Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Did you know that to the Aztecs, the avocado was
a symbol of virility and enhanced fertility. In fact, the
now one word for avocado, act means testical. What. Okay,
let's uncover the history of the avocado. My name is
Eva Longoria and I am and welcome to Hungry for History,
(00:26):
a podcast that explores our past and present through food.
On every episode, we'll talk about the history of some
of our favorite dishes, ingredients, and beverages. So make yourself
at home. Even okay, wait, wait, wait wait. The natal
word for avocado means testical. It kind of makes sense.
(00:47):
It looks like a testicle. It's shaped like a testicle,
and it also it's funny to do this with my
hands to say, well, I'm saying this, but it actually
also grows in hairs, so it's shaped like a testicle.
It grows in pairs. And to the Aztecs, it had
properties of virility and enhanced fertility. It has a lot
(01:10):
of oil and a lot of protein. Um, so it
was a powerful source of energy, which is why it
was a symbol of you know, virility. Um. Yeah. At
The word act comes from a cattle, which means testical.
Is so funny. So so waca mole. Where does the
word waca mole come from? Waka mole comes from a wakamuli,
(01:34):
which literally translates into avocado sauce. Like when we think
of mole, you know that the sauce with chocolate and
chila is and all of that means it was now
our first sauce. So a wakamuli is avocado sauce. Oh,
it's basically this is a food that was consumed, you know,
in Mexico pre conquest. Mash in there with a little
(01:56):
bit of salt wrapped like we would have as an
after school snack, or a little bit of avocado in
So it's it's an ancestral food. I did a commercial
for avocados from Mexico one year, and Americans eat around
a hundred and forty million pounds of avocado during Super
Bowl Sunday alone, just Super Bowl Sunday. Now do you
(02:21):
think Americans know that when they're eating a hundred and
forty million pounds of it during Super Bowl weekend that
it's a Meso American dish? No, I doubt it. I mean,
nobody thinks about that. It's just chips and guac right,
chips and glads just has become such a it's become
a staple to the American diet. Totally, totally. I knew
(02:41):
they were native to the America's um, but I didn't
know they were thousands of years old. There are thousands
of years old. We actually don't know exactly how old
they are, but avocado seeds have been found in archaeological
sites in modern day dating to around eight thousand sint BC,
so it could be you know, much longer than that,
(03:03):
but that's the earliest archaeological evidence. So that's ten years
that's ten tho years ago. But does the is the
avocado seasonal? It is? I mean in some areas it
grows year round, but it so in some areas in Mexico.
So most avocados now in Mexico grow in mitruck Gun,
which is a very temperate climate, so there. Yes, it's
(03:25):
a pretty hardy tree as long as it's in a
mild temperature. It can sometimes withstand freezing temperatures, but it
doesn't really like it. It's one of the few fruits
that doesn't ripen on the tree, so you can pick
it early, travel it to you know, your supermarkets all
over the world and then it ripens, which is interesting. Yeah, exactly.
(03:49):
And that's one of the most surprising facts that I
learned about avocado um that it's the only fruit that
doesn't ripen on the tree. It could hang on the
tree for up to sixteen months. So it's a great
run of Yeah, I mean it's it's kind of you know,
it's kind of amazing. And if you grow it from seed.
I don't know if you did that when you were
a kid. Just take the seed I did, and you
(04:10):
can start sprouting. It's if you grow it from a seed,
it'll take about up to thirteen years to actually to
produce fruit. Yeah, but it once it produces fruit, yeah,
I could hang for sixteen months, at least sixteen months
once you pluck it, then it starts to ripen. Well,
not only that, Like you said, it takes thirteen years
(04:31):
for it to produce fruit. But there's an avocado tree
like five years old in Puebla. They last a long time.
They can last a long time. That's the oldest still
existing tree is about five years old. But they could
live over a hundred years. I mean, it's a very
hearty treat. They only produce fruit for about fifty years,
but that's still a pretty good run. Still pretty good run.
