unlike Maya food and Inca food, is a subject for which relatively rich written source material exists. Admittedly, all of it has to be read with an eye open for prejudices of one kind or another on the part of the authors, faults of memory, flights of imagination, and vagueness or error in nomenclature. However, the chronicle of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortés (the Spanish invader) but wrote his account much later in Guatemala, and the illustrated work in Spanish and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) of Father Sahagún, written in the 1530s, are full of fascinating detail for food historians.
The Aztecs, coming south from the deserts of N. Mexico, had in the 14th century occupied sites in the valley of Mexico, an area rich in lakes, whose produce (fowl of many kinds, fish, frogs, water insects, algae) the newcomers adopted with enthusiasm. They flourished and established their dominion over a wide area. The power wielded by their emperor Motecuhzoma (Montezuma is a Spanish mangling of his name, which means ‘angry like a lord’) was such that one might have expected them to withstand a relatively small force of Spaniards under Cortés. However, the New World had never seen anything remotely like these strangers with their ships, horses, and cannons. The impact was something like the effect which would be produced on the western world today by a combination of the second coming with an invasion by beings from outer space. The question was: were the newcomers gods or mortals? and Motecuhzoma tested the matter with gifts of food. His first offerings made the Spaniards feel ill because he had caused them to be splattered with blood, thinking that this would be suitable for gods. Later, Sahagún tells us, they feasted agreeably on ‘white tortillas, grains of maize, turkey eggs, turkeys, and all kinds of fruit’. He gives a list of 25 ‘fruits’, including four varieties of sweet potato, sweet manioc (see cassava), avocados, and some cacti. It is said that they flinched from chocolate at first, but when the Indians set the example they drank and found it good.
When Cortés and his men, including Bernal Díaz, who was later to record the events, reached the capital of Motecuhzoma, they were entertained at what seemed to them to be a most sumptuous banquet, although it was a standard palace meal. The description by Bernal Díaz of how Motecuhzoma was served and ate, and of the thousands of jars of foaming chocolate, is famous. It contrasts strongly with the general impression of the Aztecs as an abstemious and frugal people, who subsisted on meagre fare and for whom fasts (of which the simplest form was abstaining from salt and chilli) were part of the way of life. Indeed, this contrast illustrates a fundamental dualism in Aztec thought. In food matters they sought to maintain an equilibrium between abstinence and indulgence.
Maize was the staple food of the Aztecs and the focus of a large part of their religion; the cult of the rain god Tlaloc was celebrated so that the rain would fall on the maize, and there was a maize god, Cinteotl, and a maize goddess, Chicomecoatl, as well. Maize was especially revered in the blue-husked form, but Sahagún devotes a highly poetic passage to the white:
The white maize ear—that of the irrigated lands, that of the fields, that of the chinampas … is small; it is hard, like a copper bell—hard, like fruit pits; it is clear; it is like a seashell, very white; it is like a crystal. It is an ear of metal, a green stone, a bracelet—precious, our flesh, our bones.
The food value of the maize was greatly enhanced by the process called nixtamalization.
Beans and chia were important enough to figure as items of tribute paid to the aztec state, as were amaranth and squash seeds. chilli was available in many guises. To quote Sahagún again:
The chilli seller … sells mild red chillies, broad chillies, hot green chillies, yellow chillies, cuitlachilli, tenpilchilli, chichioachilli. He sells water chillies, conchilli; he sells smoked chillies, small chillies, tree chillies, thin chillies, those like beetles. He sells hot chillies, the early variety, the hollow-based kind. He sells green chillies, sharp-pointed red chillies, a late variety, those from Atzitziuacan, Tochmilco, Huaxtepec, Michoacán, Anauac, the Huaxteca, the Chichimeca. Separately he sells strings of chillies, chillies cooked in an olla, fish chillies, white fish chillies.
The short list of domesticated creatures was headed by turkey and included dog (carefully bred and raised to make succulent eating) as well as, on a much smaller scale, the bees.
The culinary sophistication of the Aztecs is apparent from the extraordinarily long list of spices and flavourings which they would use with chocolate. For this and also for information about the Aztec kitchen, the cooks who worked in them, and Aztec table manners, as well as numerous other connected matters (including the extent and nature of the cannibalism practised), see Sophie Coe (1994).
Sophie Coe was the author of America's First Cuisines and co-author with her husband of A True History of Chocolate.
Coe, Sophie (1994), America's First Cuisines, Austin: University of Texas Press.
