"Blue Corn and Chocolate"

Pineapples, peanuts, avocados, and the turkey are all popular foods that originated in the New World. In the recipes and historic overviews of Elizabeth Rozin's very famous book Blue Corn and Chocolate, we read about them as well as about the more usually covered New World foods -- corn, tomatoes, potatoes, capsicum peppers, chocolate, vanilla, and certain varieties of beans and squash/pumpkin.

Although the historic treatments are brief, I liked the combination of native American history with information about the acceptance of various New World food throughout the Old World. Just one instance of how Rozin profiles the spread of a food: her list of the many identities of one lowly food, cornmeal mush. With a variety of flavors and locales, it's known as American corn porridge with milk and sugar; Romanian mamaliga; African nshima, putu, ugali, and foo foo; Louisiana coush coush, West Indian cou-cou, and Italian polenta.

The recipes from many many cultures are very intriguing, and are organized to illustrate how widespread the foods have become. An east-coast American corn chowder recipe is followed by one for Chinese crab and corn soup and another for New Mexican posole. The peanut, native to South America, appears in recipes for soup from the American South and Africa, in English sauce for ham or pork, in Asian shrimp salad, Vietnamese dipping sauce, Malay curry, Indian croquettes, middle-American cookies and ice cream, and several other dishes in the book's peanut chapter.

Along with appealing recipes, Rozin gives as many reasons why the tomato has been distrusted as I've ever seen: including an Orthodox Jewish reaction that, being the color of blood, they must be taboo. She also shows how all the tomato prohibitions eventually disappeared. In contrast, the turkey fit perfectly into the late-Renaissance or Early Modern European love of large and showy roasts for the formal dining table. New World peppers were so quickly absorbed into native cuisines around the world that their origin became obscure. And despite early opposition, the potato also now seems native to many cuisines.

Only the illustrations are disappointing. At least in the hardback edition that I took out of the library, they are blurry in black and white, while the captions sometimes seem to refer to a larger color version. I wished I could make out the faint labels on the photo of Heinz ketchup bottles through the ages -- and figure out when the word "catsup" was replaced by "ketchup."

More obscure still, Rozin discusses at least briefly: manioc (source of tapioca that moved from the New World to Africa and Oceania), the American sunflower and its relative the Jerusalem artichoke; maple syrup; pecans; cashews and Brazil nuts (both native to Brazil); wild rice; and most obscure in my experience, the New World achiote -- small red seeds of the annato tree. Not even mentioned: quinoa, amaranth.

A fine book that deserves its excellent reputation, I find.