vegetable · foodway8 bonds · 8 sourced

jicama

The Acapulco to Manila run is the trade route that food history routinely forgets, and Southeast Asian cooking is full of Mexican plants that arrived on it.

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Cultural layer

Origin

Mexico and Central America; the crisp white root of Pachyrhizus erosus, eaten raw, named from the Nahuatl xicamatl

Routes

Carried by Spanish ships across the Pacific to the Philippines and into Southeast Asia, where it became singkamas and bangkuang and was absorbed into local cooking

Context

Jicama crossed the Pacific on the Manila galleon and stayed. It is singkamas in the Philippines and bangkuang in Malaysia, folded into rojak and fresh lumpia as though it had always been there. The Acapulco to Manila run is the trade route that food history routinely forgets, and Southeast Asian cooking is full of Mexican plants that arrived on it.

Behind this layer

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

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 404 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype

What renders here when it lands