Peace be upon you, When Mexico's leading writer, Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz, arrived in New Delhi in 1962 to take up his post as ambassador to India, he quickly ran across a culinary puzzle. Although Mexico and India were on opposite sides of the globe, the brown, spicy, aromatic curries that he was offered in India sparked memories of Mexico's national dish, mole (pronounced MO-lay). Is mole, he wondered, "an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce?" How could this seeming coincidence of "gastronomic geography" be explained?
Laborious to produce, mole is served for weddings, festivals and national holidays. The legend of its origin in the convents of 18th-century Puebla, the second city of New Spainas Mexico was then calledis part of the nation's popular history, recounted time and again in newspapers, school textbooks, guidebooks and even on paper placemats in restaurants. Mole comes in many varieties, but it usually contains ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, peppercorns, anise, coriander, chocolate, chiles, almonds, pumpkin seeds, raisins, bread and tortillasall ground together and cooked in a light broth to make a harmonious brown sauce that is served with turkey, chicken or vegetable dishes The high cuisine of medieval Islam, one of the most sophisticated the world had seen, flourished from the eighth century on. It originated in Baghdad, where cooks had the advantage of being able to adapt a Persian cuisine that had developed over the past thousand years, and it was quickly adopted in the other cities of Islam. With the diffusion of Islam, the cuisine was transplanted to new territories. One of the most important was the Iberian Peninsula, whose southern two-thirds came under Arab rule in the eighth century. Watered by five rivers and greener than either their arid homelands or the other lands they had conquered, al-Andalus, as Muslim Spain was called, held out to the Arab and Berber settlers the promise of being a culinary paradise on earth. In the valleys, farmers grew wheat, grapes and olives. In the hills, shepherds tended the sheep and goats that the Arabs favored for meat dishes. But other culinary resources that the Arab elite had come to expect were lacking. The settlers immediately set about correcting this, transforming the landscape of al-Andalus and the cuisine it supported. They built stone irrigation channels through orchards and fields and filled them with river water raised by towering water wheels (norias). They installed walled gardens (huertas) where they could raise slips and cuttings of their favorite fruit trees. As early as the eighth century, the amir `Abd al-Rahman I introduced the date palm into Spain, and he happily accepted a pomegranate variety from Damascus offered to him by the chief judge of Córdoba. A century later the poet al-Ghazal returned from a mission to the East with a fine fig cultivar that he had smuggled out of Constantinople in a package of books. The Muslims also introduced rice for fine pilafs, sugar for drinks and sweets, saffron to add aroma and color to their dishes and a wide variety of their favorite fruits and vegetables, including apricots, oranges, limes, artichokes, carrots, spinach and eggplant. They grew coriander, mint, thyme, fennel, cumin and caraway; the spices and aromatics that they could not growsuch as black pepper, cinnamon, spikenard, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, galingale, musk and camphorthey imported. As in the rest of Islam, the Spanish Muslims built granaries (alhóndigas) to store grain to be distributed in case of hardship. And they set up their characteristic food-processing plants: distilleries to produce rose- and orange-blossom water to perfume their foods and refineries to make fine white sugar. The court kitchens of Córdoba and Granada, cooks could now produce the dishes of high Islamic cuisine. There were the pilaus, made by frying rice or thin wheat noodles and then simmering them in an aromatic liquid until it was fully absorbed. Another family of dishes consisted of delicate dumplings (albondigas) of meats pounded with seasonings. And there were the most characteristic meat dishes: meltingly tender spicy stews. Flavored with a variety of herbs and spices, these stews were cooked in earthenware pots nestled in circular holes in charcoal-heated masonry bench stoves. Some were green with spinach and coriander. Others were golden with saffron. And the most complex were flavored with cinnamon, cloves, peppercorns, almonds and raisins and thickened with eggs or breadcrumbs. Other great creations of the Muslim kitchen were based on clarified white sugar. Sweetened drinks (sharbat) were flavored with ground nuts, citrus fruits and pomegranates. Jams were made of rose petals, oranges and apricots, and dense pastes of quinces. Figurines were modeled from a white paste of sugar mixed with gum (alfenique). And a wide variety of confections such as marzipan was created from sugar and nuts. It is small wonder that Spanish Christians eyed the cuisine of the Muslims with envy. Over the centuries, they adopted their rice and noodle pilaus, their albondigas, their aromatic stews of lamb, kid and chicken, and their sharbats, jams, fruit pastes, alfenique and marzipan. The modifications that they introduced, such as adding pork to the list of meats, baking raised breads instead of flat breads and distilling wine and molasses instead of flower petals, did not change the basic structure of the cuisine. By the late Middle Ages, this Christian version of the cuisine of al-Andalus was famous as the finest in Europe. In 1611, Francisco Martínez Montiño, the head cook of King