(04:56):
Did you ever use the leaves in in a tea?
Not in tea, although in pre colonial Mexico it was
used in tea to cleanse, you know, like for stomach problems. Also,
the oil was used to diminish scars and cosmetics, for
split ends and for dan druff. But I like to
use the leaves in beans, like to season my beans,
(05:19):
and it has this really interesting sort of anecy scent
um which gives the beans. But I've never actually had
it in a t have you. No, I'm not a
fan of it, and I know people who put it
in their beans and it gives it an annecy taste
to me, because I don't like a niece. I don't
like it. But um, I have seen a lot of
(05:42):
people use it actually, especially traveling through Mexico this past
couple of months, I've seen a lot of people use
use it medicinally, like for stomach aches and stuff. Yeah,
it has some really great anti inflammatory properties and antifungal properties,
so it was used a lot. The leaves were used,
you know, the oil was used, and even the pit
I've never actually used the avocado pit. But the avocado
(06:03):
pit was you know, ground to use as a condiment
for salads and also used for cough and for sore throats.
So it's interesting how all aspects of this fruit are
are used. Was it the Spanish conquistadors that took the
plant to Europe? Well, pre conquest, made its way, you know,
(06:23):
through Central America, all the way to Peru. I mean
in Peru they there's the Guechua name for avocado is balta,
and they still called it the alocado palta there um.
But it eventually during the colonial period it made its
way to the Caribbean, right to Cuba and to Puerto
Rico and Jamaica. But the Spaniards then took it to Europe.
It was it was one of these interesting fruits that
(06:45):
it was unlike anything they had tasted in the Old World.
But the earliest written evidence of it diddates to fifteen
twenty six. This historian, Spanish historian in Mexico, Fernando Zolvie
though he described the avocado in the center of the
fruit is a seed like a peeled chestnut, and between
this and the rind is a part which is eaten,
(07:07):
which is abundant and is a paste similar to butter
and a very good taste. But they were eating it
with cheese, and they were also adding a little bit
of sugar to it. Um, So they were eating it
in a very different way than we eat it today.
But also they didn't really you know, they didn't really
(07:28):
want a lot of people to eat it because of
its lustful qualities. What do you mean, is it like
an aphrodisiac or something exactly, because it was considered an aphrodisiac,
so a little bit, you know, a couple of decades later,
Francisco Fernandez, a doctor of King Philip the second, in
his natural Histories, he was describing, you know, how wonderful
(07:48):
this tree is, but also saying that it excites sexual
appetite and increases semen count. So it was like, we
need to be a little bit cautious of it because
it had these you know, qualities which I find it
so interesting. But yes, but eventually the Spaniards to get
over and from there it made its way all over,
(08:10):
you know, all over Europe. Really, when we come back,
we're sharing some recipes with you. Stay with us. I
(08:30):
was actually just this morning when um, when we did
our Home Cooks episode, we talked about this book by
this woman. I was like, how, let me see what
avocado recipes are in here? And there are four avocado
recipes in here, unlike anything that we really have today.
Avocados stuffed with sardines, right, this is six with sardines.
(08:57):
Avocados in a novada sauce with the all nutsas that
goes with chiles and ogada. So they have the avocados
with roasted tomatoes, this walnut sauce and then topped with
pomegranate seeds. Not something that I would think to do today,
but now I really want to do it. Avocado stuffed
(09:17):
with piccarilla, which is ground meat with vinegar and oregano
and sliced onion, and then the wacamole. The wacamole is
really interesting because it says this is finds so interesting.
Slice it with a silver or wooden knife, not iron
because it gives it bad flavor and color. Right, So
(09:40):
then you put it on a platter and you add oil, vinegar, onion,
oregan no chili, anchel fried in lard or pickled chiless
and sometimes you can mash it the weight she fried
the chili or she fried the whole thing, fried the chile,
so put it in a platter, and then top, I say,
(10:03):
the chileneca. So the chila fried in month in lard
or or pickled cheerless. So you don't put it in
grind it, she says, you either put this on a
platter and just leave it like this, and then there
are some people that mash it. I think we're gonna
(10:26):
have a wacamole battle because I have some very sacrilegious
rules about waca moole. How do you make your wacamole?
