Reviews 



Old Foods in the New World 



by John R. Alden 



Until a decade or so ago, no one thought 

 about ancient societies as having cuisines. 

 Cuisines were high culture, like haute cou- 

 ture and symphony orchestras. France had 

 a cuisine; so did China. But that was about 

 it. In the United States people hved on 

 food like barbecue, baked beans, and com 

 on the cob, and certainly none of that qual- 

 ified as cuisine. As for the ancient world, 

 most of us figured those folks were just 

 happy to have a mess of pottage. 



Our perceptions have changed. 

 Cuisines no longer follow formal reper- 

 toires of ingredients, recipes, and tech- 

 niques. They are simply coherent styles of 

 selecting, preparing, flavoring, presenting, 

 and consuming food, and every culture, 

 region, social stratum, and ethnic group is 



recognized as having a cuisine of its own. 

 Fast-food is an element of modem Ameri- 

 can cuisine; so are com flakes and, in parts 

 of the country, com dogs. Futhermore, an- 

 cient societies had cuisines too. 



America's First Cuisines describes 

 what three of the New World's most im- 

 portant aboriginal societies — the Aztecs, 

 the Maya, and the Inca — ate and how they 

 went about eating it. Sophie Coe, an an- 

 thropologist and food historian specializ- 

 ing in Latin America, chose these groups 

 for two practical reasons. First, of all the 

 New World's disparate cultures, these 

 three made the greatest contribution to the 

 cornucopia spilling from the shelves of 

 today's supermarkets and filling the pages 

 of today's cookbooks and restaurant 



Prehistoric Mexicans made a protein-fortified bread by soaking 

 and cooking maize, a process known as nixtamalization. 



menus. Second, says Coe, "that is where 

 the information is." These societies are 

 simply better known than other New 

 World groups. Through contact period 

 chronicles, Coe has reconstmcted a fasci- 



America's First Cuisines, by Sophie D. 

 Coe. University of Texas Press, $35.00 

 ($14.95 paper); 276pp., illus. 



nating picture of how these prehistoric 

 Americans ate. 



Coe begins with a summary of the in- 

 gredients available to each of her three 

 groups. The list of domesticated animals is 

 surprisingly short. In Mesoamerica it in- 

 cluded only dogs, turkeys, honeybees, and 

 Muscovy ducks. South America had dogs 

 and Muscovy ducks, llama and alpaca, 

 and the guinea pig. Wild animals were ex- 

 tensively utiUzed by all three New World 

 cultures (game, remember, was also im- 

 portant in the cuisine of fifteenth- and six- 

 teenth-century Europe), but in terms of 

 foods they produced, these societies were 

 mainly dependent on things that grew in 

 the ground. 



The New World's staple grain, grown 

 from southem Canada all the way down to 

 the southem reaches of the Inca empire in 

 central Chile, was maize. Maize is just an- 

 other name for what people in flie United 

 States call com, but because com is some- 

 times used to describe otiier cereal grains, 

 the stuff that grows as high as an ele- 

 phant's eye in the fields of Oklahoma is in 

 Coe's book called maize. Whatever its 

 name, this was the most important item in 

 Aztec, Maya, and Inca diets. Infants were 

 weaned on maize, and many aboriginal 



76 Natural History 5/94 



