History Article: The Material History of Tikka Masala

 Listen, admit it: You want to read someone else's homework. I get it. You're super curious about the history of tikka masala. Well, bruh, today is your SECOND luckiest day. 

This is just another of my academic articles. I'm pretty proud of it, to be honest. The footnotes are broken; sorry about that. I had some good jokes in them, too. You are missing out gems like:

Aheheh. Ahem.

Anyhow: 

The Material World of Tikka Masala

Empire is one of the oldest forms of human polity. Almost immediately after humans first settled into agricultural societies, the first empires were born; transient little glories built on bronze, stone, and blood. Humanity seemed to have a taste for empire and refined the concept, one generation after another. By the 1800s the great spider of the British Empire managed to cast nearly the whole of the world under the shadow of its web; great strands carried steamships and railcars to the dustiest edges of humanity. Traditional historiography tells of this as the story of the spider squatting in London; its various imperial hungers, its abuses, its wars. But empires are not ideas, they are processes; more, they are great collections of things that make possible combinations of yet more things. Things brought together unintentionally; brought together by great chained accidents of history. And when these things combine they tell stories that quietly reveal the vast and overpowering scope of the colonial empire. And no colonial product combines so many disparate chains as chicken tikka masala, the now-iconic British dish.

0. What is the object under study?

Chicken tikka masala is a chicken dish. Hailed as a “national dish” of Britain in 2001, it remains the most popular dish ordered in British curry houses and has successfully spread to other western countries. The dish itself consists of tikka--roasted chunks of spiced and marinated chicken, immersed in a curry--a rich, thick sauce traditionally made with premixed curry powder, though many variants exist. According to tradition, tikka masala was invented in a Glasgow curry house called Shish Mahal by British-Pakistani chef Ali Ahmed Aslam sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. According to Aslam’s account, he created the dish after a customer complained the tikka was too dry. Combining curry powder with a can of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup, he created the first chicken tikka masala.

There is reason to doubt Aslam’s story, but its veracity is not particularly important for an examination of the material history of this dish. There are many stories lurking beneath Aslam’s, hidden in the material objects themselves; stories that speak to the history of a global empire.

What we learn in Glasgow

It is not an accident that tikka masala was, allegedly, born in Scotland. An examination of any Scottish high street from the middle of the 19th century on would find not only the half-timber pubs and shops beloved by tourists, but another iconic British institution: the curry house. These curry houses offer a range of Indian and South-Asian-inspired dishes with varying degrees of authenticity. As one would expect, these restaurants were historically opened and maintained by South Asian immigrants and their descendants, who came to Scotland in great numbers in the 19th century; according to the 2022 census, British Asians make up almost 4% of the Scottish population. Material reality brought many of them to Scotland, one that once served as a vital pillar of the empire: the jute trade.


Jute is a long, herbaceous plant that thrives in the hot, humid conditions in and around Bengal and Bangladesh. It has been cultivated for use as a textile for 5,000 years, producing a durable, pliable fiber suited to a wide range of industrial and commercial uses. Though somewhat too rough for clothing, jute fibers are exceptionally strong, making them excel as cordage or for use as bags, mats, and similar heavier-duty uses. Recognizing jute’s potential to be of great utility to a maritime mercantile power, the British East India Company entered the jute trade in 1790. Initially, the tropical plant existed as a minor supplement to flax. Despite its ease of cultivation and the vast labor pools that lived in its warm, humid homeland, jute required a great deal of hand-powered processing that severely limited its utility in comparison to traditional European fibers that could nearly all be spun or otherwise processed mechanically by the late 18th century.


But as was often the case, a Scottish entrepreneur ultimately resolved the problem. Jute was revolutionized in 1833 when Dundee merchant Thomas Neigh discovered a process to mechanize jute spinning. It was labor alone that had prohibited jute from overtaking flax or other traditional European fibers from mass production; now that it could be mechanized, the easily-grown fiber could go from a craft to an industry. Jute production soared; with enterprising Scots opening vast factories in the industrial cities of Scotland. In Dundee, sometimes hailed “juteopolis,” half the population is recorded as having been employed in the jute mills. Gaps in domestic labor were soon filled by immigrants arriving on the same ships as the raw jute. However, the difference in labor pools between Scotland and southeast Asia were yawning; as British control over Asia increased, it became easier to move capital than labor. By 1858, Scottish machinery was flowing to vast new mills in the jute-growing regions themselves.


Industrialization was rapid. By 1895, more jute was processed and spun in Bengal than in Scotland. Numerous Scots traveled to plan, construct, and manage these new industrial facilities. As was often the case, many returned with an interest in the “oriental” cultures they had experienced abroad and sought ways to recreate the experience at home.


One such method was visiting the local curry house. Even in 1895, these were not novel: the first, the Hindoostane Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club, had opened its doors in 1810. Its proprietor, Dean Mahomed, had been born in Bengal, the epicenter of Asia’s original hand-woven jute industry. In addition to Indian cuisine, Mahomed also introduced the then-exotic Indian practice of shampooing hair to Britain; if a modern person would think it rude to be seen at a curry house with greasy, unwashed hair, the work of one man in particular hangs over their head. The material exchange between these two distant locations provided the necessary portal allowing the cultural exchange visible in the diversity of Scottish industrial cities today; it is unlikely tikka masala would exist without the hardy herb.


