FermenteaWhere food goes to change
Source-linked articles on foods, ingredients, traditions and equipment.
A home pulquería meal for four: guava or oat curado made from bought pulque, bean, fava or requesón tlacoyos from the comal, and a pasilla salsa borracha loosened with pulque.
Pulque, the thick white drink of fermented agave sap, left its chemical trace in Teotihuacan jars 1,500 years ago. It went on to fill the tent-like pulquerías of colonial Mexico City, which officials tried and failed to reform.
In the 1650s and 1660s English cider makers bottled cider with a little life left in it, sometimes with a lump of sugar, so it would mantle and sparkle in the glass, decades before Champagne sparkled on purpose.
The first written records are full of beer, tracked to the litre. Yet bappir, the grain cake in almost every Sumerian brew, is still a puzzle. The evidence comes from tablets, a hymn, a tavern and pots.
A marula harvest, a rice mash and a bowl of fermented mare’s milk reveal different ways to make alcohol, and different kinds of knowledge behind the drink.