Sometime in the dim recesses of prehistory, wandering bands of Siberian hunters crossed the Bering land bridge and over thousands of years fanned out to populate two whole continents. From the hot, windless jungles of what is now Columbia and Brazil, jaguar-fearing people migrated east over the high Andes mountains to the highlands 12,000 feet above sea level. Here they found tiny proto-potatoes that could survive through the harsh mountain frosts. Definitely by 2500 BCE, perhaps even as early as 6000 BCE, people had started cultivating these tubers and modifying them into the fantastic variety of potatoes grown by the Incas 4000 years later. In 1532 the Spanish conquered and colonized the native people and took a few notes along the way. Today, archeologists explore how the Incas and their precursors lived and exploited the available resources and from this information scholars discern political relationships. From the material record of land use, art, living arrangements, crop production, and food distribution archeologists have reconstructed the social systems and values of ancient Peruvians. Two crops--potatoes and maize--play especially vital roles in the political and social construction of ancient Peru.
The Incas are not known for gourmet cooking. Ovens were unknown, as was any means to fry. They could only prepare potatoes by boiling and roasting over open fires. But they didn’t leave us any lists of proportions, ingredients or timing. The Incas did not have any writing system (though they did have a complicated statistical system) and the explorers didn’t take down either proportions or ingredients, none of these recipes come directly from the Incas. The third recipe comes from a Peruvian book that made a study of all the different sorts of foods in Peru. Most of this food has been influenced by the influx of non-native foods after colonization, but the people today still use some of the same techniques employed by their ancient ancestors (Dieseldorf, 1967; Hocquenghem & Monson, 1995; Salaman, 1949). The first recipes are for two very simple ways of preparing potatoes; boiling and roasting, the only means the Andean people had to prepare food. The third recipe combines the two methods with roasted peppers seasoning boiled corn and potatoes. On feast days the resulting stew might include the flesh of a guinea pig, the only animal Incas kept for meat.
At your next barbecue try roasting potatoes over the coals. Oil potato halves and wrap them in foil. Place them in hot barbecue coals or on the rack. Cook about an hour until they give to a slight pressure between your thumb and forefinger, like baked potatoes. Eat hot with vinegar (not an actual Andean thing but darn tastey) and crushed red pepper.
Papas Sancochadas
(from La Cocina Piurana, informant: Irene from Huancacarpa Alto)
Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. When tender rub the skins off. Use in salads, as a snack, or as an appetizer.
Incan vegetable soup
I reconstructed this soup from descriptions of explorers and archeological evidence about what ancient Peruvians grew and what resources were available for cooking.
4 habanero peppers
3 jalepeno peppers
3 cups sliced potatoes
1 cup sliced sweet potatoes
1/2 of a cooked butternut squash
1 cup corn meal
salt, to taste
water to cover plus two cups
Chopped peanuts for garnish
Roast the peppers. Place on a rack above ash-covered coals and let them sit until blistered and charred like an Inca, or roast them in a dry skillet on high heat until soft and charred in places like an American. Core them, remove the seeds, and dice. Be careful about the volatile oils in the peppers. Don’t touch your face or genitals until you have washed your hands thoroughly. Put the peppers, the potatoes, and the sweet potatoes in a large soup pot. Add water to cover, plus a little more, about six cups. Boil the soup, then turn it down and simmer for 45 minutes until the potatoes form a thick broth. Remove a cup of broth from the pot and whisk in half the cornmeal. Replace and stir. Do the same with another cup of broth and the remaining corn meal. Add the salt. Serve warm as a thick stew, or cold as a paste. Garnish with chopped peanuts.
