The foods the Aztecs loved the most are available in any Mexican restaurant today. They are the foods of the Americas: corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, peppers, and avocados.
The staple grain was corn, or maize. From childhood, girls learned how to make tortillas—flat bread made from corn meal. The Aztecs ate tortillas every day. They were served filled with beans, vegetables, or meats. Farmers took tortillas into the field for their afternoon meal.
Tamalli (today’s tamales) was maize dough filled with chilies, beans, or meat and formed into a ball. The dough was then steamed in a clay pot, much like a dumpling. Atolli was maize porridge to which fruit or chilies were added for flavor. Pozolli, a soup with whole corn kernels, was filling and nutritious. Today it is known as pozole in Spanish.
The Aztecs raised only two domestic animals for meat: dogs and turkeys. They did not have cattle, pigs, or sheep until after the arrival of the Spanish. Meat was expensive, and the protein source for most people was beans, which were eaten daily. Hunters added to the average diet by providing deer, rabbit, ducks, geese, and other birds. Grasshoppers and agave worms were roasted and eaten, along with other kinds of protein-rich insects and larvae.
Grains, vegetables, and fruits made up most of the Aztec diet. In addition to maize-based foods, tomatoes and chilies were common. The tomatoes were distant relatives of today’s tomatoes. There were smaller and fewer varieties were available. Chili peppers provided a full range of hotness, from very mild to mouth-searing hot. The Aztecs also ate onions, sweet potatoes, jicama, peanuts, and popcorn.
The chip-and-dip dish called guacamole today was actually a sauce in Aztec times. It is made with avocados, tomatoes, and onions. It was added to a dish fit only for the tlatoani and his guests—roasted agave worms. The Aztecs used salt and chili peppers to season their
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Rich Food, Poor Food
A meal in Aztec times varied, depending on the wealth of the person eating and the occasion. Spanish priest and historian Bernal Diaz del Castillo described in his journal one of Motecuhzoma M's dinners. (A brazier is a small device used to hold coals when cooking food.)
His cooks prepared over 30 kinds of dishes for every meai, done the way he iiked them; and they pfaced smaff pottery braziers under them so they wouidn't get coid. They prepared over three hundred pfates of the food Montezuma was going to eat, and more than a thousand piates for the guard.... Every day they cooked chicken, turkey, pheasant, partridge, quaff, tame and wiid duck, venison, wifd pig... hares, rabbits, and many varieties of birds and other things that grow in this country....
In contrast to this daily banquet for the tlatoani, Bernardino de Sahagun described
The poor choices offered at a feast thrown by a commoner.
But among those who were oniy commoners... oniy miserabiy, in poverty and want, were receptions and invitations made. Not as much was offered one as was required and customary. . . . Many things were omitted or spoiied. Thus [the feast] was a faiiure and fruitiess. . . perhaps oniy ieftovers, bitter sauces, and state tamaies and tortiiias were offered them.
(Source; Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. The BernaiDiaz Chronicle. Translated and edited by Albert Idell. Garden City, N. Y.; Dolphin Books, 1956; and General History of the Things of New Spain {Florentine Codex). Vol. 4. Translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. 0. Anderson. Reprint. Santa Fe, N. M.; School of American Research and the University of Utah Press, 1979.)
Only the richest Aztec households would serve cocoa, often in fancy vessels such as this one shaped like a hare.
Food. They also used a flavoring popular today: vanilla. Vanilla comes from the seed pod of a variety of orchid. It is still found in Mexican dishes. For those who could afford it, a meal was finished with a cup of chocolate.
The major alcoholic beverage of the Aztecs was octli. Brewers collected sap from the agave plant. The sap would be boiled and fermented until it was as smooth as honey. The drink was loaded with vitamins and had less alcohol than today’s beer. People still sometimes drank enough to get drunk, though. The Aztecs had many rules meant to keep people from drinking too much, but they were not always followed.
World History
