Blue-Egg Mapuche Chickens

The old stories speak of a pact between the hens and the people of the land [the Mapuche].  The hens would give the people blue eggs and the people of the land would care for them and honor them in ceremonies of thanks and prayer. The bodies of the colloncas and ketros [chicken varieties] remember the pact and pass on the message of the blue eggs when the pact is respected.  Agélica Celis Salamero[1] 

Photo: Lanalhue Noticias

Blue-egg chickens, gallinas Mapuches, or “Araucanas” to poultry enthusiasts, first came to outside attention in 1921 when Spanish poultry specialist Professor Salvador Castelló, announced their existence at the first international poultry conference in The Hague. 

Castelló explained that on 6 August 1914, he had landed at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan and had immediately noticed several hampers of blue-shelled eggs.  His first thought was that they were ducks’ eggs. But the local people assured him that they were, indeed, hens’ eggs and that many hens in southern Chile laid eggs of the same color.  This utterly astonished him, because as he said ‘neither in Europe not in North America had he seen eggs of this colour.’  Later in the company of Chilean poultry breeders, Castelló toured a region of Chile where blue-egg chickens were especially common. This was the rugged lake district of the south-central part of the country, the homeland of the warlike Araucanian or Mapuche Indians.[2]

What was their origin?  The chickens’ wild ancestor, the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus gallus), was found from northeasterner India east to Indonesia, and seems to have been domesticated by 4,000 years ago.  In the ensuing centuries it spread west to Europe and Africa and east to the Oceania.  By 1492 domesticated chickens (G. g. domesticus) had been introduced from Iceland, the westernmost outpost of European society, to Easter Island, the eastern most landfall of the Polynesians.[3] 

And perhaps they were in South America too. In1532, when Spanish conquistador Pizarro reached Peru, “he found that chickens were already an integral part of Incan economy and culture, suggesting at least some history of chickens in the region.”[4]  In 1590 Jesuit Fr. José de Acosta, in The Natural & Moral History of the Indies, wrote:

….let us now speake of tame fowle; I wondered that hennes, seeing there were some in the Indes before the Spanish came there, the which is well approved for they have a proper name of the country, and they call a henne a Hualpa, and the egge Ronto…[5].

Others disagreed.  “El Inca,” Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, whose accounts of Inca history, culture and society are widely accepted, contradicted de Acosta’s arguments and concluded “I have clearly proved that there were no Cocks or Hens in Peru before the conquest…”[6]  And when authoritative German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt agreed in 1811that there were no pre-Colombian chickens in the Americas, that put an end to the debate for a hundred years or so.[7]

But not forever.  In 1888, a newly graduated English engineer, 19 year old Richard (Ricardo) Latcham arrived in Chile to build roads in the recently pacified Mapuche homeland near today’s city of Temuco.  He lived there among the Mapuche for the next five years, making many friends, learning the language and developing a fascination and respect for Mapuche culture.  Moving to Santiago, he began to read anthropology, develop his anthropological library and to publish technical articles on the Mapuche and on Chilean archaeology—while still working as an engineer and teacher of English.[8]

In 1921, while finishing his Domesticated Animals of Pre-Columbian America he learned of Castelló’s report, which coincided with his view that there were chickens in South America before the conquest:

It is thought that in [pre-Colombian] America there were no true chickens, but this is only partially true.  It may be that in North America there were none, but in South America there were several species, distinct from those of the old world.  Not all these species have been classified, but in Chile, Bolivia and Peru [there are] no fewer than three indigenous varieties or species, domesticated by the native people…

 Photo: Juan Osvaldo

In Chile these are called the trintri, with “curly feathers as thought they were put on in reverse,”

…the collonca, which are small and tailless;

Photo: Asociación Argentina de Productores de Granja 

…and the francolina [or ketro], which Lacham thought to be a variety of the collonanas, “that carry a tuft of feathers on their heads that fall on all sides to the level of their eyes.  The country people call them ‘hens with ear rings.’ Like those above they lay blue eggs.”[9]

Photo: Kollonca de Aretes

So if chickens were in Chile before the Spanish, where might they have come from? 

Europe?

Maybe. The earliest recorded introduction of Chickens to the Americas was in 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral gave a single hen to a Brazilian Indian.  But whether her offspring could have been carried to Argentina, where they were reported by 1515[10] or to Peru by 1532, when Pizarro arrived and they were already supposed “an integral part of Incan economy and culture,” seems unlikely.

Polynesia?

