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America's First Cuisines
After long weeks of boring, perhaps spoiled sea rations, one of the first things Spaniards sought in the New World was undoubtedly fresh food. Probably they found the local cuisine strange at first, but soon they were sending American plants and animals around the world, eventually enriching the cuisine of many cultures. Drawing on original accounts by Europeans and native Americans, this pioneering work offers the first detailed description of the cuisines of the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca. Sophie Coe begins with the basic foodstuffs, including maize, potatoes, beans, peanuts, squash, avocados, tomatoes, chocolate, and chiles, and explores their early history and domestication. She then describes how these foods were prepared, served, and preserved, giving many insights into the cultural and ritual practices that surrounded eating in these cultures. Coe also points out the similarities and differences among the three cuisines and compares them to Spanish cooking of the period, which, as she usefully reminds us, would seem as foreign to our tastes as the American foods seemed to theirs. Written in easily digested prose, America's First Cuisines will appeal to food enthusiasts as well as scholars.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Sophie D. Coe
4 books7 followersSophie Dobzhansky Coe was an anthropologist, food historian and author, primarily known for her work on the history of chocolate.
She graduated in 1955, majoring in anthropology, from Radcliffe College, where she was apparently known for her linguistic prowess (speaking Russian and Portuguese). She continued her postgraduate studies at Harvard and received her PhD in anthropology in 1964.
Sophie Coe made a unique contribution to the field through her study of native New World cooking, writing a number of scholarly essays for Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC). Her research in this area culminated in America's First Cuisines (1994). This work contained a substantial amount of material on chocolate, which Sophie Coe decided to expand upon for her next book, The True History of Chocolate (1996). She became seriously ill during the research and writing of this book and it was published posthumously in 1996, having been completed by her widower, Michael D. Coe.
Coe built an extensive collection of books on culinary history including community cookbooks, nearly 1,000 volumes from around the world dating from the eighteenth century onwards, as well as a group of manuscript cookbooks. She donated her collection of community cookbooks to the Schlesinger Library before her death, and afterwards her husband gave the library the rest of her collection.
After her death, Michael Coe, with the help of their friends Alan Davidson and Harlan Walker, set up the Sophie Coe Prize, a charitable trust based in the UK. The prize is awarded annually at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery (which Coe attended every year) to an outstanding and original essay or book chapter in food history. One of the first of its kind at its foundation in 1995, the Sophie Coe Prize remains the most generous and esteemed prize for thorough and readable food history scholarship.
She graduated in 1955, majoring in anthropology, from Radcliffe College, where she was apparently known for her linguistic prowess (speaking Russian and Portuguese). She continued her postgraduate studies at Harvard and received her PhD in anthropology in 1964.
Sophie Coe made a unique contribution to the field through her study of native New World cooking, writing a number of scholarly essays for Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC). Her research in this area culminated in America's First Cuisines (1994). This work contained a substantial amount of material on chocolate, which Sophie Coe decided to expand upon for her next book, The True History of Chocolate (1996). She became seriously ill during the research and writing of this book and it was published posthumously in 1996, having been completed by her widower, Michael D. Coe.
Coe built an extensive collection of books on culinary history including community cookbooks, nearly 1,000 volumes from around the world dating from the eighteenth century onwards, as well as a group of manuscript cookbooks. She donated her collection of community cookbooks to the Schlesinger Library before her death, and afterwards her husband gave the library the rest of her collection.
After her death, Michael Coe, with the help of their friends Alan Davidson and Harlan Walker, set up the Sophie Coe Prize, a charitable trust based in the UK. The prize is awarded annually at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery (which Coe attended every year) to an outstanding and original essay or book chapter in food history. One of the first of its kind at its foundation in 1995, the Sophie Coe Prize remains the most generous and esteemed prize for thorough and readable food history scholarship.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 25, 2016
Coe is understandably miffed that for a long time no one from across two entire continents received any credit for the many, many contributions they made to the history of agriculture and cuisine.
Coe’s book is a scholarly approach to examining the many foodstuffs of the Americas and the locals who developed them well before the Europeans showed up. However, the book has an emotional edge to it that slightly unbalances the academic tone, but it is a fascinating subject that has long deserved more attention and recognition.
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October 2, 2015Coe provides a summary of foods available to the Aztec, Maya, and Inca peoples based off of a mixture of archaeological and historical evidence. Coe talks about how certain foods were domesticated, prepared, and consumed. While this list of foods is not complete in any way, it does provide a general overview of foods consumed on a daily basis. While this work could use an update with recent archaeological work and theory on plant domestication, it is still a highly recommended piece of literature for anyone wanting to investigate food.
