Some food history

[Gdjjr]

I find stuff like this interesting

If You Love Potatoes, Tomatoes Or Chocolate Thank Indigenous Latin American Cultures

[mr. beaumont]

Latin American food is EVERYTHING...there's so much to explore.

Mesquite flour is another native American food that is often overlooked. It's one of the healthiest foods in the world--loaded with protein, no gluten, a time-release sugar that's good for diabetics, lots of trace minerals and roughage. It's becoming more noticeable in markets and on-line receipts and products.

[Gdjjr]

Originally Posted by EvanB

Mesquite flour is another native American food that is often overlooked. It's one of the healthiest foods in the world--loaded with protein, no gluten, a time-release sugar that's good for diabetics, lots of trace minerals and roughage. It's becoming more noticeable in markets and on-line receipts and products.

Interesting- mesquite beans taste terrible-

Gd;

There are mesquite beans and then there are mesquite beans. I have 14 mesquite trees on my homestead. All the beans are healthful, but only 2 tree produce sweet beans. There are somewhere around 60 mesquite trees around my village and I'd say that about 10% have the sweet beans.

Natives of the Southwest did not have a lot of personal property, but a family would lay claim to a mesquite tree. You can chew on a bean and will know immediately if it's sweet or not.

The beans are difficult to process and to do so commercially requires a hammer mill. However, you can run 8 or 9 at a time through a blender and then filter through a screen. And then you can go on line for a million ways to use the flour.

For a while the flour was sold on line for $16 a pound. With more production occurring and more people using the product the flour has dropped in price--the last time I looked the flour could be had for $10 a pound.

[dirkronk]

The big item missing from the article is the chile. (Please pronounce it correctly: CHEE-lay.) Indigenous to central America, chile plants were also taken worldwide, and became incredibly important to numerous assorted cuisines (think Thai and the words "Thai hot").
Also remember...chile is the plant and the fruit, chili was originally the stew made from chiles and meat, though a few hundred years of misspelling and misuse have created traditions of their own. Never be surprised if you see "chili peppers" or "chilli" even though these are technically alternate spellings to the original...even the NPR article's author refers to "chilis" when she means the capsicum pods (which she correctly notes were occasionally blended with chocolate in the Aztec world).

Common food lore says the word "pepper" became associated with the chile (think "jalapeño pepper" and so on) because the closest analog to the chile's heat (which derives primarily from capsicum) in the knowledge of European explorers was the black peppercorn and its relatives found in Asia. Since many chiles were edible and imparted spicy heat, they became "peppers" by default, even though they are no botanic relation to each other. Remember, too, that finding a short route to the spices of Asia was a major motivator for Columbus and others to sail westward.

Final factoid for this post: chocolate and coffee are transoceanic cousins in a sense. Chocolate developed in the American tropics while coffee developed in the middle eastern areas of the old world. Perhaps a botanist among us can enlighten us more completely, but the cacao tree and the coffee tree are the only food plants I know on which (1) new flowers and leaves, (2) immature fruit and (3) fully mature fruit can appear on the same plant at the same time (usually different levels of the plant). Coffee, of course, has its beans develop in external clusters while cacao develops beans inside pods. Vive la diference. But both plants migrated to the other side of the world from their points of origin (again thanks to explorers), thrived in tropic climes wherever taken, and all to the benefit of our taste buds.

Cheers,

Dirk...
who spent a big portion of his 50 years in the ad biz researching and writing history and ad copy for foodservice companies, from Pace Picante Sauce to Ambrosia Chocolate to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to Uncle Ben's to Louisiana Hot Sauce to Schwann's to Farmland Foods and others.

Thank you Dirk; very interesting stuff.

[fumei]

Originally Posted by dirkronk

The big item missing from the article is the chile. (Please pronounce it correctly: CHEE-lay.) Indigenous to central America, chile plants were also taken worldwide, and became incredibly important to numerous assorted cuisines (think Thai and the words "Thai hot").
Also remember...chile is the plant and the fruit, chili was originally the stew made from chiles and meat, though a few hundred years of misspelling and misuse have created traditions of their own. Never be surprised if you see "chili peppers" or "chilli" even though these are technically alternate spellings to the original...even the NPR article's author refers to "chilis" when she means the capsicum pods (which she correctly notes were occasionally blended with chocolate in the Aztec world).

And it is an amazingly delicious combination!! There is small cocoa shop here that only sells cocoa, or hot chocolate if you prefer. The "Azteca" is ridiculously expensive but the flavors explode in your mouth. Fantastic!

[dirkronk]

Originally Posted by fumei

And it is an amazingly delicious combination!! There is small cocoa shop here that only sells cocoa, or hot chocolate if you prefer. The "Azteca" is ridiculously expensive but the flavors explode in your mouth. Fantastic!

A small ice cream place here in San Antonio offered a custom Azteca gelato with the richest chocolate flavor imaginable and that explosion you speak of at the end of every lick. Killer!

Dirk

That gelato would be nicely accompanied by a cup of coffee with a 1/2 tsp of mesquite powder.

[Gdjjr]

Amazing what can be learned from a rather innocuous subject-

[tinnitus]

Mrs. Tinnitus and I got a kick out of an entertaining/informative TV series we saw with Michael McKean (Spinal Tap and Better Call Saul) called Food: Fact or Fiction.

Further out on that limb, I'm waiting for the library to fulfill my audiobook request for a gritty inside look at how food magically appears in local grocery stores everywhere.

