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spanish america  Food  Felipe Fernández-­Armesto Adisplay of eighteenth-­ century painted tiles in Barcelona’s ceramics museum shows bewigged gentlemen offering cups of chocolate, on bended knee, to delicately nurtured ladies, beside the fountains of a hortus conclusus (Fig. 52). The work could illustrate a comedy of manners—a chocolate version, perhaps, of the Coffee Cantata—or a history of the “civilizing process.” The technology involved in preparing the beverage, however, fits imperfectly into these contexts. It is recognizable to any student of pre-­Cortesian Mesoamerica as transferred—down to the very shape of the pots—from the cult of cacao in its homeland, where European visitors acquired the taste slowly and resistingly , disliking the savor and suspecting the propriety of a drink associated with orgiastic revels and sometimes mixed with blood.The “ecological exchange” that swapped biota between the Old and New Worlds from the voyages of Columbus onward did not only bring new foods: it also involved the transmission of techniques and the interchange of tastes. It was a cultural as well as a biological phenomenon. Ecological exchange reversed, in a sense, some 200 million years of evolution, during which, since the fragmentation of Pangaea, the biota of the world’s continents had grown ever more different from one another. A convergent phase began: life forms spread around the planet and appeared wherever climatic and soil conditions permitted. In the long run, the effects transformed the diets and cuisines of the world.One might expect the impact to be greatest in Spain and America, for in the sixteenth century, and most of the seventeenth, the Spanish monarchy generated more transatlantic and hugely more transpacific traffic of almost all kinds than any other country or empire. The tradition, still strong among historians of Spanish America, that Spaniards turned the “world” of indigenous societies “upside down” helps create an atmosphere of expectation of transformed foodways along with subverted polities, religions , social structures, and economies. Yet in some ways the continuities that link the periods before and after the Spaniards’arrival are more impressive than thedisruptions. And on both sides of the Atlantic the impact of new foods on Spain’s dominions was surprisingly modest, compared with the changes wrought elsewhere. The first large-­ scale exploitation of potatoes, for instance , occurred in the Basque Country in the sixteenth century; ultimately, however, the potato has had an incomparably bigger part in the history of Ireland, Bengal, and parts of Europe, where rye was the traditionally dominant staple. Maize neverattained the same level of importance in Spanish taste or nutrition as in Italy or southeast Europe or in the Russian and Chinese empires. Peanuts reshaped cuisine in parts of China and southeast Asia more profoundly than in Spain.Chocolate now has a big place in Spanish life, but chiefly in combination with milk and sugar—ingredients that Spaniards took to America. It had to be domesticated —its savagery tamed by smoothness and sweetness. And though the evidence of cultural transmission in the Barcelona tilework is remarkable, in one respect it represents an inversion of American practice: in preconquest Mexico, chocolate-­ preparation was women’s work. The impact in Spain of tomatoes, potatoes, avocados, turkeys (which never achieved much penetration), and American fruits was largely deferred to the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Spanish palates in the Baroque era were conservative and inhospitable to transoceanic intrusions. It would be surprising if native peoples of the Americas were more receptive of Spanish foods and foodways than the other way round. Ideology has distorted debate over this issue.The view that Spaniards’ influence on native diets was slight and slow chimes with the indigenist theory of Mexican history, according to which modern Mexico is the successor-­ state of its native forebears, the continuity of whose history the conquistadores disturbed but did not interrupt. According to one of the great spokesmen of this point of view, Manuel Gamió, natives were too poor to eat foods of Old World origin in theearlycolonial period, even had they so wished, whereas historians who want to extol “the rise of the West” emphasize, and perhaps exaggerate, the impact of colonization and represent every aspect of native culture as transmuted by European alchemy. The truth probably lies between the rival positions. Native diets did undergo profound changes, which, however , happened patchily and gradually, without disrupting many traditional patterns. A “mestizo diet” did emerge from the trauma of conquest, but it was at first a feature of the lives of Spaniards and...

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