New Mexico’s Oldest House Serves Authentic New Mexico Cusine

On this day( several days late) ten years ago …
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Ancient Mexican Foods

On this day ten years ago…
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Domestication Of Chile Pepper Provides Insights Into Crop Origin And Evolution

 

On this day ten years ago…published one day early.

should have been Oct6

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Ancient humans left evidence from the party that ended 4,000 years ago

 

On this day ten years ago…

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Ancient Mexican Foods

Topic: Chilies

My Thoughts:

Here is an article I found on the ancient Zapotec and chilies in Sicence netlinks.

Some really old spice. I’m Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.

If you could travel back in time to the Mexico of a thousand years ago, the food would probably have a familiar kick to it. This according to archaeo-botanist Linda Perry of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.

She and her colleagues discovered well-preserved scraps of domesticated chili peppers in an ancient Mexican shelter cave. The peppers date back five to fifteen hundred years. Perry was struck by the variety: ten different kinds of peppers in all, including seven in a single location.

Perry:
Because you’re not going to be growing seven different kinds of peppers if you’re not making some really interesting food.

What’s more, she says the peppers appear to have been used in both fresh and dried forms—providing a broad spectrum of spices that could fuel dishes similar to today’s Mexican specialties.

When you think of ancient food, you probably … well, chances are you don’t think about ancient food very much. But you probably wouldn’t think it would be much like the food we eat today. This research suggests that Mexican food may be one of the world’s oldest surviving cuisines, and that its basic elements may be traced back thousands of years.

The ancient peppers—122 specimens in all—were found in a cave in Oaxaca, a region that remains influential in Mexican cooking today. The caves were used for shelter and storage by the ancient Zapotec people over the course of an entire millennium. The peppers there were by no means the oldest cultivated chili peppers ever found; Perry and her colleagues have found fossilized chili starch in Ecuador that dates back over 6,000 years.

In this case, it’s not the age of the peppers that matters most, but the fact that many different kinds of ancient cultivated chilis have been found in a single location. The peppers were actually discovered over forty years ago, but they were passed on to Perry only very recently. By closely examining the starch grains in the peppers, Perry was able to confirm that they were farmed, not wild, varieties, and to sort out the different varieties. She also found some whole stems, which were probably ripped from fresh peppers right in the cave, and torn-up fragments, which may have been dried, flaked peppers brought in from another location.

As Perry notes, you wouldn’t bother to keep so many different kinds of peppers in one place unless you needed them—most likely, for a variety of recipes that required slightly different flavors. The fact that other Mexican food staples were also found in the cave, including corn, beans, and squash, supports the possibility that these recipes were not so different from those of today. Of course, this doesn’t mean that recipes haven’t changed over time. But the basic elements of this popular cuisine appear to have all been there 1,500 years ago, and chances are, they were put to similar uses.

Original Article:

By Bob Hirshon

Science Netlinks

 

 

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