All of the ingredients in these recipes are native to Peru, grown on the steep slopes of the Andes or in the fertile river valleys. The Incas grew forty crops in all but the most important include beans, peanuts, quinoa, cotton, peppers, sweet potatoes and gourds, as well as potatoes and maize. There are two distinct but interconnected regions in Peru: the Pacific coast and the Andean highlands. The coast is warmer, flatter, and more fertile. This is good country for growing maize. The highlands where potatoes thrive are steep and wet with many extremes of temperature from day and night. Potatoes grow well in this climate. Potatoes can’t be cultivated below 6,000 feet, while maize can’t be grown above 11,000 feet. However, archeologists have found evidence of potatoes among the people on the coasts and maize among the people of the mountains, strong evidence for networks of trade between the two. However, on the steep slopes of the Andes wheels were impractical and llamas were the only beasts available as pack animals. Everything was carried from place to place on the backs of llamas and people. Therefore, the lighter they could make a burden, the better for the llamas and the better for trade. To make potatoes lighter for transport and to preserve them for long periods of time, the people made chuno, a dehydrating process that turns the potato into a light chunk resembling foam. Llama trains full of chuno could carry their loads much farther and faster than llamas burdened with heavy fresh potatoes. Archeologists have dug up bits of dehydrated potatoes hundreds of years old. Native people still make chuno today (Disselhoff, 1967; Salaman, 1949).
To make chuno you need fresh potatoes, a mountain side that freezes at night but warms up during the day and a large tarp. At nightfall, spread out the tarp and place the potatoes on it in a single layer. Let them freeze overnight. In mid-morning, when the potatoes have softened somewhat, walk all over them. Get the kids into the act. Repeat for five consecutive days until the potatoes resemble stiff foam. Store in a cool, dry place for up to 6 years.
Or if you don’t happen to have a mountainside you can try a nifty home experiment in your freezer. Place the potatoes on a cookie sheet and freeze overnight. When you wake up, take out the potatoes to thaw. When you get home in the afternoon walk all over the thawed potatoes. Repeat over several days until no water remains. The chuno can be ground up in the blender to make a fine flour that you can use to make fine pastries or add cakiness to cookies or cakes made with whole-wheat flour.
As the water freezes it expands and breaks the cells of the tuber. Walking on them in the morning squeezes out the melted ice. Over several days nearly all the water is extracted from the potatoes. Chuno can usually be stored for five or six years before going bad, though archeologists have dug up specimen hundreds of years old preserved under prime conditions. Andean peoples would soak it to reconstitute it or grind it up to make a starchy flour.
Once the people had a transportable commodity, how did they organize networks of trade? Through the interconnections of the basic unit of Andean society, the aylla. Ayllas are small tight-knit communities in which people worked together to perform all the social functions needed for survival. They cultivated land, performed rituals, raised children, and cared for the old and infirm. All the families in an aylla helped each other. Each aylla was very attached to their particular piece of land, though individuals did not own their own private pieces of it. The aylla was all about opposition and balance between the land and the people--the concept of yanatin that pervaded Andean society. Yanatin consists of "equal but different parts, opposite entities working together but with a tension that can breed inequality." The structure of the aylla and relationships between different aylla within an area changed over time as the political and social climate changed. In early times, families lived very close to their fields of cultivation and ayllas exchanged labor on a family basis. They grew all the food they needed themselves. Later, the people worked in exchange for community rights and feasts given by leaders in the village, who belonged to a separate, superior aylla. The leaders wanted the people to grow more valuable crops for trade with other communities. Gradually the networks of communities got bigger and bigger, building up layers of leaders and networks, until they formed the Inca Empire. The people in the highest strata no longer produced for themselves, but managed the production of others exclusively. As the political relationships changed, the use of the land changed which changed the relationship between the people and the land. The differing social status of corn and potatoes placed a higher value on land where corn could be grown and enabled the people who lived on that land to achieve higher political power (Hastorf, 1993).
