Did you know that pirates love guacamole?
Argh! Hand over the avocados.
Of course you did, but did you know that it was a pirate who wrote down the first recipe for guacamole.
A recipe that we will be recreating today, and to wash it down a souped-up version of grog called bumbo.
So thank you to Apeel for sponsoring this video as we make pirate guacamole,
this time on Tasting History.
So today we are following the very first recipe or really description of guacamole
from Panama in the late 1600s written by English pirate William Dampier
who I mentioned in the video on hardtack.
"The Avogato pear-tree is as big as most pear-trees.... and the fruit as big as a large lemon.
It is of a green color, till it is ripe, and then it is a little yellowish...
The substance in the inside is green or a little yellowish, and as soft as butter.
Within the substance there is a stone as big as a horse-plum.
This fruit hath no taste of itself, and therefore it is usually mixed with sugar and lime juice,
and beaten together in a plate; and this is an excellent dish.
The ordinary way to eat it is with a little salt and a roasted plantain,
and thus a man that's hungry may make a good meal of it."
Well this man is hungry so I intend to make a good meal of it.
Now the recipe is very similar to a modern guacamole albeit with sugar which I thought was kind of weird
until I found out that in Brazil even to this day they make something called 'creme de abacate' or
avocado cream which is basically what this is, and who am I to disagree with the Brazilians.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: a quarter cup or 50 grams of sugar.
Now they would have had access to several types of sugar at the time but in that area
it was probably an unrefined sugar now known as piloncillo.
It has lots of layers of flavor like caramel and kind of a molasses-y flavor
so that's what I'm going to be using for this and I can hear you right now saying sugar was pretty darn expensive.
Why would a pirate have sugar? But Dampier was a very fancy pirate. He wrote
"For 3 days before we parted, we sifted so much flour as we could carry,
and rubbed up 20 or 30 pounds of chocolate with sugar to sweeten it."
So if you want to use regular white sugar that works too.
One lime, a half teaspoon of salt, and three large avocados.
Now the avocado that Dampier would have been using for this probably doesn't even exist anymore.
Avocados have changed a lot over the years because of the way that they're grown but
because I'm in the US and 95% of our avocados are Hass or "Haas",
depending on who you ask, avocados that's what I'm going to be using today,
and that brings me to today's sponsor Apeel who is doing very cool things in the world.
So here's the deal food waste is a huge problem in the world today. Between one third and fifty percent of all produce
gets thrown out before it even gets to the consumer because it goes bad
but Apeel is doing something to fix that.
Basically taking a cue from nature they are creating an extra peel for produce.
And they do so using leftover plant-based materials.
This protective peel is then applied to the produce and it can actually double the life
of whatever it's on without affecting the taste and with no harmful chemicals.
Now they're starting to use it on all kinds of produce but I am using of course avocados today.
And you can find Apeel avocados in the US at Kroger, Ralph's, Fred Meyer and many other stores,
and in Germany at every Edeka location.
So to find Apeel avocados near you just check out the link in the description.
And this week Apeel is running a giveaway on their Instagram account so you can go enter to win a box of free Apeel avocados
so you can check them out yourself.
Just check out their Instagram account at apeel_sciences for details.
Now the other thing that Dampier mentions that you'll need with this dish are plantains,
roasted plantains so you'll need a couple plantains. Now let's get to making this guac-
-amole. Guac-guac-guacamole.
[Thanks Dr. Jean!]
So first cut the avocados by sliding the knife around the seed then twist and pull to open.
Then cut into the seed and twist to pull it out.
Then add the avocados to a dish and mash.
Now usually I would actually use a molcajete to make guacamole, but
Dampier says it's done on a plate so I'm kind of splitting the difference and using a shallow bowl.
lt doesn't really matter, just mash the avocados.
Then add the salt, then the lime juice and finally the sugar,
and mix everything together.
Now honestly you can mess with the amounts
if you want. You can use more sugar, less salt whatever you want there, it's totally up to you.
As for the plantains, again kind of up to you. He's not really specific in how they're roasted.
I'm just roasting them in the oven in little chips because they're going to be easy to dip.
