Chilean Cheese

It is difficult to start a post about Chilean cheese without invoking the old saw about France having one religion and 100 kinds of Cheese while England has 100 religions and only one kind of cheese… but I will restrain myself.  Chile has four major kinds of cheese:  queso mantecoso or Chanco, buttery cheese; queso fresco or quesillo, farmers’ cheese; queso de cabra, goat milk cheese; and “gauda” an industrial cheese that usually comes sliced.  (...and one religion.)

   

Quesillo and queso mantecoso.

Queso Chanco

The cheese from Chanco is exported along the entire coast and is preferred by aficionados for its excellent taste.  It is very buttery and always sells for a higher price than the rest. In the countryside they are content to get a little dry rennet from a cow’s innards and dissolve it in water and this is used to coagulate the milk. The curd is placed in a wooden mold and is well pressed to squeeze out the whey, and then salt is added and it is pressed for another day and then left to dry.  Claudio Gay 1860s[1]

Queso Chanco, now a generic term interchangeable with Chilean queso mantecoso (“buttery cheese”) produced anywhere in Chile, continues to be preferred by aficionados. It is an excellent cheese, mild tasting, soft but firm enough to slice.  And it melts beautifully.  It is similar to American supermarket Munster in texture and to some degree, in taste.

Queso mantecoso is produced by cheese makers of all levels, from fully industrialized processors like COLÚN and Soprole, that together produce almost 60% of Chilean cheese (other than farmers’ cheese)[2]; to authorized gourmet artisanal producers like Puile, producer of 5,800 kg of cheese a year;[3] to small farmers who make a few kg. a week from the raw milk of their own cows using traditional methods like those Gay recorded in the 1860s.

The chanco cheese most Chileans buy is, of course, from the industrial processors whose cheese is sold in supermarkets.  Supermarket queso mantecoso sells from around 4,000 to 6,000 Chilean pesos a kilo ($3.75 to 5.75/lb.) and on any given day, one brand may be more and another less expensive.  If you prefer your cheese to be a little sharper—although none will be very sharp—choose the least expensive:  it is likely to be older and nearer its expiration date.[4]

In a 2005 blind tasting of these cheeses three judges from the Circle of Chilean Food Writers (Círculo de Cronistas Gastronómicos de Chile) considered “aroma, glossy appearance, presence of abundant eyes [holes] and of course, intense and complex taste in the mouth: salty, slightly acid, also sweet, and hopefully, the characteristic taste of herbs that good milk has.  And soft texture, very soft.”  The best “attack the nose with a delicious buttery elegance; melt in the mouth with sweet, acid and intense tastes of milk and of the country.  Unfortunately all are industrial cheeses…, but some are very good; really notable.”[5]

Farm cheese vendor, Temuco market

To my taste the farm cheeses are better, but perhaps that’s just from knowing that they are made by farmers rather than corporations.  When we go to the Chilean lakes district I by cheese from small merchants in Pucón or Temuco, or from the ladies selling cheese along side their eggs and produce on the street corners. Some are flavored with merkin, smoked chilies ground with colander, or with oregano.  There is a certain risk involved; these cheeses are made from raw milk under hygienic conditions that leave much to be desired, but it’s a risk that I’m willing to take.  They are really good cheeses (but see below “Safety and artisanal farm cheese”). 

Quesillo or queso fresco – Farmer’s Cheese

Quesillo is a simple fresh cheese made from cow’s milk (from full fat to skim), rennet and a little salt.   It is silky smooth, just firm enough to slice or cut into cubes, and with a clean, fresh, mildly acidic taste, similar to cottage cheese, but much better since it has much less salt, and no preservatives, flavorings, sugars, gums, colorants, etc. (Cottage cheese has a bunch.[6])  We eat it at breakfast, as an appetizer, in salads (especially layered with slices of tomato and basil leaves), on sandwiches, and in place of ricotta in lasagna and similar dishes.

 It is widely available in supermarkets (67% made by Soprole) but can also be made at home.  Chilean-American blogger Pilar has an illustrated recipe for Quesillo Chileno.  

