Machaca Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Machaca is a dish of northern Mexico made by pounding salted, sun-dried beef into fine shreds and frying it with eggs, tomato, chili, and onion. The name comes from machacar, 'to pound or crush,' and true to that name, the labor of breaking down the hard, dry meat is where the dish begins. In the homes of Sonora and Sinaloa, machaca con huevo, the version bound with eggs, is a standard breakfast.

Cattle came to this land with the arrival of the Spanish. In the sixteenth century, herds spread through the dry pastoral country of the north — the ranchos — and the region grew into one of Mexico's great cattle lands. With no means of refrigeration, herders and cowboys salted their beef and dried it under the strong sun into carne seca, a jerky that would keep. That hard meat was pounded loose in a mortar and fried with eggs and vegetables, and so a keeping-food turned into a daily breakfast.

Until cattle crossed the sea and arrived, beef machaca had no way of coming into being. The dish as it stands today took its shape within the pastoral culture of the north from the colonial period onward, before refrigeration spread.

Machaca sometimes comes trailing claims that it has been eaten 'since Aztec times' or is a 'tradition from the eighteenth century.' But a story that pushes this dish of pounded beef back into antiquity compresses the dates too far: cattle themselves were not in the pre-Spanish north.

Even so, to say that machaca was simply 'born after the Spanish brought cattle' is to tell only half of it. The craft of drying meat and crushing it was rooted in this land before cattle came. The indigenous peoples of the north had long known how to salt and dry the meat of deer and other game and grind it fine to keep it. When cattle arrived, people swapped the main ingredient of that craft from deer to beef. The technique carried on unbroken; only the meat changed. In time the settlers, too, took up the drying craft already present in this land — so the Oxford scholarship on the pastoral history of Latin America records.

That dried beef had settled into the north is borne out in a primary record. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn, during his mission in Sonora, wrote down how salted, sun-dried beef was kept on the ranchos and at the missions. By at least that time, the life of drying beef had taken hold in the cattle country.

The continuity of the swap from deer to beef, and the line drawn by the arrival of cattle — the history of machaca holds both at once.