So cut them up and set them on a baking sheet, and then roast them in an oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit,
or 200 degrees Celsius for about 10 to 15 minutes on each side. 20-25 minutes in total.
Also i'd sprinkle a little bit of salt on them maybe even some chili powder if you want a little extra flavor.
It's not in the recipe but it's tasty.
Now any guacamole loving pirate worth his avocado would have a drink with this dish.
A drink like bumbo. That's like Dumbo with a b or bimbo with a u.
And it's a really simple drink just like the grog that we made in the episode on hard tack,
but a little fancier. I'm making mine with two ounces of rum, four ounces of water, and
about a teaspoon of sugar. I'm using the pilancillo that I already had out, and a sprinkle of nutmeg.
Stir it all together and that's your bumbo.
Now they probably wouldn't have had a lot of ice in Panama in the 17th century,
but if you want to add some ice I won't tell anyone.
Now you'll notice where I made this drink was behind my fancy new bar which still has some work to do especially
on what's going on behind me, and the lighting but that is where I'm going to be filming episodes of
Drinking History which should be starting here in the next week or two.
Now these are going to be extra little episodes that come out every week or two weeks, or whenever I can,
and basically I'll be making either a historic cocktail or doing something with wine or beer,
or non-alcoholic drinks like coffee and tea, and hot chocolate, and then I'll either talk about
something to do with what I'm making or in a lot of cases something that has absolutely nothing
to do with drinking or food at all.
See over the last year so in all my research I've come across a lot of cool little stories
that didn't make it into episodes because they have nothing to do
with what the episode is about so I figured this will be kind of like a little historical cocktail hour
where we can talk about whatever we want. Now as I said I'm hoping for these episodes to be
out in the next week or two, probably two, so make sure to keep an eye out. Now let's try this bumbo.
It's good. It's good, I mean it's not that sweet. I don't know if it's because maybe the
sugar just didn't really dissolve in there but it's more rummy, but that nutmeg is really nice.
I like it. I think I would like it more with ice but I don't want to get up so no ice for now.
Now bumbo is a rather weird name for a drink I'll give you that. Kind of reminds me of Natty Bumppo
who's the main character, one of his names in Pathfinder and The Last of the Mohicans. Anyway
our main ingredient avocados well they've had some really weird names throughout history too.
The story of avocados begins where every good story should
and that's with woolly mammoths and giant sloths.
Like most fruits early avocados had to spread their seed via the digestive tract of roaming animals.
The only problem with avocados is not a lot of animals are going to be able to pass this puppy,
but lucky for avocados they evolved alongside the giant fauna that roamed Central America in the Cenozoic era.
Then those fauna went extinct but avocados luckily survived until 10,000 years ago
when people were definitely eating them, and then 5,000 years ago when they were actually being cultivated.
It was around this time that the Olmecs created the first avocado commercial trade.
Avocados spread through modern day Mexico all the way down to Peru making hundreds of varieties of the fruit,
or berry because technically an avocado is a berry, but I don't think I'll
ever be comfortable calling an avocado a berry because that's just weird.
What else is weird is its original name.
At least in the Aztec empire they were known as ahuacatl,
which is where we get our modern day avocado, but how did it get that name?
Well I imagine that a couple of Aztecs, undoubtedly male, looked up at a tree and saw two berries hanging from a branch and thought
those are balls,
and that's what the name means. It's part of the male anatomy.
It's our first not great name for avocados.
Now around the year 1,500 the Spanish came to call and they fill us in with
a few more names and descriptions for this fruit.
"Here are groves of many different sorts of edible fruits,
among others is one that looks like an orange, and when it is ready for eating it turns yellowish;
that which it contains is like butter and is of marvelous flavor,
so good and pleasing to the palate that it is a wonderful thing."
And while he compared them to Oranges Fernández de Oviedo
who traveled with Cortez compared them to pears, sometimes saying that they weighed a pound or more,
and "that those who have these fruits guard them and esteem them highly and the trees are wild...
for the chief gardener is God, and the Indians apply no work whatever to them.
These pears are excellent when eaten with cheese, and they are gathered before they are ripe, and stored,
and when treated thus they ripen perfectly for eating but
after they have reached this stage they spoil quickly if allowed to stand."
