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What an amazing Indigenous culinary herb I discovered yesterday at the Mexican grocer- a zingy, very fresh, pungent plant called Papalo – or in the language spoken by the Aztecs, Papalotl, which translates to Butterfly, perhaps because the scent of the plant attracts them.
As I was looking around the produce section I bumped into an acquaintance of mine & he was holding a bunch of this plant that I couldn’t identify. It was so fragrant I could detect its powerful scent from 3 steps away. At first I mistook it for Nasturtium leaves. It packed that kind of spicy, sharp kick. I asked my friend, ‘What IS that plant??’
He responded, ‘Oh haven’t you ever had this? You should try it. It’s called papalo.’ I started asking 20 questions – and he said that you can eat it raw – and I took a leaf that he offered me while we were standing in line for the cash register. As the impact of the flavor sunk in, I realized that there were some familiar notes, and also some flavor elements that I can’t even describe – I grabbed a bunch & brought it home and started looking up info, and immediately started cooking with it. I was crazy excited over this discovery.
I made fried squash blossoms rolled in blue Native cornmeal, with a filling of rice & beans and carnitas (pork), flavored with this magnificent plant. In some quarters it is called Summer Coriander, Bolivian Coriander, and various other names. It grows wild throughout Arizona, Mexico and West Texas. How have I never heard of this plant before???
Here are a few useful links with more information & recipes.
http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Articles/Exotic-Herbs-Spices-and-Salts-639/papalo.aspx/
http://www.appalachianfeet.com/2010/05/07/how-to-grow-and-use-papalo-wrecipes/
http://nicholsgardennursery.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/papalo-or-summer-cilantro/
See if you can lay hands on this amazing herb which has been used for thousands of years by Native Peoples.
You want to say Chocolate in Nahuatl (Aztec)? This is SO cool: http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=xocolatl
Xocolatl was always reserved for the royal court before the arrival of the Spanish.
Hueytlatoani Matecuhzoma, Rey de los Mexicas de 1502 a 1520- aka Montezuma, if you have read ‘Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook’- served this food of the gods in golden goblets. It was definitely not your gamma’s can of Hersey’s Chocolate Syrup (remember those?). “Cacao beans had been roasted, ground, then mixed with corn meal, vanilla, peppers, spices, and herbs.” This is actually more or less correct- yay for Betty Crocker. And Betty also correctly notes that cacao beans served as currency in the primarily cashless economy of the Aztec empire.
I visited Teotihuacan a little over a year ago and was able to climb the Temple of the Sun with a friend from Fiji and a Maori woman visiting from New Zealand. Those Aztecs knew what time it was and they made some pretty big clocks and calendars to keep everything on schedule. They drank their chocolate out of solid gold goblets, which were probably melted down and are now probably adorning the alter of the cathedral in Barcelona or something.
Around the time of the Quincentennial (1992), Peruvian people on the other side of the Equator made a collective statement and demanded of Spain the approximately One Trillion dollars worth of silver alone that was stolen from a mountain in their ancestral domains. Before Columbus arrived and so rudely interrupted everyone’s civilizations they had been engaging in marvelous, sophisticated agricultural development in the middle of the Amazonian region, terraforming the earth with terra preta. Of course at the time all of Europe was primarily a gold-based economy, and the Far East was strictly silver, and had been for about 200-300 years already since the Dutch Bourse was founded. Looking back a century or two before that, the Champagne Fairs had previously confirmed that China and India preferred to trade in silver rather than gold as the precious metal underpinning the economies of their numerous kingdoms and empires.
In this continent, the Aztecs could eat their currency if need be- and that’s an interesting contrast to King Midas, who was not able to eat the food he turned to gold with a touch of his hand. Not very nutritious, plus it sits a bit heavy on the stomach. But it was in part gold the reason Cortés showed up in the 1500’s and was introduced to chocolate and maize: silver showed up on the radar of the Spanish court soon thereafter, and then the ravaging of South America began as well.
Chocolate is one of many foods that we Native American people have developed over the past 10,000 years or so, and which now constitute three-fifths of all crops in cultivation across the globe. If you sit down to a conventional Thanksgiving dinner, you know what I mean: Potatoes, corn or cornbread stuffing, cranberries, turkey, pumpkin pie, beans. Yup that’s all Indigenous – these form part of our collective Native intangible assets, our cultural and intellectual histories.
Until “1492, Europeans had never tasted avocados, beans (lima, kidney, pea, shell, string and others), cacao (for chocolate), cassava, chicle (for chewing gum), chilies, corn, hickory nuts, jicama, maple syrup, manioc, papayas, peanuts, pecans, peppers, persimmons, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins, squashes, sunflower seeds, sweet potatoes, tapioca, tomatoes or vanilla. Nor had they worn clothes woven from long-fiber cotton. In all, Native Americans have contributed more than 300 food crops to the world.
“Native Americans in the central Mexican state of Puebla began collecting and domesticating wild plants about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. By about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago about 10 percent of their food came from cultivated products; by about 5,400 years ago the amount ratcheted up to some 30 percent. Archaeological evidence indicates that by 5000 B.C., Native Americans began farming using indigenous agricultural practices as well as those learned from Mexican and Central American cultures.” This is a pretty decent summary of the history and impact of Native foods on modern and post-modern human history. http://www.allbusiness.com/agriculture-forestry-fishing-hunting/331083-1.html
Wikipedia has a more comprehensive examination of Native foods; and an excellent reference book I recommend is “Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World”, edited by Nelson Foster & Linda S. Cordell, University of Arizona Press, 1992. Since that book appeared, another important book has since come to print, although its focus is not specifically on food.
“1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columus” by Charles C. Mann, confirms all of this and additionally presents important new evidence of previously unknown agricultural practice in ancient South America. “Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astonomy, and mathermatics, including the zero.” — from “1491” (c) 2005 Knopt Press. – please see chapter 6 in Section II.
So back to Chocolate. You want to show some love to your loved-one for Saint Valentine’s Day, and of course chocolate is the one of the holy trinity of Valentine’s Day traditions. Chocolate, flowers and Valentine’s day cards. It’s a little more elaborate than “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness,” (Omar Khayyam -1048-1131- a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer). I don’t know, this could be a serious toss-up, depending on the wine and the Thou (wink). Valentine was a Christian martyr and I’m still not completely clear on how Roman religious persecution and violence eventually got conflated with Cupid (who is a primordial god, son of Venus and Mercury- who knew?).
If you crave even more obscure origins of Valentine, go all the way back to Lupercalia, a fertility festival in the pre-Roman world: “ Lupercalia was a very ancient, possibly pre-Roman pastoral festival, observed on February 15 to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. Lupercalia subsumed Februa, a possibly earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February its name.” God I love Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupercalia
So, eat some Godiva chocolates (you know, the lady who rides around naked on a horse), make a batch of fudge, paint your lover’s body with a little melted ganache- and connect the dots between ancient pre-America and ancient pre-Europe. And thank whichever gods are responsible for giving chocolate to the whole world.
Richard's table 