But jute did more than provide a corridor between northern Europe and southern Asia. The fiber served both colonial empire and commercial curry in the capacity of capacity itself--its ability to create materials storage. British colonialism was focused not on the extraction of gold or silver, but resources, which in south Asia meant largely the spice trade. It is impossible to understate the importance of the spice trade to world history; it would be fair to say the trade was the catalyst for much of modern history. But moving spices in bulk was always a difficult, costly affair. Jute provided an answer: jute, woven into the iconic burlap sack, came to contain the majority of British break bulk cargo. Burlap sacks were the red blood cells of British colonialism; over a billion sacks made by over 64,000 looms in Calcutta alone may have been exported from Bengal to the empire, carrying spices, coffee, teas, and countless other commodities that fueled the great commercial engine of the British empire.


Among their countless cargo would have been the spices requisite in any tikka masala recipe. The transport of sensitive spices was always challenging. Jute bags were strong but highly breathable, preventing the moisture buildup that could lead to fungal infestations that could ruin entire cargos. Jute thus allowed, in a very literal fashion, for the material existence of tikka masala. And modern jute is a child of Scottish industry: the literal thread metaphorically binding two worlds.

II. What we learn at a glance

Tikka Masala is vibrantly red. Or vibrantly orange. There are many recipes; but in most commercial settings, the titular tikka is far from the color of ordinary charred chicken or undyed tomato paste. In traditional Punjabi cooking, the vibrant reds and oranges of tandoori chicken are created with turmeric and paprika; often in quantities unpopular with the mainstream 20th-century British tongue. Enterprising British curry house chefs found a solution. The secret is not the spices: it is dye; specifically Red 40, one of the most common food colorings used in the western world. This color is another marker of the globalized, industrial ancestry of the dish; and in particular, made possible by the Empire’s desperate search for a weapon against disease.


Red 40 is a child of the UK. While dyes have an ancient provenance, they were born as an industry in the 19th century. The Scottish firm of J. Pullar and Sons pioneered the first industrial-scale dye manufacturing; founded in 1824, they operated 30 locations across Britain and had received royal patronage from Queen Victoria by 1856. This was a momentous year for their industry: 1856 was the year the chemical dye industry was born, when 18-year-old English chemist William Henry Perkin synthesized an apparently-harmless, inexpensive mauve dye he called “aniline purple” but was popularized as “mauveine.”


Mauveine caused something of a sensation across Europe. “Mauve was everywhere: streaming on hair ribbons, waving from carriages, jamming up railway stations on the newly fashionable crinolines;” Punch magazine declared London infected with “mauve measles.” Chemists raced to discover new formulae; the age of modern color had begun. It is somewhat ironic that he revolutionized the look of the modern world when young Perkin had made his great discovery entirely by accident: Mauveine was a failed experiment, born of an effort to artificially synthesize the then-lifesaving chemical quinine.


Quinine was in demand because of its use as a treatment for malaria. Malaria, a lethal infection caused by bloodborne parasites easily transmitted by mosquitoes, was perhaps the British empire’s greatest enemy in India. British medical officer Desmond Whyte expressly recalled: “Our first number one enemy was malaria. Everybody, one hundred per cent got malaria.” These microscopic pathogens sickened and killed countless soldiers and administrators over their centuries of colonial venture; in 1939 the British army reported two-thirds of its soldiers being treated for malaria. William Perkin never found his malaria treatment, but he created the precursor to tikka masala’s most iconically visible, if technically flavorless, feature.


III. What we learn Inside the House of Curry


Next we must examine the space where chicken tikka masala was invented and popularized: the curry house. What we find is that like tikka masala itself, the curry house is a British fantasy, built to British tastes, emulating a foreign look never found in the country being emulated.


The classic curry house was built in a particular, iconic form, with the features of the “curry house look” being recognizable enough to attract significant parody and comment in British media. Despite being generally working-class businesses operating with minor margins, the interiors were meant to evoke decadent fantasies of Raj. Perhaps the most defining feature of the curry house was flock wallpaper: red and gold, in sensuous “oriental” patterns that conjured an exotic fantasy of India. Ironically and perhaps predictably, flock wallpaper is a deeply English material.


Flock wallpaper was originally invented in France, but the technique was perfected in England. By the 1700s England produced it in great quantity, recycling waste products (“flock”) from England’s wool industry into wallpaper that became as prestigious as the damask it was meant to imitate; by the late 19th century flock wallpaper in intricate Victorian patterns graced country homes and the Palace of Westminster. Nearly a century later, that same material lined the interiors of the curry house, surrounding diners with red and gold Arts and Crafts or Gothic Revival patterns meant to evoke sumptuous, orientalist fantasies--at an affordable price.


