protein · foodway8 bonds · 7 sourced

chorizo

savouryspicyunrestricted

Cultural layer

Origin

The Iberian peninsula; a pork sausage, hard and cured or soft for cooking, red with sweet or hot paprika, pimentón, ground from Capsicum annuum, a pepper of the Americas, and in La Vera smoked over oak

Routes

Carried with the Spanish and Portuguese empires and rebuilt in Mexico region by region, coloured with chile, and in Yucatán with recado rojo and sour orange; brought to the Philippines by the colonizers from 1521, where it stayed fiesta fare and chorizo de Bilbao comes in tins packed in lard, not from Bilbao; and in Goa a distinctive sausage developed by monks

Context

Spanish chorizo is red because of a plant from the Americas: its colour is paprika, and pimentón is ground from Capsicum annuum, a pepper cultivated in Mexico before 3500 BC that Columbus probably met among the Taíno on his first voyage. Spain's own record of pimentón begins in the sixteenth century, with the Hieronymite friars growing it at the Monastery of Yuste, so the sausage that now reads as definitively Iberian is red only since Columbus. Mexico then made its own, with chile as the main ingredient and pork fed on maize, soft, rarely smoked, eaten crumbled rather than sliced, and Muñoz Zurita states the return plainly: Mexico gave pimentón to today's Spanish chorizos. This means the Mexican chorizo is not a copy of the Spanish one but a return trip.

Behind this layer

The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)

Pimentón de la Vera, application for registration as a protected designation of origin (Official Journal of the European Union C 287, 24 November 2006)

Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Gastronomía Mexicana (Ricardo Muñoz Zurita, 2012)

Memories of Philippine Kitchens, updated and expanded edition (Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan, 2012)

Indian Food: A Historical Companion (K. T. Achaya, 1994)

Route

Pending

The routes are written. They are not yet mapped.

This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.

1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype

What renders here when it lands

Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence

Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled

Foodway

Present as a living food culture.

No names recorded.

Peoples

Iberian

Connections

8 bonds · 7 sourced

chickpeas

Reinforced

.70

potato

Experimental

.50