The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [44]
The first mention of corn in France dates to 1523, when the governor of Bayonne complained about the husks. Apparently, Basques had been eating corn for some time by then because the city demanded that people stop throwing corn husks in the Adour, where they were accumulating by bridge pilings, posing a threat to navigation. Fishermen also learned to use corn husks to mask a hook, creating a squidlike lure. Labourdine tuna fishermen used corn husk lures until the 1930s, when a collaboration between a lighthouse keeper and a jeweler in Biarritz produced the spoon, a curved metal lure.
North of the Adour, the French eventually accepted the grain for livestock but would not eat it themselves until the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike almost all of the rest of Europe, Basques used corn not only to feed livestock but also as a staple of the peasant diet. Every town had its own corn mill. Peasants made, and still make, a flat bread similar to a Mexican tortilla but slightly thicker. Farmers wrap this Basque tortilla, known as talo, around the food they take with them to the field, much as a Central American farmer does. The talo was also eaten by miners and later by factory workers.
IN 1502, on his fourth voyage, Columbus sailed to Pino, an island off present-day Nicaragua, where he was offered a drink that the natives called xocoatl. He was not impressed, even when it was explained that it was made from beans grown by gods in the Garden of Life. For the sake of thoroughness, he took some of these small, hard, brown, bitingly bitter beans back with him.
The Castilian court agreed that the beans were unusual but of no particular use. Then in 1519, the year he conquered Mexico, Hernán Cortés negotiated the release of a Spaniard, Gerónimo de Aguilar, shipwrecked in the Yucatán and held slave to a Mayan chief. Aguilar told Cortés of many curious foods including cocoa, and Cortés, apparently blessed with a greater gastronomic curiosity than Columbus, had the locals demonstrate how to use it. In 1528, when he returned to Spain, he had the foresight to take with him not just the beans but also three recipes: a drink, a “soup,” and a paste. Understanding very well how to attract the interest of the crown he served, he pointed out that the local tribesmen so valued these beans that they sometimes used them as money.
The soup was a sauce known in Mexico as mole, and it had enough appeal so that the Basques still have a tradition of cooking game birds in chocolate, just as the Aztecs had made wild turkey in mole. Basques in Alava sometimes make hare instead of game birds with chocolate, which may explain why the Caltagirone region of central Sicily, once occupied by the Spanish, has a tradition of rabbit in chocolate.
In the 1980s, a noted Guipúzcoan chef, José Castillo, decided to document the recipes of elderly Basque women. Seventy-eight-year-old Emilia Sáenz de Vicuña from Alava gave him the following recipe.
HARE WITH WALNUT AND CHOCOLATE
Cut the hare in pieces and fry them. In the same oil, fry an onion cut in slices and a few garlic cloves. When the onion is tender, add a sliced apple, a little flour, a little chocolate, a glass of red wine, a glass of white wine, another of water.
Shell a dozen walnuts and crush them in a mortar, then throw the paste into the casserole with the hare. Simmer together very slowly, and when the hare is tender, remove it to an earthenware dish. Run the rest through a food mill and pour it around the hare. Let the whole thing simmer a little, then toss in a little chopped parsley and serve.
The drink that Cortés brought back also quickly became popular in Spain, and when both Louis XIII and Louis XIV married Spanish princesses, their brides brought the drink to the French court. Louis XIV’s bride, María Theresa, the same bride who was served macaroons at her St.-Jean-de-Luz wedding, did little to dispel the belief that chocolate was a toxic