March 9, 2019
It’s appropriate that I finished this book just before Orthodox Lent, during which we are to follow what is today called a vegan diet. The late Sophie Coe was the author of a brilliant book about chocolate, and also wrote this account of the food practices of the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas, and how they interacted with the practices and diets of the invading Spaniards. It turns out that the Aztecs, in particular, fasted, but with different rules, abstaining form chiles and salt rather than from meat. Like the Romans and Christians they also had communities of virgin women with religious functions.
What people eat, of course, is fundamentally related to their ecological setting and their mode of production, but cooking at least in the home being women’s work, the anthropology of food has not gotten the attention it deserves. This book is a good start. It’s readable and interesting, although there are many Latin species and genus names that meant nothing to me. In the best of all possible worlds, there would be more pictures, and, of course, recipes.
Still, if you like this sort of thing, as I do, this is a fascinating, readable book.
What people eat, of course, is fundamentally related to their ecological setting and their mode of production, but cooking at least in the home being women’s work, the anthropology of food has not gotten the attention it deserves. This book is a good start. It’s readable and interesting, although there are many Latin species and genus names that meant nothing to me. In the best of all possible worlds, there would be more pictures, and, of course, recipes.
Still, if you like this sort of thing, as I do, this is a fascinating, readable book.
November 30, 2024
Después de un año terminé este libro, la verdad no llevaba prisa ya que es parte de mi carrera y en los pequeños tiempos libres me ponía a leer unas 5 páginas.
La verdad me sirvió mucho porque habla de muchísimos ingredientes y en donde nacen, me gustó demasiado que ponen sus nombres científicos o en las lenguas mayas, los rituales que muchas veces hacían con los ingredientes y el significado de para que los usaban nuestros ante pasados, te llena de conocimiento gastronómico🫶🏻
La verdad me sirvió mucho porque habla de muchísimos ingredientes y en donde nacen, me gustó demasiado que ponen sus nombres científicos o en las lenguas mayas, los rituales que muchas veces hacían con los ingredientes y el significado de para que los usaban nuestros ante pasados, te llena de conocimiento gastronómico🫶🏻
March 14, 2017
Treats what people ate in the Americas before European conquest as an integrated and sophisticated system. Focuses on Aztec, Mata, and Inca. Out of date in terms of some aspects of the history of domestication but still the only effort to think in terms of indigenous tastes and preferences.
July 27, 2025
I learned an awful lot in this book, and I would love to rate it 5 stars. However, it crosses into being dry reading on several occassions. Happily, it crosses back again relatively quickly. I read the author's posthumous history of chocolate first and enjoyed the writing more in that book.
July 22, 2012
This book aims to describe the culinary traditions of the New World, specifically the practices, customs and beliefs of the three major pre-conquest civilizations – the Aztec, Maya and Inca. Coe first focuses on the agricultural development of staples and produce most familiar to a contemporary palate, explaining why they eventually found a place on European tables. She then delves into more individual studies of how each civilization employed these ingredients, along with others that fell out of widespread favor. The work then concludes with accounts of how this culinary heritage evolved during the earliest years of post-conquest settlement.
Civilization requires a food surplus, which in turn requires domestication. For the Aztec, Maya and Inca, this included the staple carbohydrates of maize, manioc, potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams. Many of the native chefs also employed beans, peanuts, squash, pineapples, avocados, tomatoes, along with the flavors of chocolate, vanilla and the chile, all of which were adopted by European settlers. Why were these items accepted by the European palate, while many others were not? Coe puts them into four categories, first asserting that some of them, such as maize, fit nicely into already established European categories (p. 27). Others, like the pineapple, “possessed unique qualities which led to their enthusiastic embrace” (p. 28). Some, including manioc and potatoes, “may not have had instant appeal for reasons of taste but were cheap, efficient, and hugely productive sources of calories” (p. 29). Finally, others just needed some time to get used to, like the tomato, which today has a place in most kitchens around the world. As for the flavors, who could resist chocolate, vanilla and at least a pinch of chile?
Coe continues to rely on “contemporary accounts of the first meetings of the Europeans” (p. 2) with Aztec, Maya and Inca cultures to create portraits of who the members of these societies were, in terms of food. The most detailed sections involve the Aztec, who are most frequently illustrated with narratives by Bernardino de Sahagun and Bernal Diaz del Castillo. However, Coe does offer some evidence that all three cultures had well developed culinary traditions. As with any civilization, food played an important and distinct role. Most people were employed in its production. Its availability and use followed social norms, reinforced social status and served as a display of power and wealth. Perhaps most importantly, it didn’t just provide sustenance, but also a vehicle for all people to gather, celebrate and enjoy life.
