Science Based Cuisine

Chocolate chip cookie

When we say chocolate, the common thought is that it is a sweet of some sort, like those ubiquitous chocolate chips or bars. Those are fairly recent, though - initially, chocolate was a drink. Well, a better drink than what most places in America think of as hot chocolate. That milky, overly sweet concoction that is provided as a patronizing nod to children while the "adults" have (bad) coffee is a tragic waste of the potential of chocolate.

Drinking Chocolate, Bean Traders, North Carolina

Chocolate de agua, Oaxaca, Mexicp

But there's a lesser known sibling to chocolate, a different product of the cacao bean: tejate.

Tejate

Perhaps the ancestral energy drink, it is purchased as a pick me up the middle of the day, drunk out of  colorful gourd cups. The white layer atop the giant bowl is pretty much cocoa butter, released by the slow massaging of the ground cacao with masa and various ingredients. A tejatera (tejate is almost exclusively made by women) will scoop out the liquid and separately top it with the fluffy white mass.

Lime treated cacao beans for tejate

Sweetening the drink is optional. The flavor is floral, chocolatey, light. Tejate is refreshing respite on a hot day, but preparing it is a laborious and manual process (with a surprisingly large number of ingredients.

Key ingredient to tejate - the seed of the mamey fruit

The Mexican dish menudo is a stew of organ meats (usually stomach and tendons) with chiles, and sometimes hominy, often eaten as curative for hangovers. Eating Mexican stews demonstrates convergent evolution with Vietnamese soups: the hot bowl is presented with uncooked vegetables and herbs to doctor up as one eats.

But a distinct flavor comes from the herb chepiche. It is ubiquitous in the Oaxacan market areas, and is intensely aromatic. So, is there a substitute? Sadly, according to Gourmet Sleuth - there isn't. So, it's a novel ingredient worth looking for - the aromatic profile is pretty unique.

Chepiche

For all the hullabaloo about "gourmet" food trucks and park devoted to them, rolling taquerias have been a mainstay in Houston dining - in these loncheras,  tacos come fast, flavorful and cheap, unceremoniously plopped onto the cheapest disposable plates, to be eaten while standing under the sun.

But on a recent trip to an Airline taco truck, I noticed a disturbing trend.

Note the yellowish tinge to the obligatory slice of lime.

The tell tale seeds confirmed my suspicion: they are distributing lemons.

Tamale from Radical Eats, Houston, TX

The US has a federal holiday commemorating Christopher Columbus, the alleged "discoverer" of the new word (although I think the ever sharp Oatmeal skewers this historical figure quite effectively). For what it's worth, a consequence of the contact is the transfer of crops from the New World to the Old, spreading them far, and change cuisines worldwide. The tomato transformed Italian cooking, for example, but another effect is that nutrient dense crops quickly became the main source of nutrition in poorer parts of Europe. Modern readers with computers may find it hard to believe, but there was a time that people literally had nothing more than corn to eat. The quick growing and human adapted corn (maize) gave rise to dishes like polenta, solving potential starvation issues.

But along with the rise of this monophagous (single sourced) diet came the spread of a disease: pellagra. Patients stricken had skin lesions, dementia, and, given the medical care at the time, died soon after. Primitive epidemiology tracked the problem to primarily corn eating populations. Perhaps it was contamination or some kind of pathogen in the corn. Pellagra reached epidemic proportions in the heavily corn consuming poor people of the southern USA.

Roasted sweet corn in a cup (elotes) at Max's Wine Dive, Houston, TX

We now know that pellagra wasn't caused by pathogen, it's a micronutrient deficiency in the vitamin niacin. What was confounding at the time, however, was that mesoamerican people also lived on a primarily corn-based diet, and yet had practically no incidence of pellagra. The key, as it turns out, was nixtamalization. The process of soaking maize in slaked lime - calcium hydroxide - well, basically most any alkali will work - made the naicin bioavailable, and also released the amino acid precursor tryptophan. The resulting maize is the basis for hominy and masa -- and all derivative dishes thereof, from antojitos to tortilla chips.

So, if you find yourself worried that your food "contains chemicals", "chemically processed", or involved things that cannot be pronounced easily - consider the history of maize in the Western diet. While one of the most genetically modified crops in human history, the link to pellagra, as it turns out, was insufficient technology.