The Unconquerable Tostada

Natural History, April, 1999 by Robb Walsh

Five hundred years after Cortes, Zapotec food still often a taste of antiquity.

To make sopa de guias, the traditional Oaxacan squash soup, you slice some huiche squash, then you chop up the small tender leaves of the squash plant, then you peel the stalks of the plant and chop them like celery. You boil all these in water, adding some chepil, a mustardy herb that grows wild in the fields, and some slices of corn on the cob. After the mixture has cooked for a while, you add some squash blossoms. The leaves give the broth a spinachlike flavor and color, the stalk retains a little crunch, and the squash and blossoms lend a delicate sweetness. The soup is as delicious as it is astonishing; you feel as though you're eating the entire squash plant--and everything else edible in the surrounding fields. "Sometimes the Zapotecs added agave worms to their sopa de guias," says Susana Trilling, who runs the Seasons of My Heart cooking school on a ranch in rural Oaxaca. (Most cooks also include onions, garlic, and spices in their sopa de guias, but these are recent additions.)

To make a side dish for the sopa, Trilling enlists a local Zapotec woman who is famous for her tlayudas. This term usually refers to the distinctive oversized tortilla of Oaxaca, but in this case it applies to a bean-covered variant.

With her black-and-gray shawl wrapped around her shoulders, the elderly woman kneels on the floor and leans forward to mash the cooked black beans, grinding her handstone, or mano, against a large flat stone called a metate, which sits on three short legs. The bean paste is then spread on toasted tortillas and dried in the oven to form a crisp, bean-covered tostada. Although no one can say just how old the traditional recipes for sopa de guias and tlayudas really are, their ingredients, preparation, and flavor are characteristic of ancient Mesoamerican culture. In fact, modern Zapotec cooking remains so close to its roots that archaeologists are studying it in order to mike sense of pottery shards dating as far back as two thousand years.

A few days after my cooking lesson, I visit an old convent in the village of Culipan that serves as a research laboratory for archaeologists of the Oaxacan Regional Center of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History. Marcus Winter, one of the researchers, gives me a tour of the convent, which houses thousands of artifacts collected at nearby Monte Alban. Considered Mesoamerica's first real city, the mountaintop capital was founded about 500 B.C. by the Zapotecs. Three centuries later, more than twenty thousand people lived there and in the surrounding valley of Oaxaca. As we walk, we pass room after room of young researchers studying pottery shards unearthed over many years of excavations. "We are trying to understand how pottery was used then," Winter says. "And to do that, we are going into contemporary Zapotec villages and documenting what the people do with vessels and cooking tools today."

The Aztecs, who dominated Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest, never really subdued the Oaxacan people, although they did make incursions into Zapotec territory in the fifteenth century. "The core of Zapotec culture persists to a greater extent than the cultures of tribes that were conquered and overthrown," says Winter. The rough, mountainous countryside of Oaxaca discouraged invasions and still provides the isolation that has allowed Zapotec culture to remain largely unaffected by outsiders. After the conquest, however, Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue, became the administrative language of most of Mesoamerica. Zapotec names for towns were replaced by Nahuatl and Spanish names, as were the names of Zapotec foods.

Nonetheless, Zapotec is still one of the most widely spoken languages in Mexico. According to the Mexican National Census of 1993, more than one million people speak an indigenous language, and two-thirds of that population are Zapotec. But the survival of Zapotec identity is not the only explanation for their cooking having changed so little since antiquity. "A lot of the reason is economic," says Winter. "This is a region of autoproduction--people here still eat what they grow."

Winter leads me to a room containing hundreds of reconstructed gray pottery bowls and vessels in the distinctive style of the earliest layers at Monte Alban. He shows me that as Monte Alban became urbanized, between 500 B.C. and 200 B.C., simple clay bowls and vessels were replaced by pottery in many new shapes and sizes--probably reflecting a rapid change in the food people ate. Examining the collection of gray pottery, I can't help but think of all the little bowls of salsa, pickled peppers, guacamole, and chopped condiments that are still common on Mexican tables today. Some of the larger vessels look just like cazuelas, the modern clay cooking pots that Zapotec women set on hot coals to prepare beans, soups such as sopa de guias, moles, and stews.

"What do you think they used this for?" Winter asks me, holding out a frisbee-sized platter with a little elevated cup about the size of a shot glass in the center. "It looks like a candleholder, but I think they put some kind of condiment in this little bowl in the middle."