Just lime and salt? That's it? Okay, okay, you're a purist.
About you're a purist. I do tomato and onion, so
I I do. Here's my rule. So I do avocado, tomato,
(10:49):
and onion, white onion, by the way, not red onion,
white onion, A lot of salt, and a lot of
yellow lemon lime. I know. My rule is lime is
for salsa and lemon is for wacamole. Really, except except
if I'm eating it in a quarter tilla, then I
put lime. But literally, I like my guacamole like lemonade.
(11:12):
I knew you would be a purist, but like I
hate when people put mayonnaise Gara, Oh my god, anything
that's disgusting I've never seen. I'm never sing that's the garlic.
Garlic does not belong in guacamole. No, I've never had
it without. That's how I feel about tomato in wacamole.
(11:33):
Whenever I have a tomato, I'm like, this is this
is filler, this is just filler. I hate to see
guacamole recipes with mayonnaise. Who was the first person to
put mayonnaise in wacamole? Like, that's so dumb. It's already creamy,
it doesn't need any Yes, I have a very I'm
I'm I'm so very passionate about this mayonnaise rule. That's
(11:56):
but I do. I will say, we go through in
my household twelve to fifteen avocados a week. Really, Oh yeah,
it's like my well, my husband and I and my son.
I mean, we just eat them every day every day.
I don't think there's a day that goes by that
I don't need an avocado. Yeah, every time I go
to the grocery store, I buy avocado. It's always on
(12:17):
my shopping list, you know, always, always, always, and either
wacom on it or just slice. You know. Another way
that I really love it is cubes like g iess
I'll make like a like a chicken soup, like some
sort of warm you know, especially now that it's so
cold at and just cubed avocados in a warm soup.
I love that. I love the feeling of that warm
(12:38):
with that with the with the creaminess and avocado. Yeah.
I make an amazing tortilla soup and it's incomplete without
avocado in it. Yes, I agree, it's such it's so good.
It's so versatile. Um, sopa for they I have to
have avocado and my you have to have you have
to have it. You have to have the little cubes.
(13:00):
It's that little pieces of little pieces of cube cheese.
It goes together and it's so versatile. I make this
really amazing chocolate avocado puddings that I need the recipe
to that. Alright, I'm gonna start making my chocolate avocado pudding,
(13:20):
which is the most delicious thing everybody really everybody loves it. Um.
I have one cup of water heating. I'm going to
add three fourths cup sugar, quarter cup of cocoa powder
and about a tablespoon of vanilla extract. Then I have
to very ripe avocados that I'm going to put in
(13:42):
a food processor to slice them, remas the pit and
scoop them into the food processor. I just processed that
until it's looks super super smooth. It's not at all chunky,
(14:02):
just like a smooth avocado. Sugar is simmering, and I'm
gonna melt one cup of chocolate chips. I'm using bittersweet
chocolate chips. I'm gonna stake this in the microwave for
about thirty second increments so it doesn't burn. Okay, My water, sugar,
(14:26):
cocoa powder mixed here is now melted. Going to take
that off the heat. I'm going to pour this liquid
into the food processor with the avocado. It's still warm alright.
So now it's this light sort of greenish brown mixed here,
(14:53):
the avocado and the liquid. And I'm gonna check my
chocolate chips again. My chocolate is perfectly melted, super smooth
and silky. I'm gonna add this to the food processor,
blend this vigure and now it's just oh my gosh,
(15:15):
chocolate avocado. It has a creaminess of butter. Gosh. That's it.