Photo Querida Comida

Queso de Cabra – Goat milk cheese

Photo: Ellen Nas

Chilean goat milk cheese is made by nationally known industrial producers like Quillayes, by gourmet artisanal producers like Quesos Arturito, and by hundreds (thousands?) of small family producers.  The industrial and gourmet artisanal varieties are usually semi hard.  Quillayes describes theirs as having “smooth texture and intense aromatic flavor.”  They are similar to feta (which is very difficult to find in Chile) and make a good substitute for it.

Chilean farm goat milk cheese is a semi soft cheese, with low acidity and mild flavor.  It is usually made by family producers from the Santiago area north into the norte chico, from the unpasteurized milk of their own goats.  Following an outbreak of food poising in Santiago in 1990, public health regulations were imposed on cheese production. As explained by American anthropologist William Alexander: 

The law requires that all sites of cheese production have potable water, hygienic services for workers, sterilized equipment, special corrals with concrete floors or milking rooms where goats are milked one at a time on platforms away from animal feces, and clean rooms where cheese is pressed and set out to mature. Families who have been making and selling this product for generations milk their animals in their corrals, press the cheese into hoops by hand in their kitchens, and leave it on shelves in cool, dry rooms in their houses, most of which have neither running water or electricity.[7]

Several cooperative cheese factories, meeting these regulations, have been set up in the norte chico, but most farm goat cheese producers continue to make cheese under traditional (unhygienic) conditions. Alexander says that cheese vendors on the roadsides of the Pan-American highway, Ruta 5 (and presumably other public locations) are inspected regularly and sell only cheese from registered makers, but a great percentage of farm goat cheese is made by unregistered producers. 

In the Santiago area goat cheese is available from artisanal producers in the cajon del maypo in the mountains south east of the city. It is delicious cheese, usually only a day or two old, thought the flavor improves with a week or so in the refrigerator. 

 

Photos: Ellen Nas 

 

Safety and artisanal farm cheese

Although the artisanal farm cheese makers I have met seem careful about cleanliness, their cheese is produced under potentially unhygienic conditions, and there is some risk in eating it.  

The most serious risk is brucellosis, a chronic disease which may persist for life, but which is rare in Chile, with frequencies similar to those of the United States (Chile has .06 cases per million population; the US .04/million[8].) Less serious food borne illness, with symptoms like intestinal flu, usually lasting a few hours to several days, may be caused by wide variety of bacteria that may contaminate cheese.[9]

Chilean studies of artisanal farm goat milk cheese making in the late 1980s found:

…serious sanitary defects in all the cheese making process, although the major contamination occurred during milking, followed by the process of cutting the curd and filling the moulds in which there is excessive manipulation and a complete lack of hygiene. While no Brucella melitensisI bacteria were found in the goat milk, the food poisoning associated with cheese consumption is attributed to a toxin produced by Staphylococcus aureusI and the significant load of fecal coliform bacteria encountered. [10]

Your perception of the risk-benefit ratio of farm artisanal cheese may be different from mine (and should be, if you are very young, very old, have reduced immunities, or really hate the likely symptoms), but we buy and enjoy farm goat cheese a few times a year and have been lucky: no illness.  Alexander writes: 

In the countryside, everyone eats it. In the city, those coming from a rural background or with family in the country were often enthusiastic about its cheese. This enthusiasm sometimes seemed like a badge of honor showing their support for the crianceros [goat herders] in the controversy [over the regulations]. Others who identify themselves as urbanized and "modern" may only buy the factory variety of handcrafted cheese sold in the supermarket. (For my firmly middle-class 80-year-old landlady in the city the cheese I brought in from the countryside was a guilty pleasure. She believed the risks as reported in the media, but could not resist eating it from time to time and she found my interest in it to be amusing.)[11] 

Gauda or gouda type cheese, Chile’s most popular

Chilean gauda is an industrial cheese, usually sold sliced in supermarkets or in large blocks to restaurants or food processors. It is the cheese of sandwiches, fast food, frozen pizza, mass produced empanadas, etc., filling the role that processed “American cheese” does in the USA. Gauda comprised 70% of the cheese sold in Chile in 2004.  At that time Chile’s annual per capita cheese consumption was about 4 kg., compared to over 14 kg. in the US,[12] but consumption is rising in both countries, as cheese is a major ingredient in fast food; cheeseburgers and the like.

