Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. Gary Paul Nabhan
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not act alone but interacted with Persians, Sogdians, Berbers, Uighurs, Gujaratis, Han Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and Dutch at these crossroads. We must go to the ends of the line—to the farthest corners of the earth—where the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real of Chile and Chocolate become no more than rustic footpaths climbing up into the hinterlands.
It is at the ends of these lines that we might truly fathom how the spice trade contributed to today’s globalization and how pervasive the culinary influences of Arabs and Jews have become.
For our immediate purposes, imagine the ends of one line for trading spices to be Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and Quanzhou and Xi’an, China, on the east and the montane hinterlands of Taos, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the west. Let us begin in Ulaanbaatar’s precursor, historically known as Yihe Huree (literally “Great Camp”), which stood not far from where the most far-flung of all Arab contributions to global cuisines was once recorded. From 1328 to 1332 CE, the country from Xi’an northward into Mongolia was ruled by the emperor Tutemur, who suffered chronic health problems during his brief reign. These maladies were severe enough to prompt him to seek dietary advice from a medical doctor who had vast knowledge of medicinal and culinary herbs in use in Persia and Arabia.
The man chosen to be the imperial physician, Hu Szu-hui, was most surely of Hui Muslim ancestry and had widely traveled in Central Asia, Asia Minor, and the Arabian Peninsula before settling in north-central China. Hu Szu-hui encouraged the emperor’s kitchen staff to favor healthful Persian, Arabic, and Turkish recipes heavily laden with certain dried spices that were already becoming popular in China and Mongolia. In essence, he worked with the emperor’s chefs to craft China’s first dietary manual. It was a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep Tutemur, a descendant of Kublai Khan, alive, in good health, and in power for several years longer.
Although the emperor soon died, the Hui doctor’s recipes lived on in a medieval manuscript, Yin-shan cheng-yao, recently translated by food historian Paul Buell and ethnobotanist Eugene Anderson. One of Hu Szu-hui’s recipes curiously resurfaced in a place halfway around the world from where the Hui and Mongolians had traded spices.8
At a meeting of ethnobiologists in May 2013, Gene Anderson recounted to me the story of how, while rummaging through used books in a shop in Silver City, New Mexico, he noticed a recipe for lamb stew in a 1939 booklet called Potajes Sabrosos. He showed the recipe to Paul, and they quickly realized that it was nearly identical to a recipe that Hu Szu-hui had left behind in China some seven hundred years earlier—one that Gene and Paul had translated for Yin-shan cheng-yao. Both recipes were for a lamb and garbanzo bean stew. The Spanish version by Cleofas Jaramillo that appeared in Potajes Sabrosos—later translated as The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes9—lacked only one ingredient that appeared in the Arabic-Persian stew recorded by Hu Szu-hui. That single missing ingredient was mastic, a gum from a wild pistachio tree relative that was used as a thickening agent in the Mediterranean. Hispanic New Mexicans apparently found their own local surrogates for such gummy thickeners.
The similarities between these two recipes are so uncanny that some sort of cultural diffusion makes more sense to food historians than independent invention does. Had the same core knowledge of what spices to pair with lamb and beans independently diffused to different corners of the earth? How in the name of heaven had the same recipe landed at one end of the line as well as at another halfway around the world, when both of these places were equally remote from the Middle East, the heartland of Arabic and Jewish spice trade?