Archeologists use the ebb and flow of hierarchacal social arrangements in ancient times to divide Andean civilization into five periods. A coherent culture centered in urban concentrations where powerful political leaders and traders gathered first appears in about 900 BCE. Until about 200 BCE lots of jungle motifs show up in art and pottery like the jaguar, eagle, and caymen, reflecting the people’s origin in the eastern jungles. But around 200 BCE the centers broke up and the area splintered into several different ethnic groups. The years from 200 BCE to 600 AD represent the Early Intermediate Period. But the urban centers rose again during the Middle Horizon from 600 to 1000 AD. The Wari culture dominated the southern region and established ceremonial centers along Lake Titicaca and in the Ayacucho Valley. In the Late Intermediate period the Chimu culture in the north gained prominence, but didn’t become the overarching culture. People felt loyalty to their local group, though several groups would band together during times of warfare. Out of these consolidations of small communes emerged the Inca empire. The highly influential inca leaders unified the region and organized massive projects for agriculture and infrastructure. During the Late Horizon, 1460 to 1532, the Inca rulers expanded their influence, dominating and reorganizing their subjects. During Spanish colonization Peruvians maintained the communal social structure of the aylla and continue to live in modified versions of ayllas even today (Hastorf, 1993).
Within an aylla the land was divided according to cycles of cropping. Fields in the highlands went through a rotation of potatoes, other crops, animal grazing and fallow years. This was the most effective way of using the higher-elevation land. Tilling the soil was a communal effort. They used a wooden foot plow called a taclla; basically, a blade on an angled pole with a hand grip and foot rest. To plow the field the men stood in a line and thrust their tacllas into the dirt and loosened a clod. They did this in unison and sang songs to keep rhythm. The women followed, turning over the clods, complete with the course grass that grew during the fallow period, to form two raised rows of bare earth separated by a trench. This simultaneously killed the grass and any weeds and provided fertilizer for the potato crop. Later they would plant potato seeds or chunks of tubers with eyes in the rows of raised earth. At harvest time they used the taclla again to uproot the potatoes (Salaman, 1949).
As the mountains ascend to their peaks, the ecological zones change very quickly as the altitude changes. Different elevations receive different amounts of light and water, and experience different ranges of temperature. Because the slopes are so steep, the ancient people built huge terraces up the mountainside, connected with elaborate systems of irrigation and drainage canals. Jack Weatherford (1993) describes the ruins of the small city of Machu Picchu in his compelling article "Early Andean Experimental Agriculture." At Machu Picchu the people built especially elaborate terraces, many the size of small fields, but some of them only six inches wide. To build the system, they hauled dirt from the river valley half a mile up the mountain side, comparable to hauling dirt from the Colorado River to flower boxes and garden plots on the rim of the Grand Canyon. The network of irrigation canals controlling runoff down the mountainside is one of the largest and most complicated engineering projects in the world. Each of these terraces becomes a micro-environment, each one receiving differing amounts and combinations of sun, rain, and altitude. Each flower box becomes a controlled experiment in plant cultivation and genetics. Weatherford speculates that Machu Picchu was an agricultural station, a space specially set up to create new varieties of potatoes. And the Andean people grew a huge variety of potatoes, thousands in all. "They sought to develop a different kind of plant for every type of soil, sun and moisture condition. They prized diversity. They wanted potatoes in a variety of sizes, textures and colors, from whites and yellows through purples, reds, oranges and browns." (Weatherford, 1993, 66) Instead of making one plant conform to a variety of conditions as many farmers do now, they made a variety of specific plants for a variety of specific conditions.
Potatoes dictated the rhythm of Andean life. Religious ceremonies coincided with important events in the agricultural cycle, like planting time and the end of the harvest. The year began with the summer solstice in December (Peru is in the southern hemisphere) and the planting of quinoa and potatoes. By March the crops were in full bloom and by April the people could begin harvesting maize and early potatoes. Harvest of late varieties continued into July when the people had great harvest festivals complete with feasts. In August they did maintenance work on the irrigation ditches, clearing them and building more when needed. September brought the sowing of maize, then in October and November they prepared the land for potatoes and other crops (Salaman, 1949).
