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A CULINARY HISTORY OF THE PORTUGUESE EURASIANS: THE ORIGINS OF LUSO-ASIAN CUISINE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES Janet P. Boileau Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Discipline of History School of History and Politics University of Adelaide 31 August, 2010 2 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 4 THESIS DECLARATION 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7 INTRODUCTION 8 LITERATURE REVIEW 20 1. PORTUGUESE GASTRONOMY: HISTORICAL BEGINNINGS 34 PORTUGUESE CUISINE 34 Early Influences 34 The Arab Contribution 36 Judaic Influences 38 Foods from the New World 40 Iberian Cuisine, Hispanic Links 41 PORTUGUESE CUISINE IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY 43 Signature Foods and Beverages 44 Cooking Methods 58 Elite and Popular Cuisines 62 Monastic Cooking 67 Conventual Sweets 72 FOOD ON SHIPS 85 The Curse of the Mouth 97 Victuals at Sea 101 SUPPLY STATIONS 108 Mozambique 109 Hormuz 115 Summary 118 2. THE LUSO-ASIAN WORLD 120 THE PORTUGUESE AGE OF EXPLORATION 120 THE PORTUGUESE SETTLEMENTS 128 LUSO -ASIAN SOCIETY 137 Miscegenation 140 THE SHADOW EMPIRE 150 SUMMARY 162 3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LUSO-ASIAN GASTRONOMY 164 THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE 164 Portuguese Botanists 167 Local Adoption of Novel Foods 174 FOOD IN THE SETTLEMENTS 178 A CONTINUING IBERIAN LEGACY 208 Bread for the Estado 209 3 Rice: A New Staple 222 Pork 229 Vinegar 235 Salt 239 Sugar 244 Sweet Preserves 250 Conventual Sweets in Asia 253 Alcoholic Beverages 256 SUMMARY 266 4. THE EMERGENCE OF A CREOLE CUISINE 267 COLONIAL DIET 267 Feast and Famine 273 High and Low Cuisine 276 Dining in A Gilded Age 285 Slavery 303 Diversity and Mobility 309 Mestiças: The Agents of Culinary Change 319 The Catholic Church 333 The Jesuits: Culinary Clerics 340 The Clarissan Nuns 357 SUMMARY 361 5. CONCLUSION 362 BIBLIOGRAPHY 380 4 ABSTRACT The Portuguese Eurasians are a cultural group who trace their ancestry to the fifteenth and sixteenth century Portuguese voyages of exploration that inaugurated the era of European colonization in Asia. The Portuguese established a maritime route to the Far East and built an empire based on spice trade with Europe and inter-Asia trade in a variety of commodities. Portuguese merchants and adventurers travelled throughout the region, married indigenous women and gave rise to Luso-Asian communities in most of the region’s trading centres, while peripatetic Portuguese missionaries established Christian communities and introduced Iberian social values to many areas in the Far East. The Luso-Asian creole societies that developed as a result of these encounters were ethnically diverse but ideologically unified by a tenacious allegiance to Catholicism and a common Portuguese cultural heritage. This study explores the culinary heritage of the Portuguese Eurasians and the historical development of their distinctive, hybridized cuisine, which blends the culinary traditions of Southern Europe with those of indigenous Asia. It establishes the origins of Luso-Asian cuisine in the gastronomy of Early Modern Portugal and examines how Portuguese colonial policy and social formation influenced the development of a 5 creolized cuisine. Key ingredients and foodways that signify Iberian cultural influence are identified and documentary evidence for their transition to Asia is examined. The evolution of Luso-Asian cuisine is traced, from the challenges of food security in the early Portuguese settlements to the emergence of elite colonial societies with an elaborate dining culture. The study argues that the adaptability of the Portuguese and their openness to inter-cultural exchange distinguished them from other European colonists and encouraged the adoption of indigenous culinary elements. At the same time, the desire to retain a Portuguese identity and commitment to the Catholic faith promoted the survival of Iberian cultural traits. This study is the first academic enquiry into the gastronomy of the Portuguese empire and makes an original contribution to the fields of Portuguese history, food history, and colonial studies. More significantly, it begins the work of documenting the foodways of a marginal community whose cultural heritage is rapidly dissipating. 