Fariñes
Check it out y’all. Grits. In Spain. Served with butter and hot buttermilk and white sugar on the side. Legit, honest-to-goodness grandma’s house grits. I am excited. Can you tell? Let me tell you all about the fascinating history of fariñes.
When I moved to Spain, I was excited by all of the interesting ways in which Asturian and Appalachian foodways were similar. It was, and still is, one of the most fascinating things about living here. The first time I saw fariñes I was amazed at the similarity. I still am. This dish is all the proof I need that I was on to something. As it turns out, I was on to something interesting.
In the Beginning Was the Corn, and the Corn Was Good
When Columbus sailed to the Americas, one of the greatest events in food history began. The Columbian Exchange, as it is called, introduced pigs and apples, among other things, to the Americas. And dozens of new ingredients flowed the other direction in the holds of Spanish ships. European cuisines before and after the Columbian exchange are completely different. Literally everything we think of a “traditional” cuisine in Europe is a direct result of that voyage in 1492. The number of surviving pre-Columbian dishes anywhere in Europe is vanishingly small.
Spain invaded and conquered South (and parts of North) America, and the produce of that “new world” radically reshaped Spanish food.[1] No one these days could imagine any of Spain’s regional cuisines without tomatoes, chilis, and potatoes. No sofrito, no tortilla de patatas, no gazpacho. What I didn’t know until I started digging into the history of fariñes is that corn used to be king in Spain.
In Which the Spanish Do Not Pay Attention
9,000 or so years ago, farmers in the Rio Balsas basin in present-day Mexico domesticated corn.[2] Part of that domestication was the discovery of how to liberate the niacin and tryptophan in the corn, and making them bio-available. The oldest equipment for this process of nixtamalization dates to 1500 BCE.[3] By the time of the Columbian exchange, corn planting and processing was widespread throughout North and South America. Everywhere Europeans built colonies they encountered the crop. And everywhere they encountered it, they were taught the nixtamalization process. In the southern United States we call nixtamalized corn hominy, regardless of whether it is whole, coarsely ground, or finely ground.
However, Europeans of that time were quite the cultural chauvinists, to say the very least. There was not anything these natives could teach them about food. Besides, they had lots of experience grinding and processing grain in Spain. They would just apply their traditional methods and technology to this new grain. What could possibly go wrong?[4] So they did exactly that, and corn took off in a big way in Spain. Fariñes and corn bread and the same myriad of corn-based dishes that are still popular in the southern US spread like wildfire in Spain.
Relegation to the Sidelines
Well, it turns out that niacin deficiency kind of sucks. Both in Europe and in the European colonies of North America, it was wreaking havoc. As the lower classes became more and more dependent on corn, they suffered more and more, because they did not have nixtamalized corn. This niacin deficiency was first diagnosed by Gaspar Casal in Oviedo in 1735.[5] He called it mal de la rose due to the red rash seen on the hands and feet of sufferers, and his work earned him a place in history as the first epidemiologist in Spain.
As pellagra spread across Spain and the rest of corn-consuming Europe, the grain fell out of fashion. The assumption was that corn contained some sort of toxin. The method of nixtamalization was as firmly forgotten as it had been rejected. In a few places, like Asturias, corn growing, and corn dishes, hung on as minor players in the diet. Now in Asturias corn is an ever-present staple, but not in the overwhelming quantities that expose people to pellagra.
Fariñes and Other Corn Dishes in Modern Asturias
Fariñes is not the only corn dish to have survived. Up here in the mountains of Asturias, corn is still widely grown and eaten. There is a lot less fresh corn eaten here than in the States, but compared to most of Spain, or even most of Europe, it is a corn lovers’ paradise. Fariñes, corn bread, corn fritters, even corn cookies and a corn cake can be found among the recipes of the region.
I love making grits here, and I use both the local harina de maíz and the more American-style sémola de maíz. The harina makes a much soupier grits, since it is ground so fine. Sémola on the other hand is pretty much exactly the same thing as American grits, and most varieties here cook like quick grits. I am very partial to serving it with sliced fried chorizo asturiano or compango on top, and sprinkled with whatever cheese we have on the table at the time.
- ↑ See for instance Cárdenas, Juan de. Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias. Editorial MAXTOR, 2003. Cárdenas is quite the fan of corn, saying ‘‘Corn is one of the seeds that might better be known for the esteem in which we should hold it in the world, and this for many reasons and causes’’ (pp 171)
- ↑ See the excellent synopsis of the work of Richard McNeish and others in Warman, Arturo. Corn & Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance. pp 31-36. University of North Carolina, 2003.
- ↑ Staller, John, and Michael Carrasco. Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica. pp 317. Springer Science & Business Media, 2009.
- ↑ Once again, we turn to Cárdenas. “…for the ease and swiftness with which it is mixed and seasoned, since we see and we know that with wheat it is necessary to thresh it, grind it, sift it, knead it and then let it rise and cook it and even leave it from one day to the next, in order to improve it and be able to eat it with no harm done, adding salt, yeast, warm water and putting it in a very moderate and fitting oven, for an amount of time determined by the quantity of the dough. Corn needs nothing of this: it is ground on a stone and mixed on this same stone and bread made, without adding more salt, yeast, or leavening, nor any other spices other than a little cold water, and it is toasted or cooked in the act in a dish or terra cotta comal, and is eaten warm as the most flavorful treat in the world, and made so quickly that one can be seated at the table and the bread has yet to be made, that I don’t know what more good things can be said about bread, that besides being so good and such good nourishment, it is so easy and cheap to season. Fourth, for the brevity and swiftness with which before, as they say, once born it begins to nourish man, because since the time the very young ear begins to form, nestled inside the small pouch of a leaf that the Indians call gilote, and after forming kernels, being as they say green and later hulled, always serves to nourish and as a mouthwatering treat, as is the green corn after being roasted or cooked, so that luckily in this it also has an advantage over all other grains, for none of them can be used before maturing and ripening, and corn is even before it fully forms and can be called corn.” (ibid pp 172)
- ↑ Hegyi, Vladimir; Elston, Dirk M (26 February 2018). “Dermatologic Manifestations of Pellagra”. Medscape. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