Philip III, recorded it in the 500 densely packed pages of his Arte de Cocina, Pasteleria, Vizcocheria, y Conserveria (Art of Cooking, Cake Making, Biscuit Making and Conserving). Almost a century earlier, Christian Spanish cuisine had already reached the Americas. In 1492the very year in which the Christians took Granada, the last Muslim outpost in al-AndalusColumbus had set sail. Within 30 years, Cortés had captured Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital that we now know as Mexico City. He sent back glowing reports of the lavish banquets of Moctezuma as proof that he had conquered a rich and powerful empire. But he and his men had embarked on their perilous adventure to create a New Spain, and they had not the slightest intention of adopting Aztec cuisine, with its maize (corn) flatbreads and unfamiliar dishes. They were going to replicate the cuisine of their homeland. So once more, the cuisine of medieval Islam was transplanted. Within five years of arriving in Mexico, Cortés had established a sugar plantation. Galleons arrived from Spain laden with seed wheat, sheep, goats and cattle, and wooden planters carrying citrus, fig and pomegranate trees. Within a generation or two, the culinary landscape of Mexico had been transformed to resemble that of the Islamic world. Shepherds followed their flocks through the dry scrub on the mountain slopes of central Mexico. Stone irrigation channels filled by the traditional noria threaded their way across the landscape. Fields of foreign wheat jostled against fields of native maize. Rice was well established. Towns constructed alhóndigas to store these grains. Stills transformed molasses into aguardiente and refineries processed sugar for confectionary. In one set of manuscripts, the Recetario de Dominga de Guzmán (Recipe Book of Dominga de Guzmán), compiled around 1750, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the cook in the act of adapting the traditional dishes of al-Andalus to the circumstances of New Spain. In the first of two recipes for braised fowl, the ingredients include onion, oregano, mint, parsley, garlic, cumin, ham, sausage, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper and capers. This is simply titled "Morisco" to indicate Muslim originsalthough the ham and the sausage are obviously Christian, not Muslim. The second, called "Mestizo" or "mixed race," drops the typically Islamic cloves, cinnamon and black pepper and substitutes Mexican tomatoes and chiles. Sometime in the 18th century, though, the brown sauces took on the collective name mole, even though some of the older Spanish names also persisted. Mole had multiple resonances in the Mexican kitchen. In the Aztec language, Nahuatl, still spoken by many servants, molli meant "sauce." In Portuguese, mollo (pronounced something like "molio" in English) also meant "sauce," and many recipes in Martínez Montiño's collection went by this name. And in Spanish, moler means "to grind," the crucial technique used in preparing these sauces. Mole therefore was a word easily recognizable by everyone in the kitchen and one that made it easy for the mistress of a house or a head cook to communicate with the servants who carried out all the menial tasks. But for all these substitutions and changes in terminology, the basic techniques and structure of the Islamic cuisine persisted in New Spain. The manuscript cookbooks contain recipes for pilaus of rice or thin noodles that could have come straight from the court of Córdoba. So too could the acidic, herby green sauces, rich in coriander. Or the recipe for "Rabbits in Sauce" (Conejos en Mollo), consisting of a base of fried onions to which pieces of rabbit were added, seasoned with pepper, nutmeg and ginger, stewed with stock, and finished with vinegar and saffron. Or, again, the "Chicken in Nut Sauce" (Pollo en Nogada) in which quartered chickens were simmered with cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, saffron and a little vinegar, then fried and sauced with a mixture of ground cloves, cumin, garlic, breadcrumbs and nuts. And the complex, expensive confectionsmarzipan and nut brittles, candied fruits, luscious jams, fruit pastes and leathers and fruits preserved in syrupnot only derive from the Islamic tradition but often retained even the Arabic names, such as jarabe and almibar for syrups. Today Mexican families still sit down to dinners that reveal their Islamic origins. They begin with a "watery" soup (sopa aguada), such as a broth with tiny albondigas. Then comes a "dry soup" (sopa seca), such as "Spanish rice," which is none other than the pilau of the Islamic world. The main course is a piece of chicken or meat accompanied by a green sauce, a nut sauce (nogada), an almond sauce (almendrada) or a spicy reddish-brown sauce (mole). After the meal comes a quince paste, with a little fresh cheese. Accompanying the meal is a refreshing drinkan agua fresca, as the Islamic sharbat is called in Mexicoa colorful, lightly sweetened homemade beverage of lime, melon or milky ground rice with almonds and cinnamon. [Rachel Laudan, Saudi Aramco World, May/June 2004, pp 32-9, abridged] May Allah Almighty continue to bless us all with good food, ameen! In peace, f ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Join modern day disciples reach the disfigured and poor with hope and healing http://us.click.yahoo.com/lMct6A/Vp3LAA/i1hLAA/TXWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** {Invite (mankind, O Muhammad ) to the Way of your Lord (i.e. Islam) with wisdom (i.e. with the Divine Inspiration and the Qur'an) and fair preaching, and argue with them in a way that is better. 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