The timing, however, is critical. By the second half of the 20th century, flock was becoming declassé. Flock had once been a symbol of luxury, but its appearance in working-class curry houses was a sign of the material’s decline. British commentators took note, with the Victoria and Albert Museum itself declaring that flock wallpaper had “declined into a cliche, most familiar (at least in Britain) as nothing more than a commonplace decoration in Indian restaurants where it is intended to evoke an atmosphere of colonial grandeur.” By the approach of the 21st century, flock was in complete retreat--not only with the little still in use now a synthetic, rather than woollen, material, but industry communiques specifically admonishing restaurateurs to avoid flock wallpaper and opt for a clean, modern look instead.


It is unclear why tikka masala was able to survive the arc of the wallpaper that once served as the womb of its popularity. The same articles encouraging chefs to abandon flock specifically encourage abandoning tikka masala; the symbolic link between the two was clear even at the time.


IV. What we learn from a can


One of the most compelling parts of the tikka masala story is the claim that it was born from a tin of tomato soup, added to tikka (boneless, spiced chicken chunks) a British patron found too dry after its time in the tandoor. This may be a myth; but a canned, creamy sauce forms a critical element of most tikka masala recipes--another useful material object. The material existence of canned, condensed tomato soup is a byproduct of European military necessity and the modern world’s drive for non-perishable, storable, cheap stores of food.


Tradition ascribes to Napoleon the maxim “An army marches on its stomach.” Though apocryphal, it captures both a military truth as well as an implication that Napoleon’s government well understood: a strong military requires a reliable food supply. To that end, in 1795 the French government offered 12,000 francs as a reward for a method to preserve food. Nicolas Appert won this challenge by heating food sealed in glass jars, though bulky, fragile glassware was hardly useful for an army on the march. It was an Englishman, Peter Durand, who instead patented the use of the modern tin can as a lighter, stronger alternative.


But Durand sold his patent to the self-taught inventor Bryan Donkin, who had already achieved some success with his improvements to the Fourdrinier machine that forms the basis for modern-day papermaking. Along with his partner John Hall, it was Donkin who can be best considered the father of modern canned food. The classic Campbell's canned soup referenced in the tikka masala origin story consists of a metal can wrapped in a paper label. As such, the story unwittingly assigns Donkin particular prominence in the history of the dish.


This also allows a complicating factor, in that Campbell’s soup is not only from the United States, but is perhaps one of the most iconically American brands. Its prominent place in the tikka masala mythology bears analysis. According to restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab, the entire story is a fiction, created by himself with the stated intent to “entertain journalists.” If his claim is true, his selection of Campbell’s as the selected soup is curious. Campbell’s soup is not particularly prominent in Scotland, where the soup market has been dominated by Heinz and native son Baxter’s for generations. If Wahhab was just being frivolous, and his mind landed on Campbell’s as pleasingly absurd, it is reasonable to assume that Andy Warhol lurks in the background of the dish. Perhaps, by the late 20th century, a different commercial empire had begun to supersede that of the British even in the imagination of the empire’s own people.


V. What we learn from the powder


A principal element of tikka masala is the curry powder used to flavor the sauce; the mixture was so associated with tikka masala that high end Indian restaurants more than capable of mixing their own fresh spices use curry powder specifically to evoke the nostalgic flavors of the 20th century. And yet, like the curry house, and like tikka masala itself, curry powder is a British creation; a signifier pointing the opposite direction of the signified.


High end Indian restaurants do not use curry powder. In India, there is simply no such thing as curry powder. Indian chefs sometimes sneer at the phrase; Indian cuisine uses a wide variety of spices in an even wider variety of blends, and the creation of a homogenized “curry powder” is sometimes seen as an insulting oversimplification of an intricate culinary culture.


And yet curry powder remains available in grocers across the western world--for curry powder is a western invention, meant to simulate “India” for a population that had little access to, or interest in, authentic South Asian cuisine. Even in the UK, there is no definitive “curry powder,” nearly all contain a few core ingredients: turmeric, chili powder, peppers, coriander, cumin; other common ingredients include ginger, cardamom, salt, garlic powder, cloves, and nearly any other aromatic. Though these spices do appear in traditional Indian and South Asian cooking, the specific flavor that manufactured “curry powder” creates is relatively uncommon in India proper. Like the larger dish itself, this is a fundamentally British flavor; a beloved national simulacrum.


This is not to suggest curry powder is particularly modern. There are advertisements for curry powder in British newspapers as early 1784; in the form of a Morning Post advertisement claiming the powder will, among other things, “promote good digestion, good circulation,” and even “a strong libido.”


VI. What we have learned


Chicken tikka masala, in its material reality, is a quintessential product of the British Empire, demonstrating how empires are not just ideas but great collections of things brought together by accident. The dish is a synthesis of Scottish industrial ingenuity, chemical science, military necessity, and cultural invention. It is a meal composed of simulacra; a British fantasy of an oriental taste, one that simplifies and commodifies intricate South Asian culinary culture. Ultimately, the status of chicken tikka masala serves as an icon of a global, colonial process that synthesized disparate materials and traditions into a uniquely British creation.

Bibliography

Official Publications

National Records of Scotland. “Scotland’s Census 2022 - Ethnic group, national identity, language and religion.” Published May 21, 2024.


