[Sca-cooks] Corn Bread

[tgl at mailer.uni-marburg.de]

> ... her arguement was: you find a turkey, bring it
> back to the cook & cook says:  "it's a bird!  It's a BIG bird!  Let's
> treat it like a (swan, peacock, other large fowl).  You hand the same
> cook a potatoe--or more convincingly, an ear of corn,  and poor cook says
> "Prithee, thou cross-gartered Varlet, what manner of object is this?"
> (Add appropriate nose wrinkle as necessary)  Maize looks nothing like any
> old world vegetable, and without the Native Americans about to show you
> how to use it, it's useless. ...

> If the Spaniards brought back South American recipes, where are they?

This line of argument presupposes that the Spaniards stumbled through
South America and Middle America with their eyes closed and that the
cooks at home were idiots too stupid to ask ...

While there may be no recipes extant for the preparation of cornbread in
Arawak (I don't know), and therefore there may be no recipes translated
from Arawak into Spanish, clearly there ARE early descriptions and
reports extant mentioning maize and its use. Take "De orbe nouo Petri
Martyris ab Angleria Mediolanensis ... 1530" ('About the new world by
Pietro Martire of Anghiera', 1530). There is an index of foreign words
(vocabula barbara), which includes:

   "Maizium granum ex quo conficitur panis"

which translates to something like:

   'Corn/maize grains from which bread is made'

Now, if I were a Castilian cook and if I were given some corn/maize in
1532 I knew what to try next.

Th.