According to a Chilean urban myth, it is made of potatoes, but an expert on the Chilean cheese industry explained that “what happens is that gouda is an acid cheese, with a lot of humidity, and this texture feels like that of potato starch, but it really isn’t.”[13]

I think that means that gauda isn't made from potatoes; it just tastes like it might be. It's not terrible, and it's real cheese with no added ingredients, not processed cheese, "cheese product," or "cheese food" like some American counterparts.   But its similarity to gouda from the Netherlands is very remote.  

Other Cheese in Chile

In addition to these cheeses, there is hard cheese sold as queso parmesano and queso reggianito, grated and in pieces: the reggianito is pretty good.  There is also Chilean industrial cheese sold as Edam, gruyere, “tipo roquefort,” camembert, brie, provoleta, etc.; as well as gourmet artisanal cow, goat, and sheep milk cheese.  And there are imported cheeses from the US and the EU, as well as from Argentina and Brazil. Still, some cheeses are difficult to find, especially sharp cheeses which are not generally to Chilean tastes: feta, sharp cheddar, etc. (2014 Update: Sheep milk feta from Quesos Boladero is available at Sabores del Sur, Pres. Battle y Ordoñez 3635, Ñuñoa, Santiago.)

A few specialty cheese shops in Santiago are said to have good variety and quality.  Quesería Huelmo is a traditional shop located at Jaime Guzmán #3090, Providencia, Santiago that has an excellent reputation.  When an interviewer asked if the owner, Yolanda Gallardo, was interested in transforming her business into a “gourmet store,” she answered:  “I don’t have anything against those stores, they are very pretty and everything, but we are a more of a neighborhood store that for all its life has worked with artisanal products.” [14]

Another store with a good selection is El Mundo de Quesos, at Nueva de Lyon 36, Local 21, Providencia, Santiago.

And for sharp cheese it is worth asking the cheese vendors in La Vega if they have any queso añejo, "aged cheese." It may be a cheese that was too sharp to sell to their regular customers and has been waiting for a discerning buyer like you.

Photos: Loogares.com

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[1] Gay, Claudio. 1862-1865.  Agricultura, Tomo 1. París: En casa del autor; Chile: Museo de Historia Natural de Santiago, p. 442. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0002688

[2] Situación del Mercado de queso en Chile. Leche y lácteos. Oficina de Estudios y Políticas Agrarias.  On line at http://www.odepa.gob.cl/servlet/articulos.ServletMostrarDetalle;jsessionid=F9C194B0BDF9ACF5130E0F4A2C6C3ADC?idcla=2&idcat=7&idclase=99&idn=1670&volver=1

[3] Lorca, Elisa Barría. (Nov. 17) 200. Quesos Puile: sabor y tradición campesina en San José de la Mariquina.  Portal INDAP. On line at http://www.indap.gob.cl/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=413

[4] Merino, Augusto. 2008. Los quesos chilenos. Revista Vinos & mas.  On line at Cículo de Cronistas Gastronómicos, http://www.cronistas.cl/articulo134_Los_quesos.html

[5] Fredes, César. Queso mantecoso, los diez mejores de Chile. La Nacion.Cl. August 14, 2005. On line at http://www.lanacion.cl/prontus_noticias/site/artic/20050813/pags/20050813172554.html

The 10 top cheeses in the tasting were: 1. Los Tilos. 2. Pahuilmo. 3. Puerto Octay. 4. Los Monjes. 5. Las Pircas. 6. Cuinco. 7. Los Hornos. 8. Santa Matilde. 9. Don Leo. 10. Las Águilas.[6] Bareman’s Low Fat Cottage Cheese ingredients:  Cultured Fat Free Milk, Buttermilk, Nonfat Dry Milk, Cream, Salt, Citric Acid, Lactic Acid, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavoring, Guar Gum Mono and Diglycerides, Xanthan Gum, Carob Bean Gum, Titanium, Dioxide(artificial color), Maltodextrin, Cultured dextrose, Postassium Sorbate, Calcium Chloride, Enzymes.  On line at  http://baremandairy.com/lowfatcottagecheese.pdf. Some Chilean quesillo has gelatin added; avoid it.