National Center for Biotechnology Information, "E129 (Compound)," PubChem, last modified April 4, 2026, https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/33258.


Office of the Jute Commissioner, "History: The Story of Jute—Past, Present and Future," Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, last modified December 24, 2025, https://jutecomm.gov.in/about-jute/history.

Royal British Legion. "How Soldiers Coped with Malaria." https://www.britishlegion.org.uk/get-involved/remembrance/stories/how-soldiers-coped-with-malaria.

Articles

BBC News. "Curry house founder is honoured." September 29, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4290124.stm.

Buettner, Elizabeth. "Chicken Tikka Masala, Flock Wallpaper, and ‘Real’ Home Cooking: Assessing Britain’s ‘Indian’ Restaurant Traditions." Food & History 7, no. 2 (2009): 203–30. https://www.brepolsonline.net/content/journals/10.1484/J.FOOD.1.100656/read

Davies, John McG. "Pullar, Sir Robert (1828–1912), dyer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 7 Apr. 2026. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-61313.

de Naoum, Kat. "A History of Food Dyes." Reviewed by Audrey Altmann. Thomasnet Insights, July 7, 2025. https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/food-dyes-history/.

Garfield, Simon. "Mauve with the Times." The Guardian, September 20, 2000. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/21/fiction.simongarfield.

Health of the Army in India. Nature 148, 47–48 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148047c0

“Hessian Fabrics in Landscaping and Agriculture: Uses, Benefits, and Applications,” Hessian Fabric, accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.hessianfabric.co.uk/page/index/landscaping-and-agriculture/.

Isabel E. P. Menzies and Dennis Chapman, “The Jute Industry,” in Studies in Industrial Organization, ed. H. A. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1946), 235–237.

“Jute’s Hidden Histories Explored at V&A Dundee,” V&A Dundee, accessed April 6, 2026, https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/info/jutes-hidden-histories-explored-at-va-dundee.


Laura Kelley, "The Origins of Curry Powder," Silk Road Gourmet, September 30, 2013, https://silkroadgourmet.com/the-origins-of-curry-powder/.

Mark Hay, "Who Owns Chicken Tikka Masala?" Roads & Kingdoms, May 5, 2014, https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2014/who-owns-chicken-tikka-masala/.




Md. Mahbubul Islam, Md. Saheb Ali. “Economic Importance of Jute in Bangladesh: Production, Research Achievements and Diversification.” International Journal of Economic Theory and Application. Vol. 4, No. 6, 2017, pp. 45-57.


Singh, R.P., Desrosier, N.W. "food preservation." Encyclopedia Britannica, January 14, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/topic/food-preservation.


Syed Ali Hamid, "The London Curry Scene In The 1930s," The Friday Times, May 11, 2022, https://www.thefridaytimes.com/11-May-2022/the-london-curry-scene-in-the-1930s.

World of Steel, “Evolution of the Tin Can,” accessed April 1, 2026, https://www.worldofsteel.com/pages/evolution-of-the-tin-can/.

Books

Jaffrey, Madhur. The Essential Madhur Jaffrey. London: Ebury, 1996.



Hills, Richard, Papermaking in Britain 1488–1988. Athlone Press, London, 1988.



Saunders, Gill. Wallpaper in Interior Decoration. V and A Publications, London, 2002.

History Article: We Have Always Eaten Bugs

 

Have you ever felt the urge to read someone's essay about insect eating? Well, today, my friend, is your extremely lucky day. I can almost guarantee you'll never find one quite like it!

This is one of my first major essays. I don't think you care about my homework but if you're curious what my nonfiction writing style looks like, here it is. I won't lie and say I'm not at least a little proud of it.

Oh, a quick note: My footnotes didn't copy over, so my claims look unsourced. My bibliography is at the end but they're disconnected. In the actual article, obviously, my sources were properly cited!

We Have Always Eaten Bugs

1. The Worm’s Eye View

Bernadino de Sahagún arrived in Mexico in 1529, a mere 8 years after the collapse of the Aztec empire. From Veracruz he traveled to Mexico-Tenochtitlan; a city now in the midst of a furious reconstruction planned by Alonso Garcia Bravo. Much of the city had been rebuilt in the Spanish style, but portions of the old city still remained; the young friar must have walked in the ruins of the Templo Mayor, a colossal pagan temple, once ritually soaked in human blood. Something about this alien place enchanted the young friar: Sahagún commissioned a painting of the temple and spoke of it as “a thing very worthy of being seen.” Five hundred years later, a Spaniard might arrive in the same city and follow the same quadrangular streets, radiating from the National Palace out along what had once been the great Aztec causeways, and find something similarly puzzling: in the upscale markets and restaurants, the escamole, the nutty, buttery eggs of the Liometopum family of ants, for sale as a delicacy; with prices reaching well over $200 USD a kilo. 

