The Jaguar's Roar - An Aztec Timeline
- Thread starter Vinization
- Start date
Perhaps, though with less "this belongs in a british museum!" and more ending up married to a native american princess because he thought she was Dulcineia
I wonder what happens when some Spaniards learn the Mesoamerican ballgame and export it to Europe (minus the death stuff, of course).
Would you believe me if I told you I completely forgot about it? I gotta do some research on this subject someday.
Relatable in all honesty
But hey decapitation is one way to spice up our national sport, or so says the french
Not necessarily anything. Sepak takraw is popular across Southeast Asia but the Spanish and Dutch don't play it.
Because they're busy fighting each other to have enough time learning it.
If you want the Spanish to adopt it then you're going to have to come up with a reason why they adopt the American ball game but not the equally popular and less-bloody Philippine ball game, since in real life they adopted neither.Because they're busy fighting each other to have enough time learning it.
Part 20: Nepantla Cuisine and its Implications
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Part 20: Nepantla Cuisine and its Implications
Part 20: Nepantla Cuisine and its Implications
Outskirts of Chalco
June 7, 1543
June 7, 1543
In a quaint country estate far away from the streets of the main cities of the Valley of Anahuac, an unremarkable Mexica noble was about to eat a dish he probably wouldn't eat in normal circumstances, since the food was, for the most part, still cultivated beyond the borders of the now heavily dilapidated Triple Alliance, despite all the changes that happened in the last couple of decades. His attendants assured him this weird-looking grain was the backbone of the diet of the men who came from beyond the eastern seas, but even so, or perhaps because of that, he couldn't help but feel uneasy.
"What am I looking at, again?" He asked an aide as he stared at the plate in front of him, the food on top of it looking like a pile of dead white maggots (1).
"The Europeans call it 'arroz', my lord," came the reply, the man's tone betraying his annoyance at the fact his superior's attention was focused on one single part of the banquet before him instead of literally anything else.
'Curse this weather,' the aristocrat thought. Had it not been for the ongoing drought and the fall in agricultural production it brought, he wouldn't have been forced to eat imported food. At least the smell wasn't half bad, so that was a good sign.
Some hours later, when he and his many acquaintances were finished, he leaned over to a Spanish guard who was sitting beside him. "If I get sick because of this stuff, I'll blame you," he whispered. It took the foreigner everything he had not to groan in response. He had come to this distant land to become another Juan Pizarro, but instead he was given the painfully boring job of guarding some pampered nobody.
Well, gold is gold.
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Given the level of scrutiny given to almost every aspect of the Nepantla Period, it should come as no surprise that there is a sizable amount of academic studies analyzing the evolution Mesoamerican cuisine went through from the 1520s onward. Before the Europeans' arrival, the diet of most of the Triple Alliance's inhabitants was dominated by the so called Three Sisters - maize, beans and squash - along with various spices, turkey, dog meat and various wild animals (including the axolotl, still considered a delicacy to this day despite its growing popularity as a pet (2)). For the first few decades of contact, whatever foods the Spanish brought with themselves to the mainland were seen as curiosities at best. The big exception to this rule was beef, whose consumption became a sign of wealth due to its rarity.
Everything changed, however, with the war against the Purépecha and the megadrought that preceded the Great Pestilence. The many clashes before, during and after the Siege of Tenochtitlan devastated the Valley of Anahuac, and the lands ceded to Spain in the Treaty of Xallapan were some of the most fertile the Triple Alliance possessed. The Mexica agriculture's recovery was cut short by the drought, which began in 1540 and didn't abate until right before the outbreak of the Great Pestilence, crippling the cultivation of critical foodstuffs for years on end. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and the central government authorized the import of large amounts of food from Cuba and other Spanish colonies to avoid a famine.
A depiction of Tlaloc, the Mexica god of rain.
The megadrought was seen by some contemporaries as a sign of his displeasure against the Code of Teotihuacan, since his worship required human sacrifice.
