The primary crops of the colonists were corn and squash. Historian Marc Simmons wrote about the early Spanish agriculture: “Other field crops included the frijol bean, horsebean, peas, squashes and pumpkins, melons, chilli, tobacco and cotton. Only a limited variety of garden vegetables seem to have been cultivated in the later Colonial period. Onions and garlic were regarded as staples in the diet, but other things, such as cucumbers, lettuce, beets and the small husk-tomato, are mentioned in the documents only rarely. The potato was practically unknown.”
Dancers performing a traditional Spanish danza folklórica, a Flamenco-style dance, at the Fiesta de Santa Fe, a three-daylong celebration that takes place every September.
The first and most important Old World influences were meats and grains. “Wherever Spaniards went, they took their livestock with them,” notes John C. Super, an expert on colonial Latin American history. “Pigs, sheep and cattle were as much a part of the conquest as Toledo steel and fighting mastiffs.”
Indeed they were. In fact, the introduction of livestock was so successful that the animals thrived even when they escaped into the wild. Within a century after the arrival of Columbus, the estimated New World population of cattle was 800,000, and of sheep, an astonishing 4.6 million. Sheep were introduced in 1598 by Capitán General Juan de Oñate. By the 1880s, there were millions of sheep in New Mexico and about 500,000 a year were exported. Today, the number of sheep produced remains at about half a million. With all that additional meat available, no wonder the cuisines of the Americas changed radically. Beef was readily added to such dishes as enchiladas, while pork was a favourite for carne adovada, the baked, chilli-marinated dish. Domestic fowl such as chickens added diversity as their meat was incorporated into the corn cuisine of Santa Fe.
Wheat was also instrumental in changing the ways the Native Americans cooked by offering an alternative to corn for making the most basic food of all: bread. It was planted in such abundance throughout Mexico that by the middle of the sixteenth century, it was more common in the New World than in Spain, where wheat supplies had dropped and the people were eating rye bread. In New Mexico, wheat tortillas eventually became as popular as those made with corn.
It is not generally known that New Mexico and El Paso are the two oldest wine-producing regions in the United States. A Franciscan friar, Augustin Rodríguez, is credited with bringing grape vines to southern New Mexico in 1580, about a hundred years before the friars in California planted their vineyards. By 1662, priests of the Mesilla Valley in southern New Mexico were regularly producing sacramental wine for Mass.
Making ristras, strings of chillies, by hand at the Rancho de las Golondrinas, which was a stopping place for caravans from Mexico and is now a living history museum.
Most of the Hispanic population of Santa Fe is the result of the early Spanish immigration from Mexico, and not from later Mexican immigration. The descendants of the early settlers have lived and prospered in the region for about 400 years, and today, together with all other Hispanics, make up about 40 percent of the population. Thus the Hispanics of New Mexico refer to their Spanish heritage.
Hot, Hotter, Hottest
The glorious chilli comes in many varieties,
each with its own shape, size, colour and flavour
Surprisingly, the now ubiquitous chillies are not native to New Mexico at all, but were introduced from Central America by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. According to one member of the Antonio Espejo expedition of 1582-83, Baltasar Obregón, “They have no chilli, but the natives were given some seed to plant.” Even by 1601, chillies were still not on the list of lndian crops, according to colonist Francisco de Valverde, who also complained that mice were a pest that ate chilli pods off the plants in the field.
After the Spanish began settlement of the area, the cultivation of chillies developed rapidly, and soon they were grown all over New Mexico. It is likely that many different varieties were cultivated, including early forms of jalapeños, serranos, anchos and pasillas. But one variety that adapted particularly well to New Mexico was a long green chilli that turned red in the autumn. Formerly called Anaheim because of its transfer to California around 1900, the New Mexican chillies were cultivated for hundreds of years in the region with such dedication that several distinct varieties developed. These varieties, Chimayó and Española, are still planted today in the fields that they were grown in centuries ago; they are a small, distinct part of the tonnes of chilli pods produced each year in New Mexico.
Capsaicinoids, the heat-producing substances in chillies, can be seen here as golden droplets in the centre below the seeds.
In 1846, William Emory, Chief Engineer of the Army’s Topographic Unit, was surveying the New Mexico landscape and its customs. He described a meal eaten in Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque: “Roast chicken, stuffed with onions; then mutton, boiled with onions; then followed various other dishes, all dressed with the everlasting onion; and the whole terminated by chilli, the glory of New Mexico.”
Emory went on to relate his experience with chillies: “Chilli the Mexicans consider the chef-d’oeuvre of the cuisine, and seem really to revel in it; but the first mouthful brought the tears trickling down my cheeks, very much to the amusement of the spectators with their leather-lined throats. It was red pepper, stuffed with minced meat.”
Chillies come in a wide range of colours, shapes, sizes and levels of heat. This photograph shows a small selection of that vast array.
Las Cruces in southern New Mexico is well known for its bountiful chilli harvest.
The earliest cultivated chillies in New Mexico were smaller than today’s; indeed, they were (and still are, in some cases) considered a spice. But as the varieties developed and the size of the pods grew, the food value of chillies became evident. There was just one problem—the many sizes and shapes of the chillies made it very difficult for farmers to determine which chilli they were growing from year to year. And there was no way to tell how large or how hot the pods might be until modern horticultural techniques produced more standardised chillies.
Today, New Mexico is by far the largest commercial producer of chillies in the United States, with about 14,000 hectares under cultivation. All the primary dishes in New Mexican cuisine contain chillies: sauces, stews, carne adovada, enchiladas, tamales and many vegetable dishes. The intense use of chillies as a food rather than just as a spice or condiment is what differentiates New Mexican cuisine from that of Texas or Arizona. In neighbouring states chilli powders are used as a seasoning for beef or chicken stock-based “chilli gravies”, which are thickened with flour or cornflour before being added to, say, enchiladas. In New Mexico the sauces are made from pure chillies and are thickened by reducing the crushed or puréed pods. New Mexico chilli sauces are cooked and puréed, while salsas use fresh, uncooked ingredients. Debates rage over whether tomatoes should be used in cooked sauces such as red chilli sauce, but traditional cooked red sauces do not contain tomatoes, though uncooked salsas do.
Chillies have become the de facto state symbol. Houses are adorned with strings of dried red chillies, or ristras. Images of the pods are emblazoned on signs, T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats and even underwear. In the late summer and early autumn, the rich aroma of roasting chillies fills the air all over the state. “A la primera cocinera se le va un chile entero,” goes one old Spanish saying: “To the best lady cook goes the whole chilli.” And the chilli