Proto-pozole (pre-pork pre-Columbian ceremonial pozole: ritual meats such as turkey/dog with nixtamalized maize proto-layer) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Pozole is a soup of large kernels of corn treated with lime (hominy), simmered at length with meat. Today it is usually made with pork and appears at Mexican festivals and at Sunday family tables. The name goes back to the Nahuatl pozolli, from a root meaning foam, or to bubble and froth (pozoni). The froth rising from a pot of boiling hominy became the name of the dish itself. From its very name, this stew is an old food rooted in Mesoamerica.

Today's pork pozole, however, belongs to a newer layer in the dish's history. Pork was an Old World animal, and it first set foot in Mexico with the expeditions of Cortes and others, in the sixteenth century. Before that, before the Spanish arrived, Mesoamerica also had a stew that could be called pozole. But there was no pork in it.

What the indigenous people simmered was corn, their sacred crop. Corn whose kernels had passed through the handwork of treating with lime water (nixtamalization) turns soft-skinned and gains a distinctive aroma and nourishment. This they cooked for hours and served with meat. In the sixteenth century the Spanish friar Sahagun set down the indigenous world in his vast record, the Florentine Codex, and it tells us that this stew was a festival food, a special dish offered at the feasts of gods bound up with life and renewal.

The meat used there was not pork. It was the meat of animals long present in this land, such as turkey and dog. The pozole of the pre-conquest period, then, differed from the modern pork version in the very nature of its meat; it was a dish of another stage. The act itself of offering corn to the gods and simmering it is old, and it forms the distant underlayer of today's pork pozole.

Pozole is often spoken of as a dish that has continued since Aztec times, and sometimes it is even said to have once been a stew of human flesh. That the indigenous people, who held corn sacred, simmered it within their rites is certain, and in that sense the dish has old roots. But laying that age and that ritual memory directly over today's pork pozole is where the account goes astray.

There are two views here. One is a story of continuity: that a ritual corn stew existed in pre-conquest Mesoamerica. Sahagun's Florentine Codex records a corn stew as a festival food, and the name pozolli itself derives from the Nahuatl word for foam, so the age of the genre, a stew offered to the gods, is not in doubt.

The other view is that this ritual stew and the modern pork pozole are separate stages. Pork was livestock that crossed the sea only after the conquest, and the meat simmered in the pre-conquest rites was turkey, dog, and other animals of this land.

The claim that pozole originated as a dish of human flesh grew out of a confusion here. Primary sources, beginning with Sahagun's Florentine Codex, do record a ritual food, tlacatlaolli, in which the flesh of a captive was added to nixtamalized corn and served (at feasts such as the Tlacaxipehualiztli of Xipe Totec). That this ritual food existed is no fabrication. But the further claim, that this tlacatlaolli was the direct ancestor of today's pozole (pozolli), is not academically established. Even Wikipedia hedges with a possibly, and researchers do not agree on which feast is meant or whether there is any real continuity; their findings remain contradictory. The popular tale of pozole as a former dish of human flesh binds together, in a single stroke, a separate ritual food, tlacatlaolli, and the corn stew pozolli, in an overreaching story of continuity.

That the lineage of offering corn to the gods and simmering it is old is certain, and it is equally certain that today's pork pozole is not seamlessly continuous with that ritual underlayer. This prehistoric layer is most honestly read as the corn stew for the gods that pozole left behind before it became its present pork form.