Escamole is not alone. Chinicuiles, chahuis, chapulines--caterpillars, beetles, and grasshoppers; among many others--are widely consumed seasonal delicacies, in demand across Mexico. Entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, is common here, and has been since long before Columbus paid a fateful visit to the Catholic monarchs. Do not picture malnourished children plucking spiders from the trunks of blighted trees; these insect dishes are true culinary works. They can be fried, dried, seasoned, simmered; they have proper pairings and seasons and a geographic terroir. These are not famine foods; and yet, the historical literature surrounding entomophagy has struggled to capture this cultural status. Instead, the practice has been discussed--if at all--in waves of misunderstanding, beginning with colonial-era revulsion and moving to a 20th-century condescension, where a complex and refined element of Mexican culture was degraded and treated as merely a symptom of poverty.

It was not malice, generally, that created this loss--it was a product of historical methods. The history of entomophagy in Mexico is, in miniscule, the history of method. The practice itself has never particularly waned; even through the colonial era, escamole remained a sought-after luxury, eaten by rural people of all social classes. It was only among the urban Spanish colonists and the Europhile mestizo middle class that entomophagy was not widely practiced. What has changed is how the colonial, and later Mexican, elites tried to codify their knowledge of the practice. Early primary sources were created by European minds who viewed insect-eating with revulsion or, later, condescension. Neither lens is able to capture the reality of insects as a refined choice; even an art. Only recently have historians been able to give this practice the defense it deserves; putting into writing what generations of Mexica have known and experienced. 

This essay will examine how historians have moved from a dependence on traditional archival history to historic materialism, before embracing ethnography and social history to  arrive at the understanding of entomophagy as the vital element of cultural heritage that it is. It will then apply each method to a single source, to draw out the strengths and highlight the blind spots of each. This will demonstrate the importance of historical methods and the conscientiousness required by a historian seeking to genuinely study the human past. 

II. The Silence of the Crickets

We must not begin with Sahagún, despite temptation. His exhaustive history of Nahua society, now a cornerstone of Mexica studies, sat ignored in a royal archive for centuries; with the Codex’s first publication waiting until 1830. His serious, analytical approach is too humanistic to represent the colonial opinion of native customs; ironic, considering the missionary purpose of his work.  

Instead, for centuries the practice was more or less ignored, both by legal and intellectual authorities. Colonial governors were deeply threatened by certain elements of the indigenous diet--corn and amaranth in particular--but had relatively little to say about the consumption of insects. Hernan Cortes makes no mention of it in his letters to Charles V, despite an awestruck list of goods available in Tenochtitlan marketplaces, one that cannot be called terse: describing fowl alone he records “a street for game, where they sell every sort of bird, such as chickens, partridges, quails, wild ducks, fly-catchers, widgeons, turtle-doves, pigeons, reed-birds, parrots, owls, eaglets, owlets, falcons, sparrow-hawks and kestrels.” There are no laws on record regulating or restricting the practice of insect-eating, though the Spanish viceroys often attempted to restrict amaranth and mezcal consumption. As an example: Pulque, an indigenous  alcoholic drink made from the maguey plant, was once highly coveted in Aztec society, and experienced many regulations over the years from both the colonial and Mexican governments. Many modern works describe the ‘disgust’ the Spanish elite had for insect-eating: this is probably true, but few historical documents seem to attest to it. Instead, the Spanish preferred to import and lionize their own tastes, and allow endomophagy to linger in the colonial periphery.

The same is true for the academic world: In the 18th century, scholars would read Cortes’ lieutenant-cum-rival Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, compiled in 1568, as one of the only primary sources remarking on pre-Colonial Mexico. The aged conquistador makes no mention of insect consumption despite lurid passages describing human sacrifice and a lengthy description of the market of Tlatelolco: “But why do I waste so many words describing what was sold in the great plaza, for I shall not soon finish if I recount everything in detail!” he concludes after paragraphs of detail. There were few academic works touching on the subject, and what existed was limited in both quality and quantity. The best work was done by Catholic orders, drawing on their centuries of groundwork in Mexico. Even these have little to say about entomophagy: the practice is documented in Friar Juan de Torquemada’s colossus, Monarquia Indiana, which encompasses three volumes--described by D.A. Brading as “a remarkably dense text…rendered more wearisome by his editor’s garrulous commentary.” Insect-eating does finally appear in writing; but it is not discussed in any detail, not even disgust. Following Cortes and Diaz, he describes an Aztec marketplace in great detail in Libro 14, explicitly listing lombrices (earthworms), hormigas grandes tostadas (roasted ants), and later maguey, agave worms. This demonstrates that, to the academic circles who would read this tome, the practice was not unknown--it was merely ignored.

What accounts for this peculiar silence? Method. 

In the 17th century, the academic world was still emerging from medieval scholastic traditions. Torquemada’s work represented the most encyclopedic and ambitious project in Mexican historiography, but it was fundamentally limited by his method: a reliance on written accounts, combined with an overtly Christian apologia. Both of these are artifacts of their era; each has certain advantages, but each brings weaknesses to the Franciscan’s effort. 

The most straightforward weakness in Torquemada’s history is his sourcing. On the 40th page of the first volume Torquemada lists the scholars cited within: there are a few fellow Franciscans, but the list is dominated by names one mightn’t expect to see in a history of central America: Seneca, Suetonius, Avicenna, Averroes. Herodotus, of course. Torquemada cites nearly all of the canonical Greco-Roman scholars. There are a small handful of citations--a character called Tucio, “Stump” in Spanish--who could possibly be indigenous to the region, but each recognizable name is either Spanish or would seem more fitting for a text on Spanish, rather than Mexican, history. 