Agriculture, productivity and fecundity weave through ancient Andean rituals. Animism was also important in their religious thought. They endowed the potato with the spirit of a sexually mature and fertile woman and portrayed her often in art. Archeologists have found hundreds of tuber-shaped pots, complete with stylized eyes. A few people made sacrifices to the potato spirit by cutting off their lips to expose their teeth like the eyes or "mouths" of fertile potatoes. Sometimes this mutilated figure appears in art as statues and pots. The mountain peaks served as deities, the spiritual system reflecting the bureaucratic social system. The higher peaks represented more important deities and the lower ones subordinate, down to one peak for each aylla. The higher peaks were more important because more people could see them, and they watched over more people. Andean social life utilized hierarchies in nearly every capacity. Community leaders would host huge feasts for the people of the village to demonstrate their wealth and power. Ritual feasts simultaneously integrated the community and established hierarchies. Hierarchies enabled them to build the huge irrigation works and other infrastructure. It established, facilitated, and protected trade among the communities. But it also created inequalities among the people that grew as the hierarchy got stronger.
Christine A Hastorf conducted an archeological study of the Sausa and Wanka people and wrote a book about it in 1993 called Agriculture and the onset of political inequality before the Inka. She describes how land use reveals political inequalities and how they grew over time. She studied the remains of the Sausa of the Upper Mantaro Valley dating from about 200 AD to 1460 when the Inca empire absorbed the group. The empire melded the Sausa and the Wanka, another rival group, who lived farther down the valley. Both groups had strong cultural identities in relation to both their territory and their population. Hastorf asserts that cultural and agricultural boundaries can interact. Different cultures will use the same resources in different ways according to their values. A change in agricultural patterns signals a change in political and cultural relationships. The division of land into various zones and the division of labor over the land affects and forms the social relations and, reciprocally, land use strategies. By examining the material remains of ancient land use strategies Hastorf found evidence that Andean society became more unequal over time. The people living in lower elevations could grow more maize, which increased their social stature and subordinated people like the Sausa who lived in higher elevations and could only grow potatoes.
In the Incan society maize was a spiritually and culturally loaded food. It enjoyed a high status in fertility rituals, and only the rulers were allowed to drink maize beer. If a aylla could grow maize on their land they usually would because of its higher status, even though the potato would yield more food per acre. They could trade it among neighboring groups for more valuable commodities. Therefore, the land at lower elevations was more desirable because it supported maize better. Potatoes were more of a utilitarian, subsistence-oriented crop, endowed with the spirits of fertility and productivity, but not the golden power of maize. Potatoes protected against hunger while maize was something closer to God. An Incan prayer, recorded by Garcilasco de la Vega, requests, "Multiply also the fruits of the earth, the papas [potatoes] and other foods that thou hast made, that men may not suffer from hunger and misery." Higher status households gained access to larger amounts of maize and, in connection with that, more textiles, metal work, serving vessels, and art. The highland people had a lower status because of their differential access to maize. As politics in the valley changed, new nodes of power developed, and the social structures and hierarchies changed. Invasions from neighbors like the Wanka and increasing hierarchical control by Inca rulers forced the Sausa to move up the mountain to a cooler elevation. Dominated by more powerful groups with access to warmer land, the Sausa specialized their cropping patterns more, growing potatoes on a larger scale for regional trading through new networks. This is just one example of how the Andean population became more unequal over time. Agriculture was a "nexus for the manipulation of social power" (Hastorf, 1993, 222) working to establish and maintain status, both high and low, over a large region. Potato cultivation showed the manipulation of power and hierarchy in concrete ways.
* * * * *
In 1532 a small pox plague struck the Incan people from the north and later that year Pizzarro’s army from the east found easy plunder in the Incan urban centers and ritual temples. They stole and melted down all the gold artifacts they could find in their search for wealth. But more important than the initial gold were the long range effects of colonialism. The Spanish integrated themselves into the existing structure, exploiting the infrastructure built by the Inca empire to further their own needs. Under the new colonial system the tribute given to the Inca rulers in honor of the gods became mandatory rent and taxes paid to the Spanish. With the Spanish reorganization, lower lords were given more power, while higher lords became simple tribute collectors, disrupting the long-established hierarchy. The Spanish also transformed and converted the religious system to their own ends. Rituals for potato fertility no longer involved animal sacrifice, but rather invoked the names of saints and disciples. The Spanish brought their own crops to Peru such as wheat for bread, grapes for wine, and olives for oil, as well as farm animals like pigs and cattle. They refused to eat potatoes themselves, but happily grew them to feed the enslaved native workers in the mines. Ignorant, the Spanish let the elaborate systems of canals and terraces fall into ruin. Today travelers need to use their imagination to see where the old canals ran and the terraces made steps up the mountainside.
