Product Description

After long weeks of boring, perhaps spoiled sea rations, one of the first things Spaniards sought in the New World was undoubtedly fresh food. Probably they found the local cuisine strange at first, but soon they were sending American plants and animals around the world, eventually enriching the cuisine of many cultures. Drawing on original accounts by Europeans and native Americans, this pioneering work offers the first detailed description of the cuisines of the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca. Sophie Coe begins with the basic foodstuffs, including maize, potatoes, beans, peanuts, squash, avocados, tomatoes, chocolate, and chiles, and explores their early history and domestication. She then describes how these foods were prepared, served, and preserved, giving many insights into the cultural and ritual practices that surrounded eating in these cultures. Coe also points out the similarities and differences among the three cuisines and compares them to Spanish cooking of the period, which, as she usefully reminds us, would seem as foreign to our tastes as the American foods seemed to theirs. Written in easily digested prose, America's First Cuisines will appeal to food enthusiasts as well as scholars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #349063 in Books
• Published on: 1994
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
Provides tantalizing snapshots of Native American cuisine and culture, especially at the first intersection with the Europeans. . . . It must not be missed by anyone professing a serious interest in America's cuisines for scientific or gustatory reasons. . . . Appropriate for any interested reader as well as for the academic consumer, this volume presents a wealth of excellent information and is a marvelous read. -- Review

Review
Sophie Coe, anthropologist and culinary historian, gives us a cook's tour of the nuclear areas of New World civilization. Her book is a botanically, zoologically, and nutritionally informed synthesis of information on the New World's contribution to the world's inventory of foodstuffs and, most importantly, on how the use of these foodstuffs coalesced in the culinary cultures of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca. It is the first work of its kind on the past civilizations of the New World. . . . This book is essential reading for Americanist anthropologists as well as scholars in a variety of other disciplines, and it constitutes serious pleasure reading for lay readers who are cooks, eaters, and students of foodways. (American Anthropologist )

Provides tantalizing snapshots of Native American cuisine and culture, especially at the first intersection with the Europeans. . . . It must not be missed by anyone professing a serious interest in America's cuisines for scientific or gustatory reasons. . . . Appropriate for any interested reader as well as for the academic consumer, this volume presents a wealth of excellent information and is a marvelous read. (Nahua Newsletter )

Customer Reviews

the history of my favorite foods!
This book is one of my favorites in recent years. I have become interested in the history of foods and Sophie Coe was an incredible scholar. Her books are great reading and amusing. Unfortunately she is no longer with us but she has left us with two wonderful books on the foods of the Americas (The True History of Chocolate--finished by her husband Michael Coe, another great writer of history. I highly reccommend this one as well).

What the Indians Ate
The list of food products discovered or created by the American Indians seems endless: corn, manioc (cassava, yuka, or tapioca) squash, beans, chocolate, tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, pineapples, avocados, vanilla, and chile peppers -- plus for your Thanksgiving table, turkey, and for your wicked moments, tobacco, coca, and magic mushrooms. Conversely, there's been very little written about pre-Columbian cusine. Coe's book fills this lacunae.

The Spanish destroyed every aspect of Indian culture they could but enough accounts of Indian food were recorded to partially construct what they ate. Coe focuses on the food of the three main civilizations in the Americas at the time of Columbus: the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. A lot more information survived about the food of the Aztecs than the other two.

Working with fragmentary information Coe has reconstructed the cuisines of these civilizations -- and rich indeed were the foods they ate -- dozens of variations of tortillas and tamales, a heavy reliance on chiles, innumerable varieties of potatoes, and a huge variety of chocolate dishes that seem ripe for the exploration by culinary adventurers, entrepreneurs, and writers of cook books. The notion, often advanced, that the pre-Columbian diet was boring, primitive, or deficient is refuted persuasively here.

The book suffers a bit from being an overly broad summary that left me hungry (groan!!!) for more information about many foods only barely mentioned. There's plenty of material here for additional books and questions to be answered. To echo an earlier reviewer: what did the Italians eat before the tomato amd the Irish before the potato?

Smallchief

A Great Book!
I purchased this book based entirely on the review by kneisl. I am glad that I did. I had no idea that so much of our everyday food came from the "New World." Peanuts, vanilla, tomatoes, chocolate, potatoes, beans, squash, tortillas, tamales, etc. all were eaten by the Aztec/Maya/ Inca Indians long before the Europeans arrived. Some of these food types date back to 7000 BC. I found this stunning. I had always incorrectly believed that most Mexican food came from Spain.

The book is thouroughly researched, well-written and easy to understand. There are more foods mentioned than those I have just described, so you'll have to read the book.