The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation

5. From Grinding Corn to Dishing Out Money

99 Chapter 5 FromGrindingCorntoDishingOutMoney ALong-TermHistoryofCookinginXaltocan,Mexico EnriqueRodríguez-Alegría University of Texas at Austin Mexican cuisine is known for a variety of flavors (especially its heat) and dishes made from an endless list of plant and animal ingredients. Women are the ones responsible for such a great variety of flavors and ingredients. Women were the cooks in Aztec society, and they are the cooks in today’s Mexico. Many Mexican men cook, but they do so mostly in contexts where it will bring an income to the house, such as restaurants, markets, and food carts on the street. The majority of cooks in Mexican homes, whether upper-class or poor, are women. This means that technological changes related to cooking have affected women’s work the most, and they also have been mediated by women’s decisions. In this chapter I examine changes in cooking technologies over a very long period of time, focusing on the change from grinding corn with stone tools to buying ground corn and tortillas in markets. What factors affected the shift from grinding corn by hand to buying corn tortillas? Why did grinding continue for centuries, even though it is a difficult and time-consuming task? What roles did women, and men, play in changes in cooking technologies? To answer these questions, I examine archaeological data in combination with interviews with contemporary women regarding their cooking technologies 100 EnriqueRodríguez-Alegría and practices. For the past decade archaeologists have intensified their efforts to engage and collaborate with local communities and with different subfields in anthropology. Archaeologists are actively trying to formulate research strategies that integrate questions that are important to indigenous people and to engage in dialogues with local communities. Integrating locals into archaeological research can help produce knowledge that benefits more than just academia and that addresses the needs and interests of indigenous peoples and others. Integrating locals can also improve archaeological models because locals have cultural knowledge and experience that archaeologists typically do not have and could not otherwise use in formulating their models of the past. This chapter is an example of how simple interviews and conversations with local women helped reconstruct the causes and contexts of technological change and continuity in rural central Mexico beyond what was possible with archaeological and ethnohistorical data. At the same time, the insights drawn from archaeological data helped evaluate critically the responses made during interviews, they helped provide a broad context for the answers, and they helped assess which answers not emphasized by respondents were prime factors behind technological change and continuity. I present a long-term history of cooking in Xaltocan, a town north of Mexico City that has been occupied for the last 1,100 years (Brumfiel 2005), drawing comparisons with other sites (especially Otumba) when appropriate. The archaeological evidence consists of studies of cooking tools, especially pots, griddles, and grinding stones before and during the Aztec period. This evidence helps reconstruct technological change and evaluate the baseline of static indigenous technologies before the Spanish conquest of 1521. Interviews with local women help examine the causes for technological change and address the question of whether ancient indigenous traditions and ideologies were responsible for technological continuity after the Spanish conquest. Some of the women interviewed are from the last generation that ground corn with stone tools in central Mexico, and they provided insights on how grinding affected different women according to their age, poverty, and other factors that were not possible to reconstruct with the available archaeological data. The chapter begins with a description of the kinds of cooking tools that women in central Mexico used and the dishes that they made, followed by a description of technological changes through time and a discussion of the causes for change and continuity in the twentieth century. Cooking in AzteC kitChens: tools And dishes Depictions of cooking tools in Aztec central Mexico are rather scant and not very detailed (Deimel 2000; Fournier 1998); however, cooking tools are abundant in the archaeological record, and they can help study changes in cooking patterns and technologies through time. In the following description I focus on tools that 101 From Grinding Corn to Dishing Out Money are commonly found on Aztec sites, including cooking pots, manos and metates (stone grinding tools), and comales (griddles). Other tools commonly found include molcajetes (dishes with striated bottoms used for grinding) and ceramic ladles. These cooking tools were used...