A reputation that avocados still maintain today unless they're Apeel avocados.
Now there he says that the avocados are grown wild but later on when he
visits Nicaragua and Panama where they're called aguacate he says that they are being cultivated.
Even further south the name changes yet again being called paltas in Peru which is actually
still today what they're called in most parts of Peru.
In 1590 Father Jose de Acosta explained the difference between the Peruvian palta and the Mexican ahuacatl.
"The paltas, are hot and delicate. In Peru the paltas are large, and have a thick rind which can be removed entirely.
In Mexico they are small, as a rule, and have a thin skin which may be peeled like that of an apple."
There he's describing two of the three families of avocado now known as the Mexican,
the Guatemalan, and the West Indian avocados.
Or as their first English description from Jamaica calls them
"Avocatas, a wholesome, pleasant fruit; in season in August and sold for eight pence per piece."
That's about five dollars an avocado. Now CNBC says that millennials can't afford to
buy homes because we're spending all of our money on avocado toast, and I would like to say clearly
that's been an issue since 1657.
Now it was also around this time that the English started referring to them as pears.
The Spanish pear, the shell pear, and my favorite the alligator pear
all of which could "..nourisheth and strengtheneth the body,
corroborating the vital spirits and procuring lost exceedingly."
Then finally at the end of the 17th century the Irishman Hans Sloane
coined the term avocado though even today in England they're often known as avocado pears,
but don't think the naming of avocados was done just yet.
In 1751 George Washington on visiting the island of Barbados wrote of
agovago pears being abundant and quite popular.
And as they spread around the globe so did their many names. In India they're known as butterfruit
and originally they were known as alligator pears in Florida and ahuacate in California.
Both states began cultivating the crop in the mid-1800s, neither name really took off
because alligator pear which is a pretty awesome sounding name just like wolf peach isn't very appetizing,
and ahuacate is well hard to pronounce for us gringos.
Luckily in 1915 the California Avocado Association decided that
avocado was the way to go and kind of standardize the name.
Then in 1926 they kicked off a marketing campaign that dubbed the avocado "the aristocrat of salad fruit;
now acclaimed by hostesses as the food delicacy supreme for smart occasions."
Though during the marketing campaign the poor fruit was yet again saddled with a rather stupid name...
calavo because they were California avocados. I really hope that some marketing person was fired over that one.
Luckily today at least in the United States we eat avocados which I'm about to do right now.
And here we are 17th century guacamole and bumbo.
Do make sure that your plantain chips are
cut very thin so they get crispy, otherwise some of them I cut they're a little mushy,
still crispy is better. Anyway, dip.
I'm going to get a lot. Going to get a lot.
So weird.
It's guacamole I mean, it's-
just that so you get the obviously the texture of guacamole.
There's nothing different there. The lime is there so it does have that zest, but the sugar is weird
and I think it would be even weirder if I had used plain white sugar. At least like this kind
of darker molasses-y flavor kind of comes out and it goes with the avocado. It's not too, too sweet,
but it is sweet.
The modern Brazilian version has a lot more sugar so it's almost like a dessert.
I really, really like these with it. Dampier was right that is the way to go adding in this,
adding in the plantain. That's actually really, really good.
I got some chips. I'm probably going to switch over to chips a little bit later,
but this is something I'm probably going to polish off.
Now I mentioned that Dampier was you know kind of a fancy pirate.
He had his sugar and his chocolate and everything
but I don't want you to get the wrong idea about him, he was still a pirate or a buccaneer as they went by at the time.
He was not a very nice man. During one trek across Panama he wrote,
"Because there were some who designed to go with us that we knew were not well able to march,
we gave out, that if any man faltered in the journey over land he must expect to be shot to death...
yet this would not deter him from going with us."
It would deter me.
I would not go with you.
So yeah still a pirate, buccaneer, privateer though he went by buccaneer. Which is cool, I like pirates
but gosh you read about them they're never very nice.
Anyway more pirate history to come on Drinking History.
Anyway thank you to Appeal for sponsoring this video.
Make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.