[7] Alexander, William L.  2004. Clandestine Artisans or Integrated Producers?: Standardization of Rural Livelihood in the Norte Chico, Chile. CULTURE & AGRICULTURE 26(1-2-March):38–51.

[8]Pappas, Georgias, et. al. 2006. The new global map of human brucellosis. Lancet Infect Dis 6: 91–99.  On line at http://agronica.udea.edu.co/talleres/Medicina/Prof%20Nicolas%20%20Ram%C3%ADrez/reyes/The_new_global_map_of_human_brucellosis_.pdf

[9] About food poisoning. Virgina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. On line at http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/foodsafety/poisoning.shtml

[10] Camacho, Lavinia & Cecilia Sierra. 1988.  Diagnostico sanitarion y technologio del proceso artisanal del queso fresco de cabra en Chile. Archivos latinoamericanos de nutricion. 38(4):935-945.

[11] Alexander, op. cit.

[12] El Mercado de los Lácteos in EE.UU. bUSiness Chile. On line at http://www.businesschile.cl/imprimir.php?w=old&lan=es&id=237

[13] CNN Quesos: "En Chile hay mucha variedad y hay que experimentarla" Santiago,  June 2010. On line at http://www.cnnchile.com/economia/2010/06/20/quesos-en-chile-hay-mucha-variedad-y-hay-que-experimentarla/

[14] La picada de quesos y cecinas artesanales en pleno Providencia. Las Ultimas Noticias On line at http://www.lun.com/lunmobile/Pages/NewsDetailMobile.aspx?dt=2010-06-21&BodyId=0&PaginaID=6&NewsID=9784&Name=I3&PagNum=0&Return=R&SupplementId=3

[15] Schmidt-Hebbel, H, I Pennacchiotti MTabla de Composición Química de Alimentos Chilenos, , Facultad de Ciencias Químicas y Farmacéuticas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 7th ed 1985* 61 pp. On line at http://mazinger.sisib.uchile.cl/repositorio/lb/ciencias_quimicas_y_farmaceuticas/schmidth03/parte02/tabla%20cont.1.html

Mapuche Wheat

Mapuche women harvesting wheat; unknown photographer and date.  On line at flickr

 As Alfred L. Crosby’s book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 demonstrates, the interchange of plants, animals and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia changed the world.  American maize, potatoes, beans, cassava and sweet potatoes, adopted as staple foods from Ireland to China and Africa, led to tremendous dietary and demographic changes.  But while old world food systems were transformed by native American food plants, few indigenous American cultures adopted Old World crops as staple foods.

There are several reasons.  The reduced and disheartened American populations seldom needed new food sources; within the first 100 years after contact old world diseases combined with war and slavery killed 50 to 90% of American Indians, depending on the region. But climatic differences were also important; Amerindian population centers—Mesoamerica and the Andes--were in the tropics, areas with summer or year-round rainfall, and frequently, high altitudes.  The crops the Europeans brought were domesticated mainly in the temperate zone from Southwest Asia to the Mediterranean, with dry summers and winter rainfall.  Wheat, the Europeans’ most important crop, is not well suited to tropical America, and in spite of the conquistador’s insistence that their native workers plant it, successful production was, and is, limited to temperate areas: northern Mexico and the south western United States;  and Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

In the north, Pueblo Indians adopted wheat and barley, but they never supplanted maize as staple crops.[1]  In Chile things were different: the indigenous Mapuche adopted and came to depend on a large number of European crops, especially wheat, along with barley, broad beans, peas, and flax.

The Mapuche homeland, stretching from the Rio Bio Bio to the island of Chiloe in south central Chile (map), has a temperate oceanic climate similar to Western Europe’s.  Average summer temperatures, which decease toward the south, are in the 60s and 70s, and winter lows are usually above freezing. Rainfall is concentrated in the winter months, and increases toward the south, reaching 120 inches in the higher elevations of Chiloe Island.  Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Mapuche were a riverine people, dependant on hunting, fishing and collecting wild foods and cultivating maize, potatoes, quinoa, lima beans, chilies, and squash; all plants with tropical origins and, with the exception of potatoes and quinoa, summer crops not especially well suited to the increasingly cool and rainy climate of the south.

When the Spanish arrived, on horseback and with steel weapons fresh from the conquest of Peru, they quickly ran roughshod over the Mapuche, defeating and decimating them in battle after battle and building fortified settlements as far south as Valdivia.  They found the country to their liking.  In 1558 Jerónimo de Vivar wrote:

Wheat and barley yield very well… all the vegetables and legumes of our Spain yield very well.  And grape vines do very well, and fig trees.  And all the other plants of our Spain will yield very well, because the climate is very good. [2]

But within a generation, the Mapuche obtained horses and developed military strategies that matched and frequently surpassed those of the Spanish, and by 1600 they had destroyed the Spanish settlements, taken thousands of prisoners, and driven the Spanish north of the Rio Bio Bio, which was to be the frontier between the two peoples for the next 300 years.  In the process however, the Mapuche way of life changed drastically.  They were forced to abandon their riverside communities and take up a highly mobile way of life based on their herds of cattle and horses and shifting agriculture based largely on wheat.

In his History of the Ancient Mapuches of the South, José Bengoa, a Chilean anthropologist who has written extensively on Mapuche history, explains why: 

The war led to an economic transformation in all aspects of indigenous society. The need for mobility encouraged herding over agriculture for subsistence, and the burning of fields, commonly done by the King’s soldiers during the summer campaigns, broke the back of indigenous agriculture.  It no longer made sense to plant maize in open areas.  This was one of the reasons for the early and rapid incorporation of wheat into the indigenous economy.  In southern Chile wheat has a short productive cycle. It can be harvested in December, whereas maize is harvested in February or May, which left it highly vulnerable to summer attacks.[3]

Cultivation of wheat posed no problems from the Mapuche.  They already cultivated maize, quinoa and madi (or made, a small oil seed) and those who had been captives of the Spanish would have been familiar with wheat cultivation, as would the Mapuches’ own Spanish captives.  While there are no records of early Mapuche cultivation methods, the Spanish planted by sowing broadcast and the Mapuche probably followed the same practice.

In a shallow plowed and harrowed field the wheat is thrown on the fly, almost without covering it and leaving it at the mercy of the prodigious quantity of birds that Chile has and shortly thereafter to the invasion of weeds that this type of cultivation allows to grow freely…  [4]

Through the 19^th century, the Mapuche’s harvest was by hand:

They cut the wheat with a sickle, tied the sheaves and tossed them with pitch forks into ox carts that took them to the threshing floor.[5]

And threshing was also done manually.  Juan Amasa, a Mapuche of the village of Collipulli explained:

After the harvest they would bring together 10 or 20 Indians, men and women, young and old to thresh the wheat with their feet.  The chief himself does not work, but is in charge of directing the threshing as a “corporal.”  Depending on the size of the pile of wheat the Indians go around it in lines of two to four people holding hands with their bodies inclined forward in a particular threshing step, executing two food movements with each step.  That is, the foot is put forward then drawn back, sliding the sole of his foot over the wheat, and then there is another step with the same foot, continuing the same sliding motion with the other foot and moving forward.  To the rhythm of the threshing they sing to entertain themselves in this monotonous work.[6]

If the amount of wheat was greater, horses were used for the threshing, a Spanish practice adopted by the Mapuche.

 Trillas   are now common summer festivals,  as pictured below at  the 2012 Trilla a Yegua Suelta (threshing with loose mares) in Aguila Sur Paine.

After the straw was brushed aside, the wheat remained on the ground. To separate the wheat from the chaff, it was winnowed—thrown into the air where the lighter chaff blows away and the wheat falls to the ground or the winnowing tray.

Mapuche wheat in a winnowing basket.

 Once winnowed, the Mapuche prepared wheat for consumption in several ways, most derived from tways that they had traditionally processed maize: 

Toasted flour: mürke (harina tostada)

Toasted flour was one of the most important Mapuche wheat products, adapted from the aboriginal toasted corn meal—an indigenous American Indian food from New England to Chile.  North America settlers called it “parched corn”[7], in Mesoamerica it is known as pinole, in NW Argentina it is ñaco, and in Chile mürke. 

The “happy captive,” Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán who was a prisoner of the Mapuche during the 1620s and who provides one of the earliest accounts of Mapuche food, mentions “toasted flour” (harina tostada) seven times, once specifically to toasted maize flour “mixed with quinoa and made”[8] although never specifically to toasted wheat flour.  (In fact, “wheat” (trigo) is only mentioned once in the text.)    

Later travelers in the Araucanía such as Edmund Reuel Smith mention toasted flour or meal frequently—and specifically to toasted wheat flour-- referring to it as a major food:

…toasted wheat and linseed ground together, of which I had already become fond, regarding the "ulpo" as not only a pleasant beverage, but almost as a necessity, in the absence of bread.[9]

José Begona describes the preparation of mürke, as follows:

The making of toasted wheat is a usually a happy family ceremony. It is a food that all apprectiate.  Earlier it was made in a clay callana, but the ones I have seen are metal.  They are like a large skillet, with a long wooden handle of a meter or more.  It is often hung from the ceiling with wire, to keep from burning oneself and to make toasting easier.  It is put over the kitchen hearth in the center of the house [and now frequently over a wood stove].  The wheat is put into the callana and stirred so that it does not burn.  A boy usually helps his mother in this task, until the wheat is well toasted and hot.  From there it is taken to the grain mill from which and perfumed smoke rises.  As it comes out of the mill it is mixed with hot water to make ulpo or allowed to cool and added to apple chicha [cider], for one of the most successful combinations of Mapuche cuisine.  The guests drink the chicha stirring the toasted flour with a spoon.  And wheat again becomes the focus of their conversations.

Traditional Mapuche milling stone

 photo:  Italo Martínez Rival

Modern hand grain mill. photo ñiyael mapuche

Toasted wheat was, and is, eaten as ulpo, mixed with cold or hot water (chercan) or was boiled in water to make a porridge.  My wife recalls having ulpo as a child, and of eating it sprinkled over watermelon.  It continues to be popular and is available in supermarkets.

Lightly toasted wheat that is coarsely ground is tukun, locro in Chilean Spanish.  It is added to soups and stews.

Peeled wheat: kako cachilla (mote de trigo)

Another indigenous American technique for preparing maize was transferred to wheat by the Mapuche: nixtamalization. In this process dry maize kernels are cooked in water containing an alkali—wood ashes, lye or lime--which causes the maize to swell and the pericarp or clear skin of the kernel to come loose.  The maize, now called nixtamal in Mexican Spanish is washed thoroughly to remove the pericarp and the alkaline taste and then is either ground to make tortillas or tamales, or cooked further to make pozole (mote in the Andes, hominy in N. American English).

This process is not thought to have extended further south than Colombia prior to the Spanish conquest, but it was part of the Mapuche culinary repertory by the 1620s when Pineda y Bascuñán was a Mapuche captive.[10]  He mentions being given mote eight times; corn mote twice and barley mote once. The rest were “mote” with no modifier.  Today in Chile unmodified “mote” means wheat mote and Chilean historian Begona believes that both toasted wheat flour and wheat mote were part of Mapuche diet by this time, although bread was not.[11]

The process of making wheat mote, as Mapuche Luisa Quidel does it for sale in Temuco is as follows:

After the wheat is harvested you must obtain ashes for processing the wheat from a local bakery.  The ashes need to be cleaned and passed through a sieve to make good wheat mote.  The mote must be cooked at a suitable temperature for the best results, so it is done over a wood fire.  It is a slow process, but gas is too expensive.  Next the water is drained off, and the mote, husks now loosened by the ashes, is peeled.  It is scrubbed by hand and this is also a sacrifice; it is tiring work and there is no one to help her. The process is finished when the mote is well washed and allowed to rest until she leaves to sell it early the next morning. [12]

Mote is eaten as a boiled grain, like rice, and in soups and stews with other products: potatoes, beans, peas.  It is also the basis for catuto or mültrun, a bread like mixture of ground mote, lard or oil, and salt which is formed into oblong rolls, and eaten as is, toasted on the coals, as below, or sautéed in a little grease[13]. (It is also made of boiled wheat that has not been peeled.)

Catutos on the coals.  photo: Pablo Azúa

Wheat beer:  mudai or muday (chicha de trigo)

In South America chicha (from chichab, “maize” in an aboriginal language of Panama) usually refers to an alcoholic beverage made of corn, but it can also refer to virtually any fermented fruit cider or even unfermented maize drinks. In modern Chile it refers to lightly fermented grape wine or, in the south, to apple cider.  Mudai, maize chicha, was traditionally made by cooking ground corn in water, adding masticated maize meal, and allowing the mixture to ferment.  The chewed meal contains enzymes from the saliva which convert the maize starch into sugar, which yeasts then convert into alcohol. (In making beer “malting” or sprouting the grain accomplishes the same purpose.)  Sometimes left over muday from a previous batch with well developed yeast was added to speed fermentation.

The Mapuche quickly adapted the same process to wheat and barley.  Edmund Reuel Smith, who came to Chile as a civilian member of the US Naval Astronomical Expedition (1849-52), traveled through Araucanía to see and learn abut the Mapuche.  He found mudai  “a kind of fermented liquor, rather muddy but not unpleasant to the taste.”  Later he saw how it was made[14]:

Today’s mudai is made without mastication, and may be drunk at any stage in the fermentation process.  Lightly fermented mudai is a refreshing, milky and slightly sour drink.  When I asked why they served the “light” variety, my host said “wincas [non Mapuches] don’t usually like the strong kind.” The recipe below comes from the web site Mapuches Urbanos:

 Other recipes add yeast and substantial quantities of sugar (replacing much of the wheat) to produce a more alcoholic beverage in less time.

Bread:  kofke

Bread was not an early addition to the Mapuche diet.  Pineda y Bascuñán mentions it only once, and then in the context of a Mapuche chief with a mestiza daughter and presumably a Spanish wife

We arrived at mid day and were received with great pleasure and regaled highly as this chief was very Spanishised [españolado] and ostentatious:  his house had many chickens, fresh meat, bacon, sausages and maize and wheat bread, and above all, a lot of chicha of different types.

He also mentions empanadas, tortillas and “fried buñuelos and rosquillas and sopaipillas of eggs,” Spanish pastries made of wheat flour, but these do not seem to have been common in Mapuche kitchens until the late 19^th and 20^th centuries when they could take their wheat to mills for grinding into a fine flour.

Since that time, however, bread has been a major factor in Mapuche life.  José Begona, who has referred to the Mapuche as The Wheat People, writes:

Making bread continues to be the principal activity of the Mapuche woman.  It occupies a good part of her day.  There are several customs.  Some women prefer to leave the dough over night, ready to make bread in the morning, others like to make use of the embers of the kitchen hearth and have the bread ready.  This is the “ash bread” [tortilla de rescoldo], cooked in the hot ashes of the hearth.  Sometimes it is left overnight and the next day, on getting up, the bread is ready and still hot.  Other women rise, knead and prepare the bread for breakfast. [15]

The other common Mapuche bread is the sopapilla, fried bread.  Although individual household recipes differ, the dough for the two can be the same:  Flour is mixed with salt and a piece of dough from a previous day and/or baking powder, and in some households lard, and kneaded.  It is allowed to rise, and if it is to be a tortilla de riscoldo, buried in the ashes of the hearth.  For sopapillas the dough is rolled out into a 4 or 5 inch circle and fired in oil, or preferably (according to some) in horse fat.  (For more on Mapuche sopapillas and tortillas de riscoldo, see Mapuche Food: Ethno Tourism/Ethno Gastronomy.)

