The tortilla here in Guatemala is sacred.
I’ve eaten 26 of them in the last week.
We got a huge lecture in Spanish class today about how you can never throw away a tortilla--jamas. It’s like the Pan de Dios and therefore totally forbidden to waste. If you’re going to eat a tortilla, you’re not going to eat half a tortilla. You’re not going to take a piece and throw the rest away. You’re going to eat the whole tortilla, and that’s all there is to it.
It was explained like this: tortilla is the one food you can find on the table in every Guatemalan house, regardless of income. The rich will fill their tortillas with huge chunks of meat. The middle families will put beans, and the poor might just put salt. But it’s tortilla just the same. It’s the single, uniting food that sustains everyone in this country, whether they’re on the verge of starvation or extraordinarily overly well fed.
And people here still make their tortillas by hand—and if they don’t, they buy them homemade from the tortilleria around the corner whose workers they’ve known for years and are practically family.
We learned how to make them today in my Spanish language training class, and they are difficult to make correctly. I wish I had brought my camera, but one day I’ll bring it to the tortilleria and show you all the process. It’s pretty cool. You basically start with raw corn, cook it, then you take it to the mill to be ground. Then you add water, and there’s your masa. Then you just form it by hand into a flat shape and put it on a hot ceramic stovetop for about 2 minutes and there you have it! Tortillas.
I’ve eaten 26 of them in the last week.
We got a huge lecture in Spanish class today about how you can never throw away a tortilla--jamas. It’s like the Pan de Dios and therefore totally forbidden to waste. If you’re going to eat a tortilla, you’re not going to eat half a tortilla. You’re not going to take a piece and throw the rest away. You’re going to eat the whole tortilla, and that’s all there is to it.
It was explained like this: tortilla is the one food you can find on the table in every Guatemalan house, regardless of income. The rich will fill their tortillas with huge chunks of meat. The middle families will put beans, and the poor might just put salt. But it’s tortilla just the same. It’s the single, uniting food that sustains everyone in this country, whether they’re on the verge of starvation or extraordinarily overly well fed.
And people here still make their tortillas by hand—and if they don’t, they buy them homemade from the tortilleria around the corner whose workers they’ve known for years and are practically family.
We learned how to make them today in my Spanish language training class, and they are difficult to make correctly. I wish I had brought my camera, but one day I’ll bring it to the tortilleria and show you all the process. It’s pretty cool. You basically start with raw corn, cook it, then you take it to the mill to be ground. Then you add water, and there’s your masa. Then you just form it by hand into a flat shape and put it on a hot ceramic stovetop for about 2 minutes and there you have it! Tortillas.