Encyclopedia of the Incas

CUISINE
What, how, and with whom we eat are among the most fundamental ways that
humans define themselves as social beings. For this reason, food preferences,
culinary practices, and commensal relations—all a part of what defines cuisine
—constitute one of the strongest markers of social identity and group
membership. Various recent anthropological studies underscore the political
dimensions of culinary practices, highlighting the prominent roles food and
feasting play in the emergence of social hierarchy and the negotiation of power.
Imperial Inca “haute cuisine” can thus be seen as a key domain for the
investigation of Inca statecraft. Analyzing Inca foodways, cooking practices, and
culinary artifacts provides important insights into the close connections among
food, politics, and gender in the context of empire building. For the Incas and
their subjects, these connections were materially manifest in the elaboration of a
distinctive ensemble of polychrome pottery serving, storage, and cooking vessels
(see Ceramics). The evidence used to reconstruct imperial Inca culinary
practices and cuisine is drawn primarily from ethnohistoric records, archaeology,
and palaeoethnobotanical research, with contemporary Andean ethnographic
data providing useful points of comparison and analogy.
The major food categories comprising the Andean diet in the late pre-
Columbian era consisted of maize—served in both cooked and fermented states;
a large variety of potatoes and other tubers; the high altitude grain-like crop,
quinoa; a variety of beans; a rather limited amount of meat consisting mainly of
guinea pig (cuy), camelids, and some wild game and fish (see Animals,
Domesticated; Foodstuffs, Domesticated); and various herbs, including hot
peppers (ají), and salt for flavoring. The most common method of food
preparation involved boiling, and foods were quite often consumed in the form
of stews or soups. Other widespread culinary techniques in the Andes included
roasting, parching, and toasting. Food preparation was likely a very time
consuming activity as many products required several stages of processing,
which could include drying, soaking, rinsing, mixing, parching, boiling, and
reheating.
Maize (corn) was by far the most highly esteemed crop in the Inca Empire.
Virtually every sixteenth-century account of native subsistence lists it as one of
the main elements of the pre-Columbian diet. After it was dried, maize could be
prepared in a number of different ways that typically involved either boiling or
toasting.