Pickled seafood, or escabeche, traveled with Spanish explorers throughout the western nations of Latin America and as far east as the Philippines. When the Spanish left Mexico, their oil, citrus and Middle Eastern spices, including cumin, remained behind and became central to Mexican cooking (If you look at a can of jalapenos in your supermarket, you’ll probably see the words en escabeche on the label). In Jamaica, escoveech is a breakfast treat of fish marinated in vinegar, onions, chayote, carrots and scotch bonnet chiles. And, courtesy either of the Caribbean or Mexico, escabeche eventually migrated to the southern United States where it became pickled shrimp, one of the distinctive flavors of a Lowcountry summer.
First cultivated by ancient Chinese, rice migrated to Eurasia and Africa and, eventually, to the Western hemisphere; In 1685, a storm battered ship sailing from Madagascar limped into South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. Colonists helped to repair the ship and, in payment, the ship’s captain gave a small quantity of “golden seede rice” to a local planter.
The low country of Georgia and the Carolinas is characterized by marshlands bordered by fresh tidal water rivers. As a result of twice daily tides that pushed fresh water onto the flood plains, nothing would grow there, except rice. It was an ideal environment for rice cultivation.
By 1700, rice was a major crop for European colonists, but the high hand labor requirements for growing it were difficult. Between 100 and 300 laborers were required to prepare the soil, plant, harvest and thresh production for only a few hundred acres. The cultivation of rice provided the impetus for the plantation system in the South and for the introduction of African slavery. Slaves with experience growing rice in Africa were preferred, but they brought more with them than agricultural knowledge. Malaria accompanied passengers on the slave ships, a disease to which Africans had become immune, but which was deadly for the indigenous American population and Europeans. Rice fields were perfect environments for mosquitos, the carriers of the disease.
Africans also brought their own culinary traditions; Charleston was a major entry point for the slave trade in the United States, and “Charleston” red rice bears a strong similarity to West African jollof rice.
Aztecs, Mayas and Incas reportedly used combinations of chiles, tomatoes and spices for thousands of years to flavor foods like fish, turkey, venison or lobster, but knowledge of these condiments didn’t spread beyond Central America until the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. The European voyages of discovery brought Christopher Columbus to the new world in 1492, and Hernando de Soto in 1539. Upon arrival they saw natives using a wooden frame for smoking and roasting fish, lizards and small animals. The native Arawak word for this device became, in Spanish, barbacoa.
The Spanish provided hogs (so popular with the natives that they often were stolen), wine, malt, cider vinegar, salt and herbs. Sugar cane and molasses were plentiful in the Caribbean, and chile peppers and tomatoes were both new world plants. Thus a familiar mingling of smoke, pork, vinegar, chiles, tomatoes and molasses evolved. In 1571 a Spanish priest and missionary named the concoctions salsa, the Spanish word for sauce. The Spanish colonized Florida and Mexico, the Dutch founded New Amsterdam (now New York), the French were in Canada and New Orleans and Germans settled in South Carolina near Charleston Bay. Each contributed their own culinary traditions and sauces.
Salsa barbacoa certainly has moved well beyond Central America since. It now combines new world ingredients (chiles, tomatillos and tomatoes) with old world produce (onions and garlic). Beginning in the mid-1800s, spicy foods and hot sauces gained popularity in Texas and the American southwest and gradually spread throughout the United States. Salsa became so ubiquitous that, by 1992, the dollar value of jarred salsa sales in the United States exceeded that of ketchup.
Salads of julienned vegetables have a long history. Cabbage, in particular, was celebrated as a hangover cure in ancient Greece and Rome. The philosopher Diogenes ate only cabbage and lived ninety years. The writer Cato ate cabbage marinated in vinegar for health reasons and died at age 80 after purportedly fathering 28 sons. Cold vinegared cabbage followed the Roman Empire northward, where it was modified repeatedly to meet local tastes.
The first American recipes for cabbage salad call for a Dutch dressing of boiled cream and flour, leading some to postulate that cabbage salad may have arrived in the new world with the Dutch, who called it koolsla (kool – or cabbage — and sla – or salad). In the 18th century that term was anglicized to coleslaw. By the end of the century, the English in New York were calling it cold slaw, a term that some still use today.
Christopher Columbus brought cucumbers to Haiti in 1494.
The oldest walnut remains were discovered in Iraq and are believed to be from 50,000 B.C. Ancient Greeks and Romans were fond of walnuts, and they were traded so regularly by the British in the Mediterranean that they became known as the “English walnut”, a name that continues today. Walnuts were brought to California by Spanish Franciscans in the 18th century, and California now produces much of the world’s supply.
Other cake ingredients also arrived from Europe. The seeds of orange, lemon and lime trees accompanied Columbus’s second voyage, eventually creating citrus industries in Florida and California. The second voyage also transported sugar cane stalks from the Canary Islands that created an industry in the United States that now pads our waistlines by making roughly nine million tons of sugar annually. The Spanish brought wheat, and the flour made from it, to Mexico in the early 1500s and it spread north into the United States, where colonists, including George Washington, grew it as a cash crop.