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Richard Jernigan -> RE: Arroz a la Cubana! (Mar. 1 2012 7:07:20)
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Ah well, I'm sure you have things we don't. Bought a can of black beans at the supermarket yesterday. They had at least six different brands, plus some others that were spiced up different ways. There are a lot more Mexican people in Austin than there were 30 years ago.
Speaking of Mexico, two friends and I spent the summer camping in Mexico in 1961, about a month of it in the high jungle in Quintana Roo and northern Guatemala. We stocked up on provisions in the market in Merida, Yucatan before heading out to the jungle. Couldn't find any red beans so we bought quite a few pounds of black.
In a Mayan village no more than three days' walk from the road it was my turn to cook. I set about preparing the fat little partridges we had shot on the trail, beans and rice. A crowd gathered to watch the strange habits of the gringos. Some of the kids had never seen beans of any kind. I suspect that most of the adults hadn't either.
It didn't surprise me that rice was foreign to the Yucatecans, but beans are a staple in central Mexico, and were throughout North America among the agricultural tribes when the white people showed up.
Jorge, our guide and translator was a kid our age, early twenties. We became good friends. Occasionally he would sample a few bites of our exotic cooking, but mostly he stuck to corn tortillas. I watched him for a full week while he ate nothing but tortillas and water.
In the 1930s while the excavations were going on at Chichen Itza, the Carnegie Institution sent a group to Yucatan to set the poor benighted Indians on the right path. They arrived at two conclusions. The Mayan method of agriculture was far more efficient than anything the Carnegie people proposed, and human life could not be sustained on the diet of the Mayans.
Jorge is about 5'2" (157.5 cm). The last time I saw him, 8 1/2 years ago, he was still going strong at age 67, working in his cornfield every day except Sunday. During our walkabout fifty years ago, on the rare occasions we had to cut brush to get to some interesting set of ruins, he could wear me down in an hour, and keep swinging his machete for another four hours.
I just read yesterday that when Cortez landed on the east coast of Yucatan in 1519, he asked the name of the place. The best the Spaniards could wrap their tongues around the reply came out to be "Yucatan". In fact their informant was saying, "I don't understand you."
RNJ
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