It was from this moment onward that Eurasian staples like rice, wheat, barley and oats asserted their presence in the Mexica diet, and from then on there would be various attempts, spearheaded by local aristocrats and governors, to farm these foreign grains within the Triple Alliance's borders. The Purépecha and other Mesoamerican peoples also learned of their existence eventually, but it took much longer for them to do so since their contact with the Spanish was far more limited. As commerce with the Andes became more and more common in the second half of the 16th century, the inhabitants of the Triple Alliance and its neighbors came in contact with the potato as well.
The food item that perhaps best embodies the changes Mesoamerican cuisine went through in the Nepantla Period is the tamale. A staple dish of native diet since millennia before European contact, one often saved for festivities, the tamale is made from maize dough which is first wrapped in either a husk or banana leaves, then steamed. It can have various fillings, such as fruit, eggs, fish, spices, miscellaneous types of meat or maybe none at all. Not only did the Mexica cooks experiment with the new ingredients the Europeans gave them - beef, pork and chicken became very popular fillings - but they learned to add pig lard to their maize dough, altering its consistency and creating the tamales millions of people know and love today.
When it comes to milk, at least 85% of Mesoamerica's inhabitants are lactose intolerant nowadays, a percentage that was undoubtedly higher at the beginning of trade with Europeans (3). This meant cow milk was out of the question as a drink, while some people discovered, in time, that goat milk was more bearable, as were its derivatives. As knowledge of cheesemaking gradually spread, goat cheese became an important component of the Mesoamerican diet, especially in the more arid regions. Some people would even mix goat milk with pulque (or octli in Nahuatl), an alcoholic, milk-colored beverage made from agave sap, giving birth to an entirely new beverage altogether. A similar process would happen with xocolatl, originally a bitter drink made from roasted and ground cocoa beans, then mixed whatever spices were available, such as vanilla and chili - sugar was added to the mix not long after the Treaty of Tlatelolco, completely altering its taste (4).
A Mexica woman pouring xocolatl into a vessel.
On the Spanish side, while the colonists were supposedly averse to eating Amerindian foods (out of a a fear they would "become Indians"), they did consider maize valuable enough to start planting it not just in their colonies but also in Andalusia, from where it spread to Sicily and the rest of Europe. Needless to say, they also became very fond of tamales, though whether the ones Europeans make can be classified as real tamales is controversial, to say the least (5). Another piece of the Mesoamerican menu which intrigued them was xocolatl, whose original bitterness made it be seen a medicine for various ailments and a stimulant. Of course, everything changed when someone decided to add sweeteners like sugar and honey to it, turning chocolate into an instant court favorite.
Finally the colonists also developed a taste for pulque, then regarded as sacred by the Mexica and thus the subject of many restrictions over who was allowed to drink it. The Spanish couldn't care less about any of that, as one could expect, and their fondness of pulque was second only to that of rum. Its consumption was so ubiquitous, in fact, that taxes on the sale of pulque became one of the main sources of income for the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, some describing it as the "second white gold" - the first, of course, being sugar.
All in all, Mesoamerica's already diverse array of dishes became even more of a melting pot during the Nepantla Period, and this was just the beginning.
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Notes:
(1) Assuming the description isn't obvious enough, he's looking at a plate of rice.
(2) Axolotls are a strange odd mix of ugly and cute, with derpy faces and really weird gills. They're also critically endangered, since their habitat ceased to exist.
(3) The overwhelming majority of Native Americans are lactose intolerant, so figured 85% is a plausible number.
(4) Special thanks to @jycee and @CountDVB for the ideas on how Mesoamerican drinks could be affected by European contact:
(5) You know those memes/jokes about Italians reacting to people putting ketchup on pizza and all that? Imagine something similar ITTL, but with tamales.
Given they're how popular they're becoming as pets (assuming the tiktok videos are accurate), I don't think they'll become extinct any time soon. I'd be very surprised if the don't end up extinct in the wild within this decade or the next, though.
I cant really eat beans so oh well :/
I do enjoy it with bean broth though! But even without it any piece of meat with rice will do for me, its always a banger
Then again I was raised thinking that food can only be a full meal if there's rice on it and otherwise its just a snack, so being a rice stan is kinda my thing