Food

[The Mad Monk]

Tortillas, probably.

[Al B. Sure!]

Corn tortillas, gepap... i'm asking if they are native to central america or if the spanish introduced them...

[The Mad Monk]

Sure they did -- just like the French introduced Pita to Africa, and the British introduced Chapati to India.

[Al B. Sure!]

just like the French introduced Pita to Africa

what? as in pita bread? if anyone spread it to africa it was the arabs, not the french...

[Al B. Sure!]

and i don't think flatbread's universal, chegitz... it's mostly in the mediterrenean region... italians, spanish, greeks, jews, and arabs are famous for flatbread. not really anyone else.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Corn tortillas, gepap... i'm asking if they are native to central america or if the spanish introduced them...

Ok:
1. I would not consider tortillas bread.
2. Obviously its indigenous, given that corn did not exist in Spain pre-conquest.
3. Tortillas are not particularly popular in Spain- in Latin America the form of the tortilla changes significantly and by the time you get to South America I am not sure I would call them tortillas.

[The Mad Monk]

At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Mexica or the Aztec, as they were commonly called, were the dominant people in Meso-America in 1519. The Spanish conquerors were avidly looking for gold and they found plenty of it, which they sent back to Spain. However, when they reached the highlands of Mexico, they found a strange and gorgeous civilization and to their delight the most unusual of its glories was its food. A great deal of information has been preserved about what the ordinary Mexican Indians ate and how they prepared their food.

The starting point was corn, the sacred plant of their religion. It supplied starch, the main energy source in the Indian diet, as well as protein and a little fat. Sometimes it was eaten green off the cob, either raw boiled or roasted, or the immature kernels were cut or scraped off to be made into cakes or added to other dishes. But more generally the Mexican Indians let their corn ripen and stored the ears in ventilated corncribs.

The Indians sometimes used a stone mortar and pestle to grind the hard whole kernels into meal out of which corn gruel (atole) was made, but this took a lot of effort. Far better was their system of heating the kernels in a mildly corrosive solution of lime until the skins came off. The skinless kernels were called nixtamal , an Aztec word still in use. Sometimes nixtamal was dried and stored, or it could be boiled in fresh, limeless water. When this was done the kernels swelled up enormously and became as soft as spaghetti resulting in a dish called pozole, one of the basic Indian ways to eat corn.

A more usual way of making nixtamal was to mash the soaked kernels into masa, a dough, to make tortillas. The ancient method can still be seen in some parts of Mexico.
The Indian woman squats on the ground in front of a stone slab known as a metate. The woman puts a few handfuls of nixtamal on the flat surface and scrubs back and forth with a stoneroller. The product, masa, may be white, yellow or other colors according to the color of the corn but if it is intended for tortillas it has to have exactly the right consistency. Then she takes a piece of masa as big as a golf ball between her wetted hands and - pat,pat,pat-flattens it into a round cake less than one eighth of an inch thick and six to eight inches in diameter. Cooking tortillas is easy. They are simply tossed on a hot griddle, comal, left there for a minute and then turned over once. Tortillas brown only slightly but develop a thin, tough skin on both sides. At times they puff up momentarily like soufflé potatoes.

Mexican cooking starts now as in the Aztec days with tortillas, the "bread of Mexico" and only those who have tasted them hot off the griddle know how good tortillas can be.
Mexicans use them as plates, forks and spoons. They dip their tortillas into stews and use torn-off pieces to scoop up sauces. They can be eaten plain or with butter, beans or meat, chili or sauces…almost any kind of food that is not too liquid can be placed on a tortilla…the "bread of Mexico"!

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Chemists at the U.S Department of Agriculture say the aroma of a tortilla is mostly due to 2-ameno-acephenone,a compound which develops when corn is soaked in lime water, the traditional treatment for producing corn masa. Food chemists have identified more than forty flavor compounds in tortillas, but 2-amino-acephenone was the hands-down winner as the most tortilla-like, as judged by a panel of government-appointed flavor smellers.
Bruce Henstell, Los Angeles Times, January 1995.

http://www.texmextogo.com/tortillas.htm

Amazing what you can get by typing "tortilla history" into google.

[The Mad Monk]

And I'm joking, AS -- pay attention!

[The Mad Monk]

Tortillas and chapatis are very clearly flatbreads.

[Al B. Sure!]

so it's coincidental that the Aztecs had flatbread as did the spanish... and i was assuming that the spanish taught them about flatbread which was then improvised out of corn.


i thought you might have been joking, mad monk, but why did you say pita to africa? if you were referring to the origin, why wouldn't you have said the french introduced pita to greece or to the middle east... not africa.

[chequita guevara]

Flatbread was how every culture started producing bread.

[Al B. Sure!]

why is it that the mediterrenean is famous for its flatbread while northern europe isn't? china isn't?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
why is it that the mediterrenean is famous for its flatbread while northern europe isn't? china isn't?

Dunno. Rembmer though, Italians are just as famous for their levened bread as their flatbreads.

[GePap]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
Tortillas and chapatis are very clearly flatbreads.

Bah! You and your liberal bread definitions!

[:) Smiley]

Chinese bread? hmmm...