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23

Turkey tomales

circa 1540

AUTHOR: Bernardino de Sahagún,

FROM: Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España

(General History of the Things of New Spain)

Here are told the foods which the lords ate … turkey pasty cooked in a pot, or sprinkled with seeds; tamales of meat cooked with maize and yellow chili; roast turkey hen; roast quail … turkey with a sauce of small chilis, tomatoes and ground squash seeds, turkey with red chilis, turkey with yellow chilis, turkey with green chilis …

Turkeys arrived on the shores of England in the mid sixteenth century. They must have startled those who first saw them. With their exotic plumage, their strutting, their ugliness and the strange noises they uttered, they characterised the wonder of what merchants were importing from overseas at the time.

The turkey was so named because that was where people reckoned it came from. Merchants had been trading in what was then called the Levant – the eastern Mediterranean – and when they came across these big edible birds they snapped them up. The birds then spread across Europe and while the English thought they were from Turkey, other nations – the Dutch, Danes, Finns, Germans and French –thought they came from India. And so the French today call the turkey dinde – the coq d’Inde, or ‘cock of India’. Meanwhile, the Danish word kalkun comes from the name of an Indian port on the Malabar coast, Calicut. Turkeys were breeding there but they weren’t indigenous, having been brought to Calicut by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. After sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and travelling up the east coast of Africa, he had crossed to India and landed in Calicut in 1498. On board his ship were turkeys, brought by him from Mexico.

And it was from Mexico that they arrived in Turkey. So really we should call turkeys ‘mexicos’. Except that at the time Mexico was called the New Spain as the conquistadors – led by Hernán Cortés – were conquering and killing their way through the country from 1521. These ‘new spains’ had been domesticated by the Aztecs and they called them huexolotl, which evolved into the current Mexican word guajolote. But ‘turkey’ is easier to say, so we’ll stick to that.

Whatever their name, the Aztecs loved them. Fossils of turkeys have been found in the Mexican highlands that date back 10 million years, and by the early sixteenth century they were an important part of their diet. More than that, they were a key ingredient at festivals and feasts. Their meat was devoured and their feathers used as head-dresses and to add colour to jewellery.

The most detailed accounts of the Aztecs consuming turkey come from a Spanish Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, who was dispatched to the New Spain as a missionary in 1529. Having studied at the convent of Salamanca, he was, aged thirty, considered worthy of evangelising the natives. Doubtless he showed the right degree of religious zeal that it would take to convert to Catholicism those whom Cortés hadn’t killed. His companions reported that he never missed Matins and went into frequent ecstasies – of the religious kind.

It was only a few years since Cortés had defeated Montezuma (but not before joining him for a hot chocolate), the ruler of the Aztec nation, slaughtered thousands and torn down their altars. But life had settled down to a certain extent and Bernardino was tasked with getting to know the locals. ‘They chose out ten or twelve of the principal old men, and told me that with those I might communicate and that they would instruct me in any matters I should inquire of,’ he wrote. ‘With those appointed principal men I talked many days during two years. On all subjects on which we conferred they gave me pictures.’

Bernardino is a little modest about his endeavours. The men must have taken to him and his gentle nature and not just because he learnt their language and became a fluent speaker. His work, translatable as a ‘General History of the Things of New Spain’, is one of the great works of anthropology, accompanied by 2,000 detailed drawings produced by the Aztecs themselves.

The vivid picture he painted of the Aztecs ran to twelve books and a total of 2,400 pages detailing their society, economics, rituals and, of course, food. On which subject the Aztecs were quite keen, particularly when it came to eating people. But aside from freshly sacrificed and cooked young man, the Aztecs liked turkey, as did Bernardino. Given that in the early months of his arrival much of the food seemed to consist of ‘tadpoles, ants with wings, and worms’, turkey must have been a welcome relief.

Templo Mayor Library Mexico / Gianni Dagli Orti

Friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things in New Spain in mid-sixteenth century Mexico showcased drawings produced by the Aztecs (who liked eating turkey).

He found it ‘always tasty, savoury, of very pleasing odour’ and he noted the various ways his hosts cooked it – the section above from the eighth volume of the Historia being the closest we’ll get to a contemporary recipe – from boiling to roasting, served with different sauces, coloured with green, yellow and red chillies. But he was particularly taken by the turkey-stuffed tomales. These early wraps were made with a corn-based dough, usually stuffed with meat. The wrap – a local leaf – was discarded before eating and its contents sustained the conquistadors, who turned their noses up at the human- or ant-type items the menu otherwise had to offer.

Bernardino noted that one of the first things the Aztec women did as a feast day approached was to prepare the tomales, which they had taken to an art form. Young girls would aspire to twist and plait the dough, imprinting them with designs of seashells and shaping them into butterflies. The skill in their construction belies the Americanised reputation of Mexican food as a sloppy pile of lettuce, rice and beans. To honour the various gods, tomales were made with different fillings, be it beans and chilli, shrimps, fish or frogs. But our Spanish friar preferred his with turkey. ‘Very good-tasting, it leads the meat,’ he wrote. ‘It is the master, it is tasty, fat, savoury.’

As brilliant as Bernardino’s work was, however, it never saw the light of day in his lifetime – he stayed in Mexico until he died, aged ninety-one. The closer he worked with the natives, the less he believed in the task of converting them all to Catholicism. So honest was his description of their lives, in fact, that the Spanish authorities thought publication would be dangerous. They feared the Aztecs might return to their heathen ways. Much of the work also made uncomfortable reading on the subject of Cortés’s conquest, including many first-hand accounts of the terrible massacres he had perpetrated.

The work was quietly buried and didn’t see the light of day until an astonishing 250 years later. It was finally published in its full glory in 1829, by which time turkey had become widespread everywhere. Today it is virtually the national dish of Mexico, the ubiquitous mole poblano containing a delicious mix of turkey in chilli sauce, flavoured with chocolate and thickened with seeds and nuts.

It is not surprising the meat took off in Britain and Europe. The King of Spain ordered that each returning conquistador ship bring back ten turkeys – five male and five female. It soon replaced the stringy peacock or goose of banqueting tables. The English were well used to serving big birds and took to it quickly. Championed by Henry VIII, it regularly graced the tables of English and European royalty by the end of the sixteenth century.

By 1600 it had caught the eye of Shakespeare, who mentions it in Twelfth Night, clearly amused by the ridiculously aggressive pose of the bird, its puffed out feathers and strutting gait. ‘Here’s an overweening rogue!’ says Sir Toby Belch of the posturing Malvolio, to which Fabian replies: ‘O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!’