1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [111]
“Everyone in Mexico knows the rules for making a true tortilla,” Ramírez Leyva told me. “But you can’t get them that way now, except maybe in your grandmother’s kitchen.” First soak the dried maize kernels in a bath of lime and water to remove their thin, translucent skins (a process with its own special verb, nixtamalizar). Then stone-grind the kernels into masa, a light, slightly sticky paste with a distinct maize fragrance. Made without salt, spices, leavening, or preservatives, masa must be cooked within a few hours of being ground, and the tortilla should be eaten soon after it is cooked. Hot is best, perhaps folded over with mushrooms or cheese in a tlacoyo. Like a glass of wine, he said, a tortilla should carry the flavor of its native place. “You want to try some?”
A gourmet tortilla shop in Oaxaca, Itanoní is an attempt to preserve southern Mexico’s hundreds of varieties of maize, a Mesoamerican tradition that has survived for thousands of years.
I did. The smells in the shop—dry-toasted maize, melting farm cheese, squash flowers sautéing in home-pressed oil—were causing my stomach to direct urgent messages to my brain.
Ramírez Leyva gave me a plateful of tlacoyos. “This is exactly what you would have eaten here ten thousand years ago,” he said.
In his enthusiasm, he was overstating, but not by much. Indians didn’t have cheese, for one thing. And they didn’t eat tortillas ten thousand years ago, though tortillas are indeed ancient. It is known that 11,500 years ago paleo-Indians were hunting from caves in what is now Puebla, the state northwest of Oaxaca. These were not mastodon and mammoth hunters—both species were already extinct. Instead they preyed on deer, horse, antelope, jackrabbit, and, now and then, giant turtle, as well as several species of rodent. Within the next two thousand years all of these animals except deer vanished, too, done in either by a local variant of overkill, the onset of hotter, drier conditions that shrank the available grassland, or both. Responding to the lack of game, people in Oaxaca and Puebla focused more on gathering. Shifting among productive locations, individual families, living on their own, ate seeds and fruit during the spring and fall and hunted during the winter. During the summer they joined together in bands of twenty-five to thirty—cactus leaves, a local favorite, were plentiful enough in that season to support larger groups.
All the while their store of knowledge about the environment increased. People learned how to make agave plants edible (roast them), how to remove the tannic acid from acorns (grind them to a powder, then soak), how to make tongs to pick spiny cactus fruit, how to find wild squash flowers in the undergrowth, and other useful things. Along the way, perhaps, they noticed that seeds thrown in the garbage one year would sprout spontaneously in the next. The sum of these questions led to full-fledged agriculture—not just in the Tehuacán Valley, but in many places in southern Mexico. Squashes, gourds, peppers, and chupandilla plums were among the initial crops. The first cereal was probably millet—not the millet eaten today, which originated in Africa, but a cousin species, knotweed bristle-grass, which is no longer farmed. And then came maize.
At the DNA level, all the major cereals—wheat, rice, maize, millet, barley, and so on—are surprisingly alike. But despite their genetic similarity, maize looks and acts different from the rest. It is like the one redheaded early riser in a family of dark-haired night owls. Left untended, other cereals are capable of propagating themselves. Because maize kernels are wrapped inside a tough husk, human beings must sow the species—it essentially cannot reproduce on its own. The uncultivated ancestors of other cereals resemble their domesticated