There is no reason to suspect this was done maliciously; Torquemada clearly has great interest in the people and history of “New Spain.” But he studied in the academic method of his day, which depended heavily on written accounts, generally composed by either fellow clergymen or the letters and statements of “great men;” which in the case of Mexico meant almost exclusively conquistadors or native princes; such as the Tlaxcalan elite who retained power after 1521 as a reward for their service in Cortes’ coalition. There is of course nothing wrong with using such sources: the Franciscans were literate and left meticulous records, the conquistadors are naturally an important voice in the story of Mexico, and the Tlaxcalan elite are genuine indigenous leaders. A history of the Aztec empire that neglected Diaz and Cortes would be leaving valuable information on the table. A reliance on exclusively such accounts, however, consigns not just facts but entire worldviews to oblivion--as nearly occurred here. Torquemada’s colossal project recorded thousands of pages of city names, of the wars of the Mexican nations, and elaborate comparisons of the Aztec empire to the civilizations of the ancient near east--thus his extensive references to Mediterranean antiquity-- but was limited in its ability to capture the lives and lifestyles of the indigenous people of ‘New Spain.’ To the extent that Torquemada was able to capture indigenous stories, it was in the service of extolling the natural virtues that Christian education brought out of them. 

The latter element is another obvious current running through his work: an insistence on the Christian character of the Mexican people. Torquemada wrote with an overt agenda. Mexican historian Antonio Rubial Garcia describes Torquemada’s work as “still imbued with the defense of the indigenous people that characterized the friar writers of the previous century.” He goes on to summarize the overarching purpose of Torquemada’s history: “Through (his) study, indigenous culture, particularly Nahuatl culture, was placed within the context of universal civilization, on par with Greece, Rome, or Egypt. This allowed for an explanation of the achievements of Christianity and revealed how the arrival of the Gospel was proclaimed in these lands during their pagan period.”

Torquemada’s work was fundamentally a defense of the Mexican people, in an age of intense religious chauvinism. As much as he worked to record the history of the Nahua, Tlaxcala, Mixtec, and other regional indigenous peoples, Torquemada had an overt goal: to demonstrate that Mexican history was comparable to that of the ancient near East; demonstrating that the Mexican people were not incapable of European-style civilization, but merely a few centuries behind, with souls and minds able to turn from bronze-age kingdoms to Christendom, as the great civilizations of the west had done. The stakes here are not low: while Juan de Torquemada reads as a deeply humane, curious mind, most Europeans likely recognize “Friar Torquemada” instead as the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada, “whose name has become synonymous with the Christian Inquisition’s horror, religious bigotry, and cruel fanaticism.” The Inquisition was very much in power in Spain, and the status of the native people of the New World was ever in flux. Torquemada was attempting to give legitimacy to pre-Colombian civilization, giving dignity to its descendants, armoring them against identification as savages. 

This goal, noble though it may be, forced Torquemada to deliberately overlook elements of Mexican folk culture that did not lend itself to this message. It was one thing to list the consumption of strange and alien things in the markets of old Tenochtitlan; it would be wholly against his message to write of contemporary (at the time of his writing) Mexica continuing to engage with the practice--and so he doesn’t. 

Such is a great drawback of all politically-motivated history: any culture is infested with enough complexity, enough unsavory elements, and enough particularity that attempting to commit any large group of people to a single message will inevitably have to elide elements, lest it be punctured by thorny contradictions. In Mexico, insects formed a vital, valuable part of the rural diet for huge numbers of its people; in Spain, the consumption of insects would be seen as revolting. (Even in 2023, a survey of Spanish university students found only 20% claiming they would be willing to eat insects at all; fewer than 5% claimed they would be willing if they “saw insects in their natural appearance,” as they are traditionally consumed in Mexico.) Torquemada sought to downplay the exotic and alien in Mexico; his goal was quite the opposite. Emphasizing distasteful (by European standards) folk practices in Mexico could only weaken his argument and risk endangering the position of the peasant class the Franciscans considered their foundation in New Spain. The Spanish crown could not expel the Mexican natives en masse as it had the Iberian Jewish population in 1492 or the Moriscos in the early 17th century, but it certainly had the power to diminish what few protections they had. (For a more mercenary motivation, the crown also had the power to suppress the influence of the Franciscans if it seemed they were failing to properly “civilize” their flock.)

It’s impossible to know if Torquemada’s omission was intentional or an unconscious bias, but the question is moot; ultimately, this history was written from above, and carried with it the intrinsic bias created when any people’s history is written by someone who is, fundamentally, from a different and more dominant social class. However, what would follow next would completely re-order the academic understanding of entomophagy, as Torquemada’s classical methodology was replaced by a modern, industrial approach to the production of knowledge, where the consumption of insects would be recognized--and instead of ignored, misunderstood. 

