Pepián Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Pepián is a stew thickened with squash seeds, sesame, and chiles that are dry-roasted and then patiently ground on a stone metate, the powder giving the dish both body and a deep toasted aroma. The main meat is simmered in this sauce along with tomato and chile. The Maya grinding technique—dry-roasting and grinding to a paste—is the heart of the dish's flavor. Even the name comes from Nahuatl (pipiyalli/pepian), meaning ground seed.

The main ingredient of this dish is the turkey, a fowl long rooted in the land. The turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) was domesticated in Mesoamerica and was already living in the Maya region around the turn of the common era. Squash seeds, chiles, and tomatoes are all crops native to this land, familiar staples the Maya had long had in hand. From these local ingredients and the grinding technique, pepián had already appeared in pre-Columbian Maya society as a special stew served on ceremonial occasions.

Today the most common pepián uses chicken, and aromas of cinnamon and allspice enter as well. Spanish and monastery kitchens brought pork, sesame, and almonds—materials of the Old World—into the dish. Even so, the base of toasted, ground seed and chile carries on unchanged. In 2007 the Guatemalan government named it part of the intangible cultural heritage, marking it as a dish that represents the nation.

Two views of pepián's origin stand side by side, each filling in the other.

One holds that the dish took shape in Maya society before the Spanish arrived, and this is the established account. The turkey rooted in the land, and the technique of dry-roasting and grinding seeds and chiles, were both long present in Maya society. That the turkey lived in the Maya region from early on is clear from archaeology (the work of Thornton and colleagues published in PLoS ONE), and the 2007 heritage listing rests on this old origin.

This way of grinding seeds to thicken a stew of fowl did indeed exist in Mesoamerica before the Spanish came. In the sixteenth century the friar Sahagún compiled his General History of the Things of New Spain (the Florentine Codex), which records a totolin patzcalmollo—turkey combined with red chile, tomato, and ground squash seed—as a food of rulers such as Moctezuma. A contemporary record thus mirrors the very core of the dish that had continued from before the colonial period.

The other view looks to the chicken pepián most common today, and to Old World spices like cinnamon, clove, and cumin. These came in during the colonial period, from the sixteenth century on. But chicken is an equal substitute for the native turkey, not something that marks the beginning of the dish; what the colonial period brought was an overlay of flavor and a swap of protein. The beginning of the dish itself still reaches back to the pre-Columbian Maya.