SC - Horsemeat, was Re: "cruel food"- long response.

[Michelle "TJ" Brunzie]

Greetings

The Tribe you referred to is indeed the Hopi (AZ).  They make a paper thin
"bread" called piki.  You can buy it around here on feast days, but it's
not very common.  The blue corn from which it is made is common.  It looks
turquoise when fresh, dk blue when it's dried and ground and almost black
when it's baked.  To my knowledge, no additives to alter the color.

Last year, I saw a place in Albuquerque where these seeds where available 
(only open on Thursdays; and they have Hopi pink corn too):

Native Seed Search
144 Harvard Dr SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106
(505) 268-9233

I don't know if this store is still open. Their main store is in Tucson,
AZ, but I do not know the address or phone for that store.

tortillas are fairly recent (spanish colonial?).  Out here on the Navajo
Reservation, the traditional breakfast is blue cornmeal mush: taa'niil,
also called tanaashghizh by some of the Elders.  My Young and Morgan
Ethnographic dictionary does not give a date for the estimated age of this
word.  

In spanish, the same dish is called atole'.  I don't know the age on that
one either, but I suspect it is pre-conquest.  If the "Chaco Corridor"
theory is true, it may have come from old Mexico along with chiles, corn,
parrots and copper bells, etc.  If you really want to stretch it, the word
does sort of look Nahuatl....

pondering,

Ariann
ariann at nmia.com
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/7868/



On Tue, 6 Jul 1999 snowfire at mail.snet.net wrote:
> 
> Lastly.     Blue tortillas.  I saw a documentary on the TV a few years       
>             ago that explained that there was a certain New Mexican tribe 
> 	    (Hopi maybe) that had traditionally cooked blue tortillas, 	    
> 	    and on analysis by the anthro people, it was found that by adding 
> 	    just enough of a certain ingredient (don't remember what it was 
> 	    sorry) to the tortilla recipe, the cooked tortillas acheived a 
> 	    certain blue colour (they were being cooked very thinly on a 
> 	    heated bakestone). Apparently the reaction causing the blue 
> 	    colour produced or activated a certain a mineral not otherwise 
> 	    found in the diet of the people.   
> 
> 	    As weird as this sounds (maybe not?), I just wonder if anyone    
>             else had heard anything about this.  I know blue tortillas are 
> 	    available in stores sometimes, as well as the nacho chips, but 
> 	    they're made of blue corn and are not the same as the ones 	    
> mentioned above?
> 
> Elysant
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