[dirkronk]

I'm back and here's why: told a friend about this thread. He's been hearing my tales and anecdotes about the food biz for years, and he started asking me, "Did you tell them about X? And what about Y?" And of course, the answer was no. So he gave me grief and here I am. I will attempt to regale you with factoids (until I run out or someone tells me to shut up).

First up...not a food item, but a beverage:

The Mexican beer and the lime.

No, this is not about Corona and its longneck bottle with a lime wedge stuck in the top. It's about how beer and lime actually became associated in Mexico...and it wasn't about looking cool or the taste sensation. It was totally pragmatic. And Corona had nothing at all to do with it.

(This story was first told to me c.1979 by a guy named Alejandro, scion of one of the founding families and then president of Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc, one of Mexico's oldest and largest breweries and owner of our client CIBCO Importing.) In the mid 1940s, Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc (CC) started equipping their delivery trucks to haul crushed ice so they could assure end customers of really cold beer, even at outlying cantinas in little villages in Mexico where electricity was scarce and refrigeration thus non-existent. In the early 1950s CC bought the Tecate brand, then brewed only in Baja California, and took it nationwide as Mexico's first-ever canned beer. The metal cans were a hit...they could be chilled super-cold and they were a novelty...but the cans were still made from steel and tin in those days before aluminum, and being iced down in giant tubs of ice meant that they could develop spot rust along the rim. Luckily, limes were abundant, super-cheap and available pretty much year-round...and thanks to the citric acid, a lime slice swiped around the rim of the beer can could remove any offending spot rust. Cool, right?

Pretty soon, instead of serving lime wedges only with cans of beer, cantina owners began putting small bowls of lime at any table that was having beer, even in bottles, so customers began making a taste association too.

By 1979-80, when the agency I worked for was hired to introduce Tecate to the US market (from the Mississippi west; an east coast agency was hired for the eastern part of the country), Tecate was canned in aluminum, but there was still a tradition of serving lime with it in Mexico. We wanted to capitalize on that here in the US...and embellish it, to make ordering a Tecate a real bar ritual. So we pushed the idea of the same tradition as a tequila shot: a lick of salt, a bite of lime, a long swig of Tecate. A rhyming call-to-action "Salt and lime at Tecate time" was used in commercials, along with the positioning line "Squeeze more flavor out of life." We even produced Tecate-branded salt shakers, etc. It went over big. Bar patrons went wild.

Good thing. CC's flagship Carta Blanca was a decent enough lager, and its Bohemia and Indio brands were superb, but Tecate was kinda "meh"...like a Miller Lite or Bud Light. It needed help. Also, some regional brands had stolen a march on the lime flavor thing (Mike's Lime Lager was already in production in the northeast, for example). Within a year, though, Tecate was the biggest selling imported canned beer in the US.

However...

A couple of hiccups in client relations caused us to resign the account within a couple of years, and our replacements dropped the whole lime and salt thing. Go figure. And a few years after Tecate went silent about its lime connection, that's when you started seeing the first ads for Corona longnecks and the lime wedge.

Don't cry too much for CC, however. By about 1985, they bought out previous competitor Cerveceria Moctezuma, brewer of Dos Equis, Superior and a few other major beers...and the whole thing's called FEMSA. So yeah, they're doing OK.

So now you know. (And don't worry...the rest of my anecdotes will be shorter than this.)

Cheers,
Dirk

I'm seeing a book....................

Dirk--did you buy stock in limes?

[dirkronk]

Next up...

The Taco and its cousins

So the taco probably isn't exactly what you think it is. The word describes a shape, in the same tradition as our "sub" sandwich made with a long slender loaf in the shape of a submarine. And like the sub, it's a finger food.

However, the word "taco" in Spanish originally meant "bung" (or stopper)...as in a plug designed to go in a bunghole, the hole in the end of a barrel, to keep the contents from spilling out. So the original taco shape: a somewhat stubby cylinder with its middle fatter than either end.

This is precisely what you get when you put frijoles refritos (refried beans), carne guisada (stewed meat), eggs or other ingredients on a flour tortilla and simply roll it up with the ends of the tortilla left open. And that's how it'll be served to you here in San Antonio if you order breakfast tacos...or "flour tacos" any time of day. (Sometimes, if they wrap the taco in foil, they'll simply fold the tortilla over to a half-moon shape, but that's pretty much the exception.)

Order "soft tacos" and you may get either flour or corn tortillas, thin and rolled around a filling, and sometimes (not always) served with a salsa (sauce) ladled over the outside. (Salsa is ALWAYS appropriate to put inside any taco...you unroll and reroll yourself after pouring it on...but if it's poured over the outside, grab a fork; it's no longer finger food.)

"Crisp" or "crispy" tacos are the ones you've seen/eaten at Taco Bell: masa harina (corn) tortillas folded over to create a half moon shape and a "u" seen from the end, fried to keep their shape and be crunchy, and filled with whatever you want.

"Puffy" tacos can be either corn (most common) or flour but rolled in thin layers so they "puff" when flash-fried. Properly prepared, they beat the ordinary crispy taco hands-down.

If the flour tortilla is large and you tuck in the sides before rolling it, you get a burrito. Which, like its "little burro" namesake, will carry the burden of the contents without spilling the beans. (Unfortunately, most burritos are made with doughy, almost tasteless, virtually raw tortillas that I personally don't care for. YMMV.)

Congratulations. You have now completed your crash course in taco lore. We will, however, investigate the tortilla further in future episodes.

Cheers,
Dirk