80 kilometres southwest of Santa Fe.
Other dishes likely to be encountered at the pueblos are fried red chillies, dried pods that are simply fried in lard or oil and eaten; green chilli stew, which is virtually identical to the Hispanic version; green pumpkin stew, which is pumpkin stewed with corn, onion, green chillies and garlic; and red chilli stew, which is usually made with pork.
Since meat was preserved in the old days by either salting or drying, an Indian favourite is beef or lamb jerky, which is often treated with chilli powder. The jerky may be added to stews if fresh meat is not available.
The Deer Dance at San Juan Pueblo, which takes place in February, is performed by the young people of the tribe to honour the deer for the many gifts it has given them. The profile of a deer dancer is the symbol of the San Juan Pueblo people.
The Spanish Contribution
The Old World meets the New and
transforms the eating habits of the region
Imagine Southwestern cuisine without beef, lamb, pork, chicken, coriander, cumin, limes, garlic, onions, wheat bread, rice, beer and wine. That’s where New World cooking would be without the Old. The Spanish colonists brought a new dimension to this ancient cuisine because the native peoples had never before experienced food sources such as cattle and wheat. The new foodstuffs merged with the old but did not overwhelm them. Rather, they were incorporated into the ancient techniques, and the result was a unique and highly spiced cuisine.
The Spaniards who first settled Santa Fe brought with them the seeds to plant the crops they needed as well as livestock. Since Santa Fe was the terminus of the 2,400-kilometre-long Camino Real (Royal Road) from Mexico City, it became a trading centre and both the beginning and the end for caravans of wagons. The Plaza in Santa Fe was where the wagons unloaded, and vigorous trading was done in foodstuffs.
The primary crops of the colonists were corn and squash. Historian Marc Simmons wrote about the early Spanish agriculture: “Other field crops included the frijol bean, horsebean, peas, squashes and pumpkins, melons, chilli, tobacco and cotton. Only a limited variety of garden vegetables seem to have been cultivated in the later Colonial period. Onions and garlic were regarded as staples in the diet, but other things, such as cucumbers, lettuce, beets and the small husk-tomato, are mentioned in the documents only rarely. The potato was practically unknown.”
Dancers performing a traditional Spanish danza folklórica, a Flamenco-style dance, at the Fiesta de Santa Fe, a three-daylong celebration that takes place every September.
The first and most important Old World influences were meats and grains. “Wherever Spaniards went, they took their livestock with them,” notes John C. Super, an expert on colonial Latin American history. “Pigs, sheep and cattle were as much a part of the conquest as Toledo steel and fighting mastiffs.”
Indeed they were. In fact, the introduction of livestock was so successful that the animals thrived even when they escaped into the wild. Within a century after the arrival of Columbus, the estimated New World population of cattle was 800,000, and of sheep, an astonishing 4.6 million. Sheep were introduced in 1598 by Capitán General Juan de Oñate. By the 1880s, there were millions of sheep in New Mexico and about 500,000 a year were exported. Today, the number of sheep produced remains at about half a million. With all that additional meat available, no wonder the cuisines of the Americas changed radically. Beef was readily added to such dishes as enchiladas, while pork was a favourite for carne adovada, the baked, chilli-marinated dish. Domestic fowl such as chickens added diversity as their meat was incorporated into the corn cuisine of Santa Fe.
Wheat was also instrumental in changing the ways the Native Americans cooked by offering an alternative to corn for making the most basic food of all: bread. It was planted in such abundance throughout Mexico that by the middle of the sixteenth century, it was more common in the New World than in Spain, where wheat supplies had dropped and the people were eating rye bread. In New Mexico, wheat tortillas eventually became as popular as those made with corn.
It is not generally known that New Mexico and El Paso are the two oldest wine-producing regions in the United States. A Franciscan friar, Augustin Rodríguez, is credited with bringing grape vines to southern New Mexico in 1580, about a hundred years before the friars in California planted their vineyards. By 1662, priests of the Mesilla Valley in southern New Mexico were regularly producing sacramental wine for Mass.
Making ristras, strings of chillies, by hand at the Rancho de las Golondrinas, which was a stopping place for caravans from Mexico and is now a living history museum.
Most of the Hispanic population of Santa Fe is the result of the early Spanish immigration from Mexico, and not from later Mexican immigration. The descendants of the early settlers have lived and prospered in the region for about 400 years, and today, together with all other Hispanics, make up about 40 percent of the population. Thus the Hispanics of New Mexico refer to their Spanish heritage.
Hot, Hotter, Hottest
The glorious chilli comes in many varieties,
each with its own shape, size, colour and flavour
Surprisingly, the now ubiquitous chillies are not native to New Mexico at all, but were introduced from Central America by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. According to one member of the Antonio Espejo expedition of 1582-83, Baltasar Obregón, “They have no chilli, but the natives were given some seed to plant.” Even by 1601, chillies were still not on the list of lndian crops, according to colonist Francisco de Valverde, who also complained that mice were a pest that ate chilli pods off the plants in the field.
After the Spanish began settlement of the area, the cultivation of chillies developed rapidly, and soon they were grown all over New Mexico. It is likely that many different varieties were cultivated, including early forms of jalapeños, serranos, anchos and pasillas. But one variety that adapted particularly well to New Mexico was a long green chilli that turned red in the autumn. Formerly called Anaheim because of its transfer to California around 1900, the New Mexican chillies were cultivated for hundreds of years in the region with such dedication that several distinct varieties developed. These varieties, Chimayó and Española, are still planted today in the fields that they were grown in centuries ago; they are a small, distinct part of the tonnes of chilli pods produced each year in New Mexico.
Capsaicinoids, the heat-producing substances in chillies, can be seen here as golden droplets in the centre below the seeds.
In 1846, William Emory, Chief Engineer of the Army’s Topographic Unit, was surveying the New Mexico landscape and its customs. He described a meal eaten in Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque: “Roast chicken, stuffed with onions; then mutton, boiled with onions; then followed various other dishes, all dressed with the everlasting onion; and the whole terminated by chilli, the glory of New Mexico.”
Emory went on to relate his experience with chillies: “Chilli the Mexicans consider the chef-d’oeuvre of the cuisine, and seem really to revel in it; but the first mouthful brought the tears trickling down my cheeks, very much to the amusement of the spectators with their leather-lined throats. It was red pepper, stuffed with minced meat.”