6 THESIS DECLARATION This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Janet Boileau 31 August, 2010 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the support and encouragement of my supervisors, Dr Rachel Ankeny and Dr Roger Knight at the University of Adelaide and especially, Professor Warren Belasco at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I would like to acknowledge the editorial assistance of my sister and fellow historian, Joanna Boileau. I am also indebted to fellow PhD candidate, Dr Leonie Ryder, for her guidance and friendship. The writing of this thesis would not have been possible without the generous financial support and constant encouragement offered by my husband, Michael Hyde. 8 INTRODUCTION “Portugal and its empire are one of the great enigmas of history .” J.H. Plumb .1 “No single nation can rival the Portuguese for having altered, and improved, the diet of so many people .” A.J.R. Russell-Wood 2 “The marinheiros , albeit unintentionally, were at the work of gods.” Alfred Crosby 3 The Portuguese voyages of exploration at the dawn of the sixteenth century led to their monopoly of the European spice trade and the establishment of administrative bases along their maritime trading routes in Asia. The principal bases, which became Portuguese colonies, were Goa, on the western coast of India, Malacca, on the western coast of present-day Malaysia, and Macao, a coastal enclave in southeastern China. Subsidiary colonies were formed in East Timor and at Damão and Diu in what is now the Indian state of Gujerat. Cultural and culinary creolization was a hallmark of the societies that evolved in these distant outposts and each of the colonies gave rise to a unique cuisine and 1 J.H. Plumb, introduction to The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 , by Charles R. Boxer (London: Hutchison, 1969), xx. 2 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998), 219. 3 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe , 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131. 9 gastronomic heritage. 4 Iberian culinary influences also extended to the many smaller Portuguese enclaves that arose on the fringes of the trading empire. Much has been written about the political and economic history of the Portuguese empire in Asia but far less about its social aspects and almost nothing of a scholarly nature about its culinary heritage, despite the fact that Iberian culinary influence was felt throughout the Portuguese trading arena in Asia, from the western coast of India to Japan. It has been estimated that a Portuguese Quarter existed in nearly every maritime trading state in the region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 5 Mixed marriages between Roman Catholic Portuguese men and indigenous women from Malacca, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Africa, Japan, China and other nations gave rise to a richly multicultural Roman Catholic Eurasian community with a unique culinary culture. Portuguese Eurasian communities, some of them tiny, are found all over Asia. Portuguese Creoles are spoken in fifteen locations from Diu to Hong Kong. 6 Even in areas where no identifiable Portuguese 4 Rachel Laudan defines creole foods as those “eaten by descendants of parents from very different culinary traditions.” More than just a mixture of contributory cuisines, true creole cuisine develops an identity of its own, in the same way that creole languages develop new grammars and vocabularies that set them apart from their parent languages. (Rachel Laudan, “Creole Food,” in The Penguin Companion to Food , ed. Alan Davidson (London: Penguin, 2002), 272-273. 5 G. B. Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Seas 1630-1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14. 6 Darrell T. Tyron, Peter Mühlhäusler and Stephen A. Wurm, “English-derived Contact Languages in the Pacific in the 19th Century (excluding Australia)," in Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas, eds Stephen A. Wurm, Peter Mühlhäusler and Darrell T. Tyron (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 489. 10 language groups remain, culinary artifacts attest to an earlier Iberian presence. The Portuguese exploratory voyages established new connections between existing trading networks and linked together all the inhabited continents of the world. Along these new maritime pathways travelled the ingredients, people, tools, technologies and ideas that facilitated the creation of a new cuisine that fused the cooking and culinary traditions of late medieval Iberia with the great culinary cultures of Asia. The introduction of European ingredients and foodways and novel food plants from the Americas had a significant impact on the indigenous cuisines of the region. The impact was felt to varying degrees wherever the Portuguese made extended or repeated landfall. Where the Portuguese solidified their presence through the political act of colonization, or attempted a large-scale program of religious conversion, a matrix of social, economic and historical forces fostered a two-way process of adaptation that brought about significant changes in the dietary habits of both the Iberians and the indigenous peoples they encountered. Portuguese culinary expertise that evolved out of the monastic traditions of late medieval Europe, for example, in viticulture, bread-baking and the confectionery arts, was exported to the colonies and other territories in Asia as a corollary of the Portuguese missionary efforts that accompanied 11 their economic initiatives.