tables on the Dutch colonists, describing them as uncivilised, and partly for their enthusiasm for ‘grass and lettuce’. In a society where women were responsible for gathering roots and edible plants, the Khoikhoi attached more value to the eating of meat.
Yet, the Khoikhoi ate Dutch bread, apparently with some enthusiasm, and the Dutch tried hippopotamus meat and penguins’ eggs. Their first encounters with each other occurred through the barter and eating of food, but this was no example of happy multicultural sharing: they ate that which was familiar and, most importantly, that which they thought tasted good. Yet it’s clear that cultural assumptions about particular foodstuffs were instrumental in shaping the colonial encounter.
Further Reading
Texts quoted here:
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
Journal of Jan van Riebeeck, vol. I, ed. H.B. Thom (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1952).
Other sources:
Sophie Coe, America’s First Cuisines (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972).
Nelson Foster and Linda Cordell (eds), Chillies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992).
Elinor G.K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
John C. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonisation in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988).
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Jan 8
Real Revolutions
When Keenwa opened in Cape Town last year, much was made of the fact that it serves ‘authentic’ Peruvian food. I put ‘authentic’ in quotes partly because I’ve read far too much Derrida and Foucault, but mainly as a result of some scepticism. I doubt that any of the reviewers who’ve eaten at Keenwa have ever been to Peru, and there’s something odd about deciding how a varied and changing cuisine can be made ‘authentic’. The bobotie I cook has grated apple in it, but a friend’s doesn’t: which is more authentic? Neither, obviously.
I was thinking about this a month ago when I had supper with my friends Katherine and Ricardo in London. Ricardo is from Cuba, and cooked us a Cuban-themed dinner. The only Cuban food I’ve ever eaten was at Cuba Libre, a restaurant and tapas bar in Islington. It’s the kind of place which people recommend by saying ‘it’s not authentic, but….’ I haven’t the faintest idea if it’s authentic (whatever that may be), but it was certainly fun.
The food that Ricardo made showed up the problem with the mania for ‘authenticity’ particularly well. We had fried plantain, tortilla, and congrí. This is, to some extent, the kind of food his family would eat in Cuba, although because he and Katherine are vegetarians, we had tortilla instead of the usual, more meaty accompaniment to the meal (hurrah – I love tortilla), and the congrí was pork-free. It was delicious, but was it any less authentic? You tell me.
Christiane Paponnet-Cantat describes the food eaten in Cuba as ‘contact cuisine’, a concept borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualisation of the colonial space as a cultural and social ‘contact zone’ which ‘treats the relations among colonisers and colonised…not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practice’. She suggests that Cuban, and colonial cooking more generally, is a manifestation of the complex relationships between different groups of people in colonies.
Congrí is an excellent example of this contact cuisine. As in the rest of the Caribbean, Cuba’s indigenous population was eradicated – by disease and conflict – after the arrival of European colonists during the seventeenth century. Slaves were imported from West and Central Africa to work on sugar plantations. In the nineteenth century, indentured labourers from India replaced slaves. Along with foodstuffs introduced by the Spanish – like rice in the 1690s – these groups brought with them a variety of cuisines.
Congrí – at its most basic, a dish of rice and beans – can be found in various forms around the Caribbean. It’s a version of moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians) and rice and peas. And jollof rice, popular in West Africa, is similar too. The term congrí seems to have originated in Haiti and is a combination of ‘Congo’ and ‘riz’ (the French for rice), suggesting its African origins.
The recipe that Ricardo used for his congrí was by Nitza Villapol. To my shame, I’d never heard of her until Ricardo mentioned one of her best-known recipe books, Cocina al minuto. This was published in 1958, four years after Cocina criolla, the Bible of Cuban cuisine. Villapol seems to have been a kind of Cuban Delia Smith or Julia Child: she was as interested in writing about Cuban cuisine as she was in communicating it to people. She had a long-running television series which aired between 1951 and 1997. (She died in 1998.)
Villapol would be interesting simply on these grounds, but she was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution. Born into a wealthy family in 1923, she was named after the Russian river Nitza by her communism-supporting father. She spent her early childhood in New York, returning to Cuba with her family at the age of nine. During World War Two she trained as a home economist and nutritionist at the University of London.