It's really dark, brown, rich, amazing. I'm going to scoop
this into ramikins and I'm going to refrigerate it for
I would say about three hours, just until it sets
it and it will thick in a little bit, and
(15:36):
then I'm going to garnish it with cocoa nibs. And
it's the perfect dessert for Valentine's Day, for Super Bowl,
for any day. It's delicious, it's healthy fish and it
is gorgeous. It's the avocado making the chocolate creamier as
(16:00):
opposed to mayonnaise in avocado like it's like a it's
like an oxymoron. You're doing creamy, creamy, but an avocado
chocolate moves. That is like, yes, we're going to post
that recipe to that because it's so good because it's creamy.
It doesn't have butter, it doesn't have eggs, it doesn't
have anything the bitterness of the chocolate, but then it
has this creamy sensation in a very good way. Don't
(16:24):
go anywhere. Hungry for History will be right back. Welcome
back to Hungry for History. With Super Bowl and Valentine's
(16:44):
Day around the corner, we thought we'd feature chef to
give us some tips on making the perfect guacamole. Here
is Chef Manuel, the vice president of culinary Operations at
Rosa Mexicano Restaurants. He also happens to be from my
hometown of Laredo, Texas. My name is Manuel Vino, based
(17:04):
in New York City, but I was born and raised
in South Texas in a town called the Arrado, Texas,
as long as I can remember, probably about the age
of six or seven. It's when I really started cooking
in my mom's kitchen. It's always been a passion of mine.
I love food and quickly learned that my destiny was
the restaurant business. It's been an incredible journey and something
(17:25):
that I wouldn't change for anything. That rose Magana, we
make guacamola for you table side. Will pull up a
little cart and inside of morquaehette that will start building
the guacamola right in front of your eyes. A little
red onion celan thro chilies. We use a combination to
set out. We will mash that up into a paste
(17:47):
with a little coast of salt, and then to that
will fold in the avocado. We'll finish it off with
a little bit more cilan, throw a little bit of
onion the chili mixture, and some dice tomatoes. The one
thing that we don't do is we don't add lime
juice to it. You know. We found that it really
produces a really avocado forward guacamole, if you will, and
(18:09):
our customers love it. It's what they keep coming back for.
The mark I had to really allows us to create
our seasoning paste and by using the mono, we mash
all this ingredients. The mark I had To itself is
quite porous, so it really assists in the grinding and
(18:29):
extraction of those essential oils. Those oils then marry very
well with the fats of the avocado, seasoning the avocado
from the inside out, if you will. But mark I
had then anointed as well with all those essential oils,
so the flavor profile becomes much richer and deeper than
you would just folding in those ingredients. But the key
(18:51):
again with the mark I had the besides tradition, besides
its functionality, it really takes on those flavors and creates
a guacamola that's richer and deeper flavor than you would
get from just taking the ingredients combining them in a
normal bowl and folding everything together. It's really about the
layering of flavor, and it all starts with that work ahead.
(19:14):
Then I get very proud of the fact that Mexico's
the primary world exporter of avocados. Avocado, yeah, it is.
I think it's something like of avocado comes from. I
read that the California Avocado Commission blocked it from entering
(19:35):
the US between nineteen until seven. They couldn't keep up
with the demands. So then they finally opened the doors
to Mexico and was like all right. The Department of
Agriculture was like, okay, all right, come on in the
California Avocado Commission was so strong, and there were so
many avocados being produced in California, like really good avocados
(19:58):
being consumed enough in California. So this is why they
were saying, oh, you know, Mexican avocados have a plague
and they're bringing plague to the US, which wasn't true.
But eventually avocados got really popular. So when we grew
up right in South Texas, probably the avocados that we
(20:19):
were purchasing in South Texas was from California, but they
couldn't keep up with the demand. I remember, you know,
growing up in Laredo on the border, we used to
go across and that's where we used to buy the avocados.
There was a fruit stand fr Salz. I remember we
used to go to sales. They had the best avocados
and no Laredo. They used to just remove the pits
so we would be able to cross it. It's crazy,
(20:42):
how much power, how much control an organizations, crazy you
can have. Well, talking about power, I thought it was
a rumor, but this is actually true that avocado exporting
is such a big business that the cartels have tried
or are trying to control the supply chain. It is
big business. I mean the avocado it's it's it's green gold.