III. Los Pobrecitos

In December 1943, trucks belonging to Mexico's Ministry of Public Health and Welfare carried medical doctors up winding dirt trails. They were headed  into the Mezquital valley; only 75 miles from Mexico City but far deeper in its past. It was, and remains, one of the poorest places in the Americas. Windswept, sunbaked, arid; almost completely devoid of natural resources. The doctors were on a mission to record, as exhaustively as possible, the health of rural Mexican villagers. The subjects of this particular study were Otomi Indians, living without electricity or running water. There were at most two wells in each village, and lice infested 90-95% of the population. These facts, and many more, were recorded as these modern men applied rigorous medical tests to these villagers, examining everything from their gum health to their birthweights to the nutritional breakdown of their diets. A single sentence lurks in their observations: “A variety of worms and insects are also eaten with relish.” This is not examined further; the practice was unremarkable to the doctors. What does seem to surprise the researchers is that these people, some of the poorest in the world, show almost no nutritional deficits at all. Their overall health is not particularly good; but their diets are beyond these medical men’s ability to critique. The study concludes: “In spite of the barrenness and poverty of the region its inhabitants have through many centuries developed food habits and a way of life adapted thereto. Attempts at change would be a mistake until their economic and social conditions can be improved and something really better substituted.” It is a strikingly generous conclusion, from one angle; but it anticipated the next great wave of entomophagic interpretation: entomophagy as a nutritional necessity; a practice engaged in for crude survival, “until something really better substituted.” 

The 20th century brought the first scientific analysis of indigenous Mexican diets, as part of a great wave of new academic enthusiasm for scientific and materialist approaches to what had once been the exclusive domain of the humanities. Anthropologists like Marvin Harris attempted to explain historical contingencies not as the products of the diplomatic maneuvers of states, but through previously-ignored environmental concerns; moving away from Thucydides and Leopold van Ranke towards a marriage of Karl Marx and Thomas Malthus. Most strikingly, he attempted to explain the origin of Aztec human sacrifice as a response to chronic protein deficits in their diet. Numerous studies similar to the 1946 survey followed, and trickled from the health services into the growing field of Mexican history. A new materialist conception took hold: the consumption of insects was indeed widespread and was motivated by the need to fill vital nutritional gaps; it was the product of poverty; it would, presumably, be replaced once better economic conditions allowed. 

There are great advantages to a multidisciplinary approach to history; particularly one that incorporates scientific principles. The nutritional breakdown of the highland Otomi diet is remarkably useful; it allows historians to situate dietary practices in the chemical reality of the human body. It is one thing to read Cortes’ account of an Aztec market; it is another to have some evidence that the people of central Mexico were in fact eating as well as he made it seem. The work of Marvin Harris displays an elegant command of scientific facts that he attempts to support his theories with, down to estimates of the edible biomass available from lake Texcoco and how many people it could theoretically support. The combination of nutritional science, anthropological theories, and a willingness to engage in fieldwork opens vital doors that a purely archival history can never access. 

And yet-- “A variety of worms and insects are also eaten with relish.” The learned doctors did not realize the importance of the statement; how could they? While they asked many questions about the specific elements of the Otomi diet, they had no interest in investigating the reason. They, like Harris, assumed the culture was downstream of the environment. This is a blind spot, one that lurks in the margins between the questions. Why did the Otomi eat “with relish?” Was it truly poverty alone? The questions were not asked; they were not part of the medical intention of the survey. And so no answers arose, and as before, it was possible that the learned world would once again look past this curious rural custom; once again see it and look straight through it. It is useful to read Sahlin’s response to Harris: it contains not only better mathematics, but also an entertaining footnote expounding on the nutritional value of cannibalism (underwhelming) and, most vitally, a refutation that should remind all aspiring theorists: no archival source, from Cortes’ to the Nahua codices, suggested that human flesh formed a major, reliable part of the Aztec diet; though cannibalism formed an element of ritual culture, there is no evidence whatsoever it was practiced on an agricultural scale. It was a conclusion reached entirely on specious math and broad assumptions about culture.

Meanwhile, Harris responds to the existence of entomophagy with utter disdain: “It is one thing to relish piquant morsels of witchety grubs and snails as a supplement to meat and fish, it is quite another to make such fare one’s primary source of animal flesh,”  he writes, dismissing the concept with no investigation at all. Such is the profound limit of his method. Like the doctors, he wished to speak about the people he studied more than to them. 

IV. The Worm Turns

All that was missing was a return to Sahagún. Specifically, to the combination of modern science with the friar’s prescient method, which drew heavily on a lifetime not only of archival research but lengthy interviews with the people he studied. In 1979, the Florentine Codex was reprinted in full, just as a new generation of scholars finally turned to the role of entomophagy in Mexican culture. These scholars worked to synthesize the best of academic history, scientific inquiry, and the then-burgeoning field of social history, buoyed by the continued success of such texts as Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson focused on the everyday life of people long ignored by history, with interest in culture and values of those not traditionally considered powerful. In Mexico, this led to the immediate realization that insects were a delicacy, not a famine food. Jumiles and escamoles each had local shrines, maintained by the locals since the 15th century. In Mexico, the work of Julia Ramos Elorduy established that not only did Mexico’s edible insects “”provide the necessary energy to achieve the activities and vital functions of our organism,” they did so with significantly greater energy efficiency than the traditional meat animals in the European diet. By combining social history and the voice of indigenous people with scientific and archival study, the practice of entomophagy could finally be given the attention it deserves, as a vital element of indigenous Mexican culture. 