This experience of wartime rationing proved to be surprisingly useful. In Cuba, Villapol began her career during the 1950s by teaching cookery classes to young, middle-class brides and her earliest recipe books emerged out of this work. But after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, she devoted to her formidable talents to teaching a kind of revolutionary cuisine. Tellingly, editions of her recipe books published after 1959 no longer included advertisements for American consumer goods.
Under the new communist regime, food distribution was centralised, and rationing was introduced in 1962. People collected their allowances of food – listed in a libreta (ration book) – from the local bodega, or depot. Villapol’s aim was to teach Cubans how to cook when they had little control over the quantity or the nature of the ingredients they would receive at the bodega. She taught a cuisine developed to underpin the goals of the revolution. Unfortunately, I don’t read Spanish and I haven’t been able to track down any substantial scholarship on Villapol. From what I’ve gleaned, though, it seems to me that she was interested in cooking a form of a ‘traditional’ Cuban cooking – but the cooking of ordinary Cubans, rather than those at the top of the social scale who would, presumably, have favoured American or European dishes as a marker of wealth and sophistication. This elevation of ‘every day’ Cuban food would have meshed well with the aims of the revolution.
By writing recipes for favourites like congrí and flan, Villapol created a kind of canon for Cuban cooking. The popularity – and possibly the ubiquity – of her writing and television programmes meant that not only was she seen as the authority on Cuban cuisine, but she also became the source for all that was (or is) ‘authentically’ Cuban. The irony is that this happened during a time of rationing, when what people ate was determined by supplies available to the state.
This system functioned relatively well until the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989. Peter Rosset et al. explain:
There was simply not enough food to go around. (A similar set of factors caused the famine in North Korea, a country as dependent on trade with the USSR as Cuba.) As a 1998 article from the sympathetic New Internationalist noted:
Even though he was shielded – to some extent – from the worst food shortages because he was in school and university accommodation during the Special Period, Ricardo described what it was like to live while permanently hungry – and entirely obsessed with the next meal, even if it was likely to be thin, watery soup or overcooked pasta. In fact, one of the most traumatic features of the Special Period was that staples like rice and coffee – things which most people ate every day – were no longer available. Some people seem to have made congrí from broken up spaghetti.
Drawing on her experience of wartime cooking in London, Villapol used her cookery series to show her audience how to to replicate Cuban favourites with the meagre rations available to the population. Ricardo mentioned one episode during which she fashioned a steak out of orange peel. She received widespread ridicule for doing this, and I think deservedly so.
Cuba managed to pull itself out of its food crisis by radically reorganising its agricultural sector. The state transformed most of its farms into worker-owned co-operatives which
In addition to this, urban agriculture helped to provide a supply of vegetables and pork:
Food may not be abundant now, and there are still occasional shortages of particular items, but no-one goes hungry anymore. Cuba does offer a model of a sustainable, largely organic and pesticide-free food system, and we can learn a great deal from it.
I’m interested, though, in how Cuban food has changed as a result of the Special Period. From a quick trawl of the internet, it seems to me that Nitza Villapol still exercises a kind of nostalgic appeal to some Cubans living in Miami – there’s even one woman who’s heroically cooking her way through Villapol’s oeuvre. But for those still in Cuba – and those who experienced the deprivations of the Special Period – she seems to be tainted by association. It’s certainly the case that despite Villapol’s best efforts, Cuban diets are more meat-heavy and vegetable-poor than ever before. I wonder if this is the effect of the hunger of the nineties: a diet which was based once mainly on rice and fresh produce, has become increasingly focussed around red meat because meat is associated with plenty – and with having a full stomach.
So where does that leave us on ‘authentic’ Cuban cuisine?
Sources cited here:
Mavis Alvarez, Martin Bourque, Fernando Funes, Lucy Martin, Armando Nova, and Peter Rosset, ‘Surviving Crisis in Cuba: The Second Agrarian Reform and Sustainable Agriculture,’ in Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform, ed. Peter Rosset, Raj Patel, and Michael Courville (Food First Books, 2006), pp. 225-248. (Also available here.)
Christiane Paponnet-Cantat, ‘The Joy of Eating: Food and Identity in Contemporary Cuba,’ Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (Sept., 2003), pp. 11-29.
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ‘Tamales or Timbales: Cuisine and the Formation of Mexican National Identity, 1821-1911,’ The Americas, vol. 53, no. 2 (Oct., 1996), pp. 193-216.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).