Coe’s work was generally well-received in at least four published reviews. Karen Olsen Bruhns, of San Francisco State University, calls the aforementioned chapters that deal with the existing culinary cultures the most detailed and most well balanced of the book. However, it is in this section that Coe was most at the mercy of historical records. Olsen Bruhns goes on to say the weakest section is on the Inca, partly because of sparse documentation, but also because Coe apparently had no personal experience of the Andes. The harshest criticism focuses on the final section of the work, which describes the evolution of this culinary heritage during the earliest years of post-conquest settlement. John C. Super of West Virginia University states that several assertions about dietary change after the conquest are unsubstantiated or misleading due to a failure to consult recent anthropological and historical literature related to the topic. Super also claims that Coe too often dismisses the work she does consult as naïve and misdirected, but without reference to specific authors or titles.
Despite the flaws, Coe met her objective of describing the culinary traditions of the New World, including the practices, customs and beliefs of the three major pre-conquest civilizations. I agree with those who see this as an important work, and not just because it was among the first of its kind. It remains highly relevant at a time when westerners are increasingly interested in culinary culture. Additionally, as the cliché goes, you are what you eat and culinary traditions are a major factor of cultural identification, from within and out.
Civilization requires a food surplus, which in turn requires domestication. For the Aztec, Maya and Inca, this included the staple carbohydrates of maize, manioc, potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams. Many of the native chefs also employed beans, peanuts, squash, pineapples, avocados, tomatoes, along with the flavors of chocolate, vanilla and the chile, all of which were adopted by European settlers. Why were these items accepted by the European palate, while many others were not? Coe puts them into four categories, first asserting that some of them, such as maize, fit nicely into already established European categories (p. 27). Others, like the pineapple, “possessed unique qualities which led to their enthusiastic embrace” (p. 28). Some, including manioc and potatoes, “may not have had instant appeal for reasons of taste but were cheap, efficient, and hugely productive sources of calories” (p. 29). Finally, others just needed some time to get used to, like the tomato, which today has a place in most kitchens around the world. As for the flavors, who could resist chocolate, vanilla and at least a pinch of chile?
Coe continues to rely on “contemporary accounts of the first meetings of the Europeans” (p. 2) with Aztec, Maya and Inca cultures to create portraits of who the members of these societies were, in terms of food. The most detailed sections involve the Aztec, who are most frequently illustrated with narratives by Bernardino de Sahagun and Bernal Diaz del Castillo. However, Coe does offer some evidence that all three cultures had well developed culinary traditions. As with any civilization, food played an important and distinct role. Most people were employed in its production. Its availability and use followed social norms, reinforced social status and served as a display of power and wealth. Perhaps most importantly, it didn’t just provide sustenance, but also a vehicle for all people to gather, celebrate and enjoy life.
Coe’s work was generally well-received in at least four published reviews. Karen Olsen Bruhns, of San Francisco State University, calls the aforementioned chapters that deal with the existing culinary cultures the most detailed and most well balanced of the book. However, it is in this section that Coe was most at the mercy of historical records. Olsen Bruhns goes on to say the weakest section is on the Inca, partly because of sparse documentation, but also because Coe apparently had no personal experience of the Andes. The harshest criticism focuses on the final section of the work, which describes the evolution of this culinary heritage during the earliest years of post-conquest settlement. John C. Super of West Virginia University states that several assertions about dietary change after the conquest are unsubstantiated or misleading due to a failure to consult recent anthropological and historical literature related to the topic. Super also claims that Coe too often dismisses the work she does consult as naïve and misdirected, but without reference to specific authors or titles.
Despite the flaws, Coe met her objective of describing the culinary traditions of the New World, including the practices, customs and beliefs of the three major pre-conquest civilizations. I agree with those who see this as an important work, and not just because it was among the first of its kind. It remains highly relevant at a time when westerners are increasingly interested in culinary culture. Additionally, as the cliché goes, you are what you eat and culinary traditions are a major factor of cultural identification, from within and out.
November 11, 2018
You can find my review of America's First Cuisines on my book blog, Bastian's Book Reviews.
In summary: America's First Cuisines is a great book. It illuminates an aspect of history and knowledge that most people are probably quite ignorant of. It does so accessibly and reliably. The one thing I would have liked to see included is some recipes, but I understand why there are none: it would have been conjecture, and the book is strictly factual.
In summary: America's First Cuisines is a great book. It illuminates an aspect of history and knowledge that most people are probably quite ignorant of. It does so accessibly and reliably. The one thing I would have liked to see included is some recipes, but I understand why there are none: it would have been conjecture, and the book is strictly factual.