(21:03):
Auto Evans could refer to as green gold. There's so
much money involved. So a lot of the drug characters
are going to farmers, are going to exporters, and they're
trying to infiltrate. Like any business that makes so much money,
they're trying to infiltrate. Limes are also a big part,
I mean, lives are not native to to Mexico. But
(21:24):
it is also such a big business. I didn't know
there were five hundred varieties of avocado. At least I
was like, what what do you mean? Is that is
that because of GMOs? Like is it is it genetically modified?
I don't necessarily know about GMOs. I mean, I remember
(21:45):
the first time I went to a hacka many many
years ago, I tasted an avocado. It was like like
the size of an egg. It was tiny, and the
peel was super super thant. You could bite it like
an apple, and it had a very intense sort of
anest taste. But there are main varieties of avocado. The
Mexican one with like which is like a little agg
(22:05):
or like a little size of a plum that's very anessy.
And then there's it's like black and the Mexico ones
are black, yeah, yes, yes, like thin skin and and
black which was those and then there's the Guatemalan which
is a larger fruit. And then they're also Avocados are
also grown in Israel, Africa, China. Right now they're growing, yeah,
(22:27):
right now, they're being grown everywhere. But from these sort
of main varieties, there are many hybrids, so they'll take
like the strongest ones, like the hass avocado, which is
the avocado that's the one that's the most consumed, probably
the ones that everybody is more familiar with in the US,
and that was first developed here in California, not far
(22:48):
from Los Angeleba. So this is a combination of two
different avocados. It's named the hass avocado. I didn't realize that.
What was somebody's name, Rudolph has He was an amateur
botanist gardener and he was supposed to worker. So this
is kind of an interesting story. Right in the early
(23:10):
nineteen hundreds, California was just everybody wanted to move to California.
It's this the land of Sunshine, and it was this
whole thing. Oh, you plant two avocado trees, you put
a hammock in the middle, and then you're going to
become rich. Right, So he decided to move to California
from Wisconsin. He bought an acre of land in Lahabra
and he, you know, took these avocados. This fuerte avocado
(23:34):
that came from an avocado in Mexico that was grafted
here in California. It survived this frost, this this frieze
of nineteen eleven um, and it was named Flerta because
it was so strong. So this Rudolph Has. He took
some of this ferte some of these avocados and combined them,
graftered them with these other avocados, taking two different really
(23:58):
strong avocados and putting them together to create this really
resistant tree, this new tree that grew year round. And
he named it the hass avocado. And he patented this,
patented this avocado in ninety five, and by the nineteen seventies,
hass avocado represented more than eight percent of the avocados
(24:23):
in California. And this is something that this amateur gardener
postman from Wisconsin, he basically created this and he made Sadly,
his patent expired in nineteen fifty two and he made
like five thousand dollars this whole this whole time. Yeah,
it's kind of a sad story. I don't know why.
(24:43):
I don't even question what Hass meant. I was like,
that's obviously a plant type, right, I think Hass is like, yeah,
because we live in California, that's like we always buy
Hossa avocados. They're just the most common. They're they're tasting,
they're they're really good because they're a feel like they're consistent,
like you always know what you're gonna get. But it's
(25:04):
also this particular avocado house avocada. It's also grown in Mexico.
Now it's so resistant, it grows yeer around. It's really strong,
it's really flavorful. It's sort of the perfect the part
I like the flavorful, Like all the fruit in Mexico
is so flavorful, avocados and mangoes and pineapple and cucumbers.
I mean, like things have taste in Mexico, which I love.
(25:26):
I have thoroughly enjoyed this episode because I thought I
knew the avocado. Let me tell you, the avocado and
I are really good friends. And I thought I knew
everything about it, and I didn't. There's a lot of
stuff I didn't know. I didn't know it was an aphrodisiac.
I didn't know it procures lusty avocado is the best,
the best. I love it too. Thank you guys for listening.
(25:46):
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