If chickens were in western South America before the Spanish, a Pacific origin seems more likely than a European one.  Prehistoric Polynesians spread chickens throughout the Pacific to Easter Island, the eastern most Polynesian outpost, by the 1300s.  Since sweet potatoes – a South American plant domesticated in Peru by around 2,000 BC – were in the central Polynesia by 1000 to 1100 AD it is very likely that there was prehistoric contact between South Americans and Polynesians.[11] And if sweet potatoes went west, chickens could have come east.

The Evidence

Archeological evidence shows domesticated chickens to have been in China before 5000 BC, in India by 2000 BC, and in Polynesia as early as 1000 BC. But of all the thousand’s of archaeological excavations that have taken place in Peru, not one has reported finding a pre-Columbian chicken bone. 

But they found 83 in Chile…. maybe. 

In 2007 archaeologist Alice A. Storey and her colleagues published an article on El Arenal-1, an archaeological site near the central Chilean coast, about 530 Km south of Santiago and 100 Km south of Concepcíon.  There they had found chicken bones radiocarbon dated to between 1321 and 1407 AD, well before Columbus and more than 100 years before chickens came to Chile with Pedro de Valdivia in 1540.  Genetic analysis of the bones “produced an identical [mtDNA] sequence to chicken bones from two prehistoric archaeological sites in the Pacific.”[12]

But of course their conclusions were not universally accepted.  Jaime Gongora and his colleagues responded, arguing that the mtDNA sequence of the Chilean finds also matched chickens from Europe and “all over the world,” contradicting the view that they were of specifically pacific origins. They also questioned the dating, arguing that the site’s location near the coast suggested that the chickens’ diet might have included shells or fish scraps which would have introduced carbon from marine sources into their bones, yielding inaccurately old radiocarbon dates.[13]

Alice Storey and unidentified chicken 

Storey and her colleagues replied, arguing that “Ultimately, the question rests on the antiquity of the El Arenal chickens,” and that chemical analysis of the bones demonstrated that the chickens “did not derive protein from marine sources and thus did not require a marine offset correction to their radiocarbon ages.” Further, they argued that the bone dates were consistent with dates on other material from the site, and that no post Colombian artifacts were found on the site. 

So, what to conclude?  Storey and her colleagues make a good case for pre-Colombian dates on the El Arenal-1 chickens, but if there were chickens in South America before the Spanish, and especially if they were “an integral part of Incan economy and culture,” it is difficult to explain why chicken bones have not been found at any other Peruvian or Chilean sites. 

But perhaps some were.  Storey and her colleagues suggest that archaeologists working along the Pacific coast of South America re-examine the faunal collections from their sites. “Remains such as bones of chickens or pigs which may have been classified as intrusive previously may provide evidence of other points of contact between Polynesia and the Americas.”

And what of the Blue-egg Mapuche Chickens?

As part of their examination of the origins of chickens in South America Storey and her colleagues considered the possibility that the blue-egg chickens are descendants of the El Aremal-1 birds.  They found a complicated story.  Castelló originally described the chickens as being tailless, having ear tufts and laying blue eggs, and these became the defining characteristics of the poultry fanciers’ Araucanas.  He later discovered that the birds he described had been bred recently from a cross between a blue-egg tailess hen and a rooster with ear tufts. Both the tailess trait and the trait for ear tufts are also found in European chickens, and that may be their origin. 

Of the blue egg trait, which seems to be indigenously Chilean[14], they found no mention prior to about 1880. Darwin, who was in Chile in 1834-35 and who wrote extensively about chicken varieties in The Origin made no mention of blue eggs.  As Storey says, “it seems unlikely that if blue eggs had been available in markets as they were in the early 1900s, that Darwin would have missed them.” [15]

So Mapuche blue-egg chickens appear to be a relatively recent development, the result of a mutation sometime back in chicken prehistory before 1880.  But that makes them no less Mapuche chickens, nor does it exclude the possibility that their ancestors included pre-Colombian Chilean chickens--if they existed. 

Mapuche Blue-Egg Chickens today

Beginning in the first years of the 21^st century, the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture and other agencies, governmental and non-governmental, began programs to encourage rural Chileans, Mapuche and mestizo, to raise blue-egg chickens under artisanal and sustainable conditions and to promote their sale in local and perhaps national markets.  In the 20^th century blue-eggs had become increasingly rare as breeding among many chicken varieties had resulted in a highly heterogeneous population of chickens in rural south central Chile, so the project was also designed to restore and improve the genetic characteristics of the earlier blue-egg lineages. 

While the program’s success has not been completely evaluated there seems to have been progress with the sale of 15.6 million blue eggs in the first year of the project. Today you can often find vendors selling blue eggs along with garden produce on the streets of Pucón and Villarica and the market in Temuco.[16]

But if that’s not convenient, here are some Contacts in the Valle del Itata, and Contacts in Villarrica.  Or you can Google “huevos azules en Santiago” if you live in the capitol.