July 19, 2016
Almost all sources on indigenous communities' foodways treats them like livestock feed, trying to analyze how they can possibly get enough protein, whether lack of protein drives their cultural quirks (as in Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures), and why the Inuit eat such gross stuff. Sophie Coe offers a refreshing palliative to that attitude, focusing on the cuisine in which Native Americans combined the vast array of food plants she describes briefly in the first section. Unfortunately, she asserts there is not enough evidence to do this justice for any culture but the three major civilizations - Aztec, Inca, and Maya. And she seems to be right, because I felt that the evidence on even the Inca and Maya was a bit thin too.
But no matter, because just the one solid description got the point across. Coe shows us a wide and complex food gathering and dividing and preparing culture, one that seems to touch and exploit every facet of the somewhat unique ecosystem at Lake Texcoco. She describes how they fill most of our culinary niches with different plants - marzipan made from squash seeds, tortillas and tamales of maize, honey from stingless bees and sugar from agave leaves, axolotl or giant waterbug tacos for the poor, dried algae blocks eaten like cheese, hairless dogs raised on vegetarian diets for meat, and turkey and other forest fowl raised from wild eggs. Spices with flavors totally unknown to us were used to spice chocolate drinks of many sorts, none of which resemble anything we know. Orchards of dozens of tropical fruits that didn't make their way into the modern economy yielded year-round bounties. And everything was consumed with chile broth or whole chiles.
It is at once tantalizingly familiar - reading about tortillas and early salsas made me so nostalgic for Mexican food that I finally made some decent tortillas - and totally bizarre. As it should be. It's actually a great lesson for me now in why it is I can't just reproduce Winnebago subsistence ecosystems - the products they yield are appropriate to a Winnebago cuisine and a Winnebago audience, but they are fundamentally incompatible with my customers' tastes. At least unless I can create a marketing campaign that makes that food seem exotic and compelling. . .
The overall impression is the strongest thing I got from the book - it's hard to communicate so much variation in a digestible form, so that's probably inevitable. The impression was largely a romanticization of the complexity of Aztec integration with their environment, taking so many different sorts of foods from so many different ecozones. But that just made me wish the book had focused more on food production and gathering techniques - I want to know how the Aztecs managed this complex array of ecosystems to produce all this food. But alas, this information either lies in some other book or doesn't exist at all. And woe to he who'd like to know about pre-contact food habits among Wisconsin societies. :(
But no matter, because just the one solid description got the point across. Coe shows us a wide and complex food gathering and dividing and preparing culture, one that seems to touch and exploit every facet of the somewhat unique ecosystem at Lake Texcoco. She describes how they fill most of our culinary niches with different plants - marzipan made from squash seeds, tortillas and tamales of maize, honey from stingless bees and sugar from agave leaves, axolotl or giant waterbug tacos for the poor, dried algae blocks eaten like cheese, hairless dogs raised on vegetarian diets for meat, and turkey and other forest fowl raised from wild eggs. Spices with flavors totally unknown to us were used to spice chocolate drinks of many sorts, none of which resemble anything we know. Orchards of dozens of tropical fruits that didn't make their way into the modern economy yielded year-round bounties. And everything was consumed with chile broth or whole chiles.
It is at once tantalizingly familiar - reading about tortillas and early salsas made me so nostalgic for Mexican food that I finally made some decent tortillas - and totally bizarre. As it should be. It's actually a great lesson for me now in why it is I can't just reproduce Winnebago subsistence ecosystems - the products they yield are appropriate to a Winnebago cuisine and a Winnebago audience, but they are fundamentally incompatible with my customers' tastes. At least unless I can create a marketing campaign that makes that food seem exotic and compelling. . .
The overall impression is the strongest thing I got from the book - it's hard to communicate so much variation in a digestible form, so that's probably inevitable. The impression was largely a romanticization of the complexity of Aztec integration with their environment, taking so many different sorts of foods from so many different ecozones. But that just made me wish the book had focused more on food production and gathering techniques - I want to know how the Aztecs managed this complex array of ecosystems to produce all this food. But alas, this information either lies in some other book or doesn't exist at all. And woe to he who'd like to know about pre-contact food habits among Wisconsin societies. :(
February 5, 2009
About the food eaten by the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca around the time of the conquest. Very engagingly written, with an almost snarky sense of humor at times.
October 31, 2010
Very interesting account of food and eating in the Americas.
November 12, 2010
Fascinating history of pre-contact native foods, and the changes that came when they met European cuisines. Informative, helped me write my story on Ocellated Turkeys, a wild turkey of the Yucatan.
December 5, 2011
A Mesoamerican archaeologist friend of mine described this book as something her grandmother might have written. :) It's a good read, though, and informative. I liked it.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews