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TV
chef re-writes salsa history
Millions
watch James Martin's Saturday Kitchen on BBC and are fascinated with
the little facts as well as the exciting cooking. However, when guest
Chef, Fernando Stovell of London's Cuckoo Club, stated that the word
salsa must originated in Europe because Europe introduced the tomato
to the Americas, as he did on the show on 17th January, it makes one
wonder how much else on the show is rubbish.
Calling creations
salsa has become an 'in thing' recently, seemingly without really
knowing what a salsa is (a sauce of chiles, tomatoes and other
ingredients like squash seeds and even beans). An accompaniment
recently featured on that doyenne of cooking programmes 'Master Chef'
was referred to as a salsa when it was, in fact, a chutney (in the
strict Indian sense).
Salsa, - America's
favourite condiment since 2000, supplanting ketchup - actually has
been a favourite condiment for thousands of years. The chile (chilli)
has been domesticated since about 5200 BC., and tomatoes by 3000 BC.
both in Central America - not Europe. The two were combined into a
condiment, which the Conquistadors named "salsa," or sauce.
In 1494, Dr. Diego
Álvarez Chanca brought the first chiles to Spain, after
travelling to the West Indies on Columbus' second voyage. He wrote of
their medicinal effect. Salsa is the Spanish word for sauce, but the
food itself predates the Spaniards by many centuries. Tomato is the
base of salsa: The wild tomato is indigenous to Ecuador and Peru, but
the Aztecs and other Central American nations were the first to
domesticate it. The tomatillo-which is not a green tomato but a
member of the nightshade family that includes the cape gooseberry
(their closer relation) as well as the tomato- which also originated
in the Andes, in the area that is now Ecuador, Colombia and Peru.
The making of a
sauce by combining chiles, tomatoes and other ingredients like squash
seeds and even beans has been documented back to the Aztec culture as
we are told Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary
sent to "New Spain" (Mexico) in 1529, after the Aztec
Empire was conquered by Hernando Cortes.
Aztec lords
combined tomatoes with chiles and ground squash seeds and consumed
them mainly as a condiment with seafood, turkey and venison. This
combination was subsequently called salsa in 1571 by Alonso de
Molina, a Spanish priest and missionary (c. 1510-1584), who was taken
by his parents to Santo Domingo, and went on to Mexico in 1523, after
the conquest, where he learned the Aztec language, Nahuatl.
Salsa is an
excellent condiment to use with many dishes especially as it is very
healthy - salsa is low in calories and contains little to no fat.
Tomatoes, chiles and cilantro contain vitamins A and C; tomatoes also
have potassium. It was not introduced from Europe and neither was the
chile(chilli) or tomato and as for the dance - it first appeared in
1933 when Cuban songwriter Ignacio Piniero wrote the song "Echale
Salsita" ("Throw On Some Sauce") after tasting food
which lacked Cuban spices. But it was in 1962 that Jimmy Sabater's
tune "Salsa y Beme" suggesting that dancers spice it up by
adding a little "salsa" to their movement when they danced
- with not a European in sight.
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