Indigenous corn-dough dish (humita family) Period COrigin theory BVerified

From the Andes down into southern Chile, maize is an old crop, well settled in the land. Analysis of pre-Columbian pottery from Araucania shows traces of maize already in everyday use around a thousand years ago. Young maize (choclo) is pressed and worked into a dough, wrapped in the corn husks, and steamed or boiled. This is the preparation called humita, carried down through the households of the Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples.

This older layer holds none of the Old World elements that would later come to define Chilean cooking. There is no beef and no wheat, and none of the Spanish empanada's way of wrapping and baking. It is also a separate line from the Mesoamerican treatment of nixtamalizing maize into masa: here the fresh choclo is made straight into dough. The Inca were said to distinguish several maize breads, the sacrificial sancu, the ceremonial and gift bread huminta, and the everyday tanta; and the name humita comes from the Quechua umint'a, meaning worked young maize.

This plain steamed dish would later change shape in colonial Chile. A filling (pino) of minced beef or lamb, brought by the Spanish, is covered with corn dough and baked in an oven or an earthenware pot, and this is today's pastel de choclo. It is a fused dish in which the Indigenous handling of maize met a Spanish filling on one plate; the steamed maize dish described here is its prehistory.

The phrase pastel de choclo is an Inca-era Indigenous dish is widely in circulation. It is easy to want to see, in a national dish of Chile, an unbroken line reaching back to the pre-Columbian era.

It is true that the maize-dough dish itself is old. Archaeological analysis of maize residues points to a thousand years of use in Araucania, and the primary source Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) records that the Inca made several kinds of maize-dough bread. The age of the genre is not in doubt.

The question is whether that older layer may be treated as the same thing as today's pastel de choclo, filled with beef and baked. What the archaeology and ethnohistory can follow is only the steamed humita-type dough dishes of native maize; the pie form, with a filling enclosed and baked, is not to be found there. The present form, a pastry covering a pino of lamb or chicken with corn dough, appears in the record for the first time with the naturalist Claudio Gay's Historia fisica y politica de Chile (around 1862), and is mentioned next by Vicuna Mackenna (1877). The enclosed pie, in other words, crystallized in the nineteenth century, a mestizo dish in which a Spanish minced-meat filling and an Indigenous maize dough fused together.

The Indigenous maize-dough dish did exist. But to draw a straight line from it to the baked pie of today goes too far: between the two lies the colonial encounter.