History
The corn tortilla, with many variants, has been a staple food in North American and Mesoamerican cultures since pre-Columbian times. It predates the alternative wheat flour version of the tortilla (tortilla de harina or tortilla de trigo) in all such cultures, as wheat was not grown in the Americas prior to European contact.
In Aztec times, corn tortillas were served at every meal. The Aztec commoner ate two to three corn tortillas with each meal. The Aztecs ate corn tortillas plain or by dipping them in mole or a chili pepper and water sauce. The Aztec marketplace sold tortillas that were filled with: turkey meat, turkey eggs, beans, honey, squash, tuna (a type of cactus fruit) and chili pepper.
Analogous staple foods in New World cultures, made from nixtamal and serving a similar nutritional function, include the sope, the totopo, the gordita, and the tlacoyo of Mexico, the pupusa of Central America, and the arepa of northern South America.
The tamal (or tamale) of Mexico, Central America and northern South America is also made from nixtamal, but is much thicker and is a dish unto itself, usually including other ingredients and flavors, rather than a staple food used in other dishes.
Read more about this topic: Corn Tortilla
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)