Noodles: pangkutra (pantrucas)

Humble noodles of flour, water, salt and perhaps egg and oil, cooked in a meat broth were the most commonly eaten “traditional Mapuche foods” encountered in a recent survey of Mapuche dietary habits in Temuco.[16] (The next most common were tortillas de riscoldo, merkin and horse meat.)

Links:  Arte Culinaria Mapuche contains 20+ Mapuche recipes in Spanish

More posts on Mapuche food in Eating Chilean:

Mapuche Food: Ethno Tourism/Ethno Gastronomy

Feasting with the Enemy: 17th Century Mapuche food

Eating Piñones

Chilean Corn (Choclo Chileno)

Broad Beans and Peas

Eating Chilean Horse Meat

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[1] Vlasich, James A.  2005. Pueblo Indian Agriculture.  University of New Mexico Press.  P. 27 On line at http://books.google.com/books

[2] Torrejón, Fernando and Marco Cisternas.  2002.  Alteraciones del paisaje ecológico araucano por la asimilación Mapuche de la agroganadería hispano-mediterránea (siglos XVI y XVII)  Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 75: 729-736.  On line at http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0716-078X2002000400008&script=sci_abstract  All translations mine unless otherwise noted.

[3] Bengoa, José. 2003. Historia de los Antiguos Mapuches del Sur, Ed. Catalonia, Santiago de Chile. p. 302

[4] Gay, Claudio. 1862-1865.  Agricultura, Tomo 2. París: En casa del autor; Chile: Museo de Historia Natural de Santiago, p. 19. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0002688

[5] Begona, José.  2002. Historia de un conflicto: El estado y los mapuches

en el siglo XX. 2nd Edition. p. 88. Santiago: Editorial Planeta Chilena S. A.

[6] Lenz, Rodolfo. 1895-97. Estudios Araucanos. Anales de la Universidad de Chile, Vol. 97. p. 115. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0003440

[7] Houghton Mifflin Word Origins:parched corn. On line at http://www.answers.com/topic/parched-corn

[8] Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Francisco, 1608-1680. 2001. El cautiverio feliz, Tomo dos; edición crítica de Mario Ferreccio Podestá y Raïssa Kordić  Riquelme. Santiago de Chile: Seminario de Filología Hispánica, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile, p. 638. On line at  http://books.google.cl

[9] Smith, Edmund Reuel. 1855. The Araucanians; or, Notes of a Tour among the Indtia tribes of Southern Chile.  New York:  Harper & brothers. p. 269 On line at http://books.google.cl

[10] How nixtamalization arrived in Chile is unknown.  The most likely alternative is that the Spanish, some of whom had been in areas where the practice was common such as Panama and Mexico, introduced it to Peru and then to Chile.  But if this is the case the absence of corn tortillas, the food most commonly made from nixtamal, in Peru and Chile is difficult to explain.

[11] Bengoa, José. 2008. Historia del Pueblo Mapuche (Siglos XIX y XX). 7th corrected Edition. Santiago: Lom Eds.

[12].  Aguilera Vega, Eugenia. 2007. Mote: Gusto para unos, vida para otros.  Centro de Medios Independientes Santiago, on line athttp://santiago.indymedia.org/news/2007/06/70390.php as quoted in Eating Chilean: Mote con huesillos, Chile’s favorite summer sweet. October 19, 2009. On line at http://eatingchile.blogspot.com/2009/10/mote-con-huesillos-chiles-favorite.html

[13] Mapuche, Gente de la Tierra. Comidas. Receta de Catutos. On line at http://www4.biblioredes.cl/BiblioRed/Nosotros+en+Internet/Gente+de+mi+tierra/Comidas

[14] Smith, op. cit. p. 302 quotation and illustration

[15] Begonia 202, Chapter 7

[16] Schnettler, Berta et al.  2010 Diferencias Étnicas Y De Aculturación En El Consumo De Alimentos En La Región De La Araucania, Chile.  Rev Chil Nutr Vol. 37, Nº1, Marzo 2010

On line at http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/rchnut/v37n1/art03.pdf.