When Cleofas Jaramillo was a budding folklorist for the Federal Writers’ Project during the Depression, she became intent on collecting recipes and other lore from the villagers of the Rio Arriba watershed of northern New Mexico. Those Spanish speakers pointedly referred to their ancestry as Hispanic, not Mexican, and certainly not as Jewish or Arabic. A few may have known that some of their Spanish-speaking ancestors who had accompanied Hernán Cortés from Spain to Veracruz, Mexico, in 1519 did not want to linger very long in central Mexico, where echoes of the Spanish Inquisition had already begun to reach. They linked their cultural identity to “new beginnings” in the Rio Arriba in the 1590s, when Gaspar Castaño de Sosa and Juan de Oñate recruited emigrants from Spain to join them in the colonization of the northern highlands now known as New Mexico. It seems that many of the people who joined Oñate and the others for the journey were at first thought to be conversos—newly confirmed Catholics from historically Jewish (or perhaps some former Muslim) families—who had recently fled from Andalusia, the Canary Islands, or Portugal. And yet it may well be that they were conversos in name only, and that they continued to practice their former faiths and associated culinary traditions clandestinely. Although historian Stanley Hordes and sociologist Tomás Atencio have referred to these people as crypto-Jews, their colleague Juan Estevan Arellano has suggested that there may have been crypto-Muslims among the earliest “Spanish” colonists of New Mexico, as well.
The descendants of these original Spanish-speaking inhabitants still reside in the remote uplands of northern New Mexico, where they remain quick to distinguish themselves from recent Mexican immigrants in language, appearance, and custom. Curiously, among the culinary customs that many of these Hispanos juxtapose with those of more recent immigrants from Mexico is their abhorrence of pork and their predilection for lamb, as well as their breaking of fasts with capirotada (bread pudding) and pan de semita (a bread made with bran, sesame, or nuts, originally unleavened but today also leavened). They do not see such observances practiced among the Spanish-speaking newcomers to the arid, windswept reaches of the Rio Arriba, and for good reason.
We now know that many of the descendants of those original “Spanish” and “Portuguese” inhabitants of New Mexico, when genetically fingerprinted, test positive for Semitic roots, Sephardic Jewish, Arabic, or both. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Hordes, Atencio, and Arellano, we are able to confirm that both bloodlines and cultural practices of Semitic communities from the Middle East reached one of their most remote outposts in northern New Mexico during their worldwide diaspora. The crypto-Jews, crypto-Muslims, and true conversos had arrived at “the ends of the earth” in 1591, less than a hundred years after the Great Colónoscopy of the New World had begun.10
But let us return to consider that recipe-catching folklorist Cleofas Jaramillo. The surname Jaramillo, like many others in northern New Mexico, such as Robledo, Martinez, Gómez, Oñate, Salas, and Medina, now appears to be one that was commonly attached to Jewish or Muslim families escaping to less populated areas of the Americas to avoid the Mexican Inquisition. Genealogical and historical evidence suggest that among the first sheepherders, garbanzo bean growers, and spice traders in New Mexico were crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims who outwardly behaved as conversos in their Catholic-dominated communities but maintained many of the religious and culinary traditions of Sephardic Jews, Arabs, and Moors within the confines of their homes.
When Cleofas Jaramillo visited with her brother’s neighbors in the Rio Arriba village of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, in 1938, she was ostensibly collecting nineteenth-century Hispanic culinary traditions. But both the direct and indirect roots of their cultural and culinary practices can be traced far deeper than that. The Arabic, Sephardic Jewish, and even Phoenician influences on “Spanish” cuisines were centuries if not millennia old, perhaps dating back to the twelfth century BCE in Spain. Given the status of historical research during her career, it would not have been possible for Cleofas Jaramillo or anyone else of her upbringing during that era to extricate those Arabic and Sephardic subtleties from other influences on the culinary traditions of New Mexico, Mexico, or even Spain itself.
Perhaps that inextricability is due in part to certain advances in the Spanish culinary arts initiated by the Phoenicians, who arrived in Cádiz, Spain, around 1100 BCE. These arts became even more deeply indebted to Persian and Arabic influences in 822 CE, when an enigmatic figure named Ziryab arrived in Córdoba, Spain. As we will discover later, Ziryab not only revolutionized Spanish farming and cookery but also sent Spanish table manners, seasonal dress, and chamber music on altogether fresh trajectories. Of course, one of his principal contributions to Spanish cuisine was the delicate mixing of rather pungent, aromatic spices in a manner already