Changing crop patterns and new animals meant changing cuisine. Now the Peruvians had dairy products, eggs and meat to add to their potatoes and corn. Potatoes take well to dairy products and other fatty foods to smooth out their mealiness. Today, the imported Spanish ingredients and original Peruvian ingredients meld seamlessly. Dishes today contain dairy products, European vegetables and Andean vegetables side by side. In Ocopa Arequipena, New World peanuts and Old World cheese go together into the same sauce with native chilies. Papas Chorreadas incorporates onions, lard, cream, butter, and cheese, with chilies and tomatoes and spreads it over potatoes.
(from "Papas/Batatas/Patatas/Potatoes" by Anne Meadows in Americas, May, 1990.)
". . . a regal blend of ground nuts, cheese, and chilies from the city of Arequipena."
8 yellow or new potatoes
1/2 cup peanut oil
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 cups peanuts (or 6 oz walnuts)
1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup crumbled queso fresco (or grated Munster cheese
1/4 teaspoon salt (1/2 teaspoon if using walnuts)
2-3 teaspoons seeded and chopped fresh chilies
8 leaves Boston or Romaine lettuce
8 hard boiled eggs, halved lengthwise
16 black olives
Boil the potatoes until they are tender, then drain thoroughly. Peel them just before serving leave them whole, or slice them to allow the sauce to coat them more evenly. Heat the oil and sauté the onion and garlic until they are soft. Grind the nuts for 30 seconds in a food processor. Add the milk, cheese, salt, chilies, onion, garlic and oil, and puree at high speed for about a minute, to a consistency like that of thick mayonnaise. Serve on individual plates, placing each potato on a lettuce leaf and dressing it with about 1/2 cup of sauce. Garnish with olives and hard-boiled eggs.
Papas Chorreadas
(from "Papas/Batatas/Patatas/Potatoes" by Anne Meadows in Americas, May, 1990)
8 yellow or new potatoes
1 tablespoon lard
1 tablespoon butter
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 scallions, cut into 1-inch lengths
2 or 3 habanero chilies, seeded and minced (optional)
3 large tomatoes peeled, seeded, and chopped (or 2 cups canned Italian plum tomatoes)
2/3 cup heavy cream
pinch of ground cumin (optional)
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano (optional)
1 teaspoon minced cilantro (fresh coriander) (optional)
salt and pepper, to taste
1 cup crumbled queso blanco (or grated Munster cheese)
Boil the potatoes until they are tender. Drain well and peel just before serving. Slice them or leave whole. Melt the butter and lard in a heavy frying pan. Add the scallions and onion and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the onions are transparent. Add the chilies and the tomatoes and continue cooking, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes. Stir in the cream, cumin, oregano, cilantro, slat and pepper. Stirring constantly, add the cheese. As soon as the cheese begins to melt, pour the sauce over the potatoes and serve immediately.
Peru is only the beginning of the incredible potato’s journey as food of the common people and political barometer. From the high slopes of Peru it traveled east to Ireland and Eastern Europe, then back west to the United States. At each of these stops it carries these same themes expressed in Peru. Potatoes are food for the masses, not a fine food for kings and queens. European countries present the flip side of the colonialism problem in Peru: how to fit the potato as a new food into an old diet full of milk, meat, and grain. They came up with entirely different ways to cook potatoes than the Incas. The potato serves as a window into agriculture and political relationships that dictate the distribution of land and cultivation. Different cultures use the same resources in different ways to produce different outcomes. The potato shows this relationship everywhere it goes.