Photo: CETSUR

Photo: Ministerio de Agricultura

 

Mapuche egg recipes

Once you have your blue eggs, you’ll want to prepare them traditionally (unless you plan to incubate them), so here are a few recipes:

“Flour and egg soup for breakfast: This was used long ago to give the men energy before they went to work.  Fry a little onion, garlic and vegtables add potatoes cut into pieces and boil.  Add toasted flour and allow to boil again.  At the end season and add one egg per person.  The eggs should be opened at one end with a fork and then beaten through the opening, then added to the soup in a thin stream.”  Marina Recabarren 

“Here in Tucapel a Chicken cazuela with home made noodles is very typical.  Take one egg per person and add sifted flour and water to make a soft dough and about 10 minutes before serving, drop the dough into the boiling cazuela by pushing through the tines of a fork.  They come out like little noodles, short and very pretty.” Francisca Paredes. 

“They are used a lot in deserts to sweeten the day, like Leche Asada [aka flan]. Boil a liter of milk with cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla.  Beat 6 eggs with a cup of sugar, add the milk, beat again and strain through a colander. Bake until done, about 30 minutes in a wood fired oven. Marina Recabarren.[17]

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[1] Huevos Azules de Gallinas Mapuche, on line at http://huevosazules.wordpress.com/  All translations mine unless otherwise noted.

[2] Langdon, Robert. 1989. When the Blue-Egg Chickens Come Home to Roost: New thoughts on the Prehistory of the Domestic Fowl in Asia, America and the Pacific Islands

The Journal of Pacific History Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 164-192.

[3] Chicken, Wikipedia; Icelandic Chicken, Wikipedia.

[4]  Storey A. A., et al., "Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[5] Acosta, José de. 1880. The Natural & Moral History of the Indies. Reprinted from the English Translation of Edward Grimston, 1604. Vol 1.  London: Haklupt Society. p. 276.

[6] Garcilaso De La Vega, El Inca, 1688. The Royal Commentaries of Peru in Two Parts London: Miles Flesher. p. 386.

[7] Langon, op cit.

[8] From 1928 to his death in 1943 Latcham was Director of the Chilean National Museum of Natural History.

[9] Latcham, Ricardo E. 1922 Los animales domésticos de la América precolombiana. Santiago. p. 177.

[10] Ibid, p. 9.

[11] Montenegro, A.,C. Avis and A.J. Weaver, Modeling the pre-historic arrival of the sweet potato in Polynesia, Journal of Archaeological Science,35, 355-367 on line at http://www.climate.uvic.ca/people/alvaro/SPotato.pdf

[12]  A. A. Storey et al., op. cit.

[13] Gongora J, et al. Indo-European and Asian origins for Chilean and Pacific chickens revealed by mtDNA. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2008;105:10308–10313.  On line at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2492461/

[14] There is also a Chinese blue-egg chicken, the Dongxiang blueshelled, which has the same gene for shell color as the Araucana. I found no evidence concerning its relation to the Araucana, if any.  See Zhao, R, et al. 2006. A Study on Eggshell Pigmentation: Biliverdin in Blue-Shelled Chickens. Poultry Science 85:546–549. On line at http://ps.fass.org/content/85/3/546.full.pdf

[15] Storey, A.A., et al  2008. Pre-Columbian chickens, dates, isotopes and mtDNA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(48): E99., and Storey, A.A, et al  2011. Pre-Columbian chickens of the Americas: a critical review of the hypotheses and evidence for their origins.  Rapa Nui Journal Vol. 25 (2) on line at http://une-au.academia.edu/AliceStorey/Papers

[16] Fundación para la Innovación Agraria, Ministerio de Agricultura. 2009. Resultados y Lecciones en Selección y Manejo de la Gallina Mapuche Productora de  Huevos Azules. Serie Experiencias De Innovación Para El Emprendimiento Agrario. On line at http://bibliotecadigital.innovacionagraria.cl/gsdl/collect/publicac/index/assoc/HASH8d8c.dir/68_Libro_Gallinamapuche.pdf?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=prettyphoto&iframe=true&width=90%&height=90%, and  Moya Azcárate, Rita. 2004 Gallina De Huevos Azules: contribuciones a la elaboración de un protocolo.  Línea Transversal Biodiversidad no cultivada y semidomesticada. América Latina Red CBDC.  On line at  http://www.cetsur.org/wp-content/uploads/gallina-de-huevos-azules-contribuciones-a-la-elaboracion-de-un-protocolo.pdf

[17] Moya A., op cit, p. 20.

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.