All of which returns us to the Florentine Codex. Sahagún’s work is exhaustive; the product of multiple lifetimes of work, and it provides enough depth to allow many methods of analysis. As an archival source, it is excellent; citing sources, organized by topic, carefully indexed. By including Spanish translations alongside the original Nahuatl, it remains accessible to modern scholars while preserving the source text. This helps correct for the inevitable omissions inherent in any translation-- despite Sahagún’s best effort, small deviations always emerge; unintentional but inherent due to the colonial structure of the project. The fragrant resin copal, for example, holds particular importance for indigenous Mexicans, burned ritually since pre-Colombian times, and yet it goes unnamed in the Spanish translation. Similarly, the Nahuatl is not entirely translated; with one prominent lacuna running from folio 192v to 197v; the columns are filled with illustrations instead. No explanation is provided, but these gaps suggest that even the best efforts at a colonial history will inevitably leave possibly-vital elements of indigenous cultures unstudied. Fortunately, the Codex allows for an elegant scientific analysis as well. It is not difficult to cross-reference Sahagún’s descriptions with modern biology, allowing historians to show specific insects mentioned within were seasonal delicacies, refuting the shallow materialist argument that consumption was indiscriminate and based on necessity. It is also easy to locate the most popularly-consumed insects, such as chapulines and escamole, in the Codex, corroborating the oral history of the practice. Conversely, the use of modern science can help limit some of the possible weaknesses of oral history: for example, on folio 89v the Codex gives space to an intelligent snake that lays aquatic traps for human beings; a page prior it described the iconic, biologically-impossible feathered serpent quetzalcoatl. Of course, a wise historian today understands these ‘creatures’ not as mere fabrications, or signs of Franciscan credulousness, but elements of indigenous culture, worthy of record even if their biological reality was unlikely. Properly read, using all the tools of modern historical method, the Codex becomes an even richer text than it was when Torquemada drew inspiration from it centuries ago. 

V. The Food Remains the Same

It is possible there remain new and unexplored avenues in history; there are likely many elements of human culture and history that lurk in the margins of our records, cut out from proper record by the inability of historian’s methods to center them. Historians must always remember that their tools shape their work, and they must be conscious of the strengths and drawbacks of each.

The history of entomophagy is a microcosm of the evolution of historical method. For centuries, the practice was ignored or misunderstood, the victim of the colonial era’s political and cultural agenda, or the 20th century’s rigid historic materialism. The “silence of the crickets” finally ended with the conscientious historian’s willingness to synthesize the best of multiple approaches. The final shift demonstrates that the choice of method need not be passive; and in fact the best history comes from the active decision to value the voices and reality of the people being studied. 

The food remains the same; only the method has allowed its truth to be written. 

Bibliography

Unpublished Sources:

Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex), MS 218-220, Book 11, fol. 177r, The Digital Florentine Codex, Getty Research Institute.

Published Sources:

Official Publications

Britannica Editors. "Tomás de Torquemada." Encyclopedia Britannica, September 12, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tomas-de-Torquemada.

Articles

Álvarez-Ríos, G.D., Casas, A., Pérez-Volkow, L. et al. Pulque and pulquerías of Mexico City: a traditional fermented beverage and spaces of biocultural conservation. J. Ethn. Food 9, 40 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42779-022-00155-2.

Anderson RK, Calvo J, Serrano G, Payne GC. A Study of the Nutritional Status and Food Habits of Otomi Indians in the Mezquital Valley of Mexico. Am J Public Health Nations Health. 1946 Aug;36(8):883-903. PMID: 18016399; PMCID: PMC1625980.

Cantalapiedra, Fernando, Ana Juan-García, and Cristina Juan. 2023. "Perception of Food Safety Associated with Entomophagy among Higher-Education Students: Exploring Insects as a Novel Food Source" Foods 12, no. 24: 4427. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods12244427.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. "Text 3: Bernal Díaz: The Tlatelolco Market." An Aztec Folio. Translated by DKJ. Last modified September 6, 2025. pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/nahuatl/aztecfolio/AztecFolio03-Tlatel.html.

Harris, Marvin, and Marshall Sahlins. "'Cannibals and Kings': An Exchange." The New York Review of Books, June 28, 1979. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/06/28/cannibals-and-kings-an-exchange/.

Hirsch, Eric. (2021) 2023. “History”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/21history.

Olivadese, Marianna, and Maria Luisa Dindo. 2023. "Edible Insects: A Historical and Cultural Perspective on Entomophagy with a Focus on Western Societies" Insects 14, no. 8: 690. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects14080690.

Ramos-Elorduy, B. Julieta (1997) The importance of edible insects in the nutrition and economy of people of the rural areas of Mexico, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 36:5, 347-366, DOI: 10.1080/03670244.1997.9991524.

Ramos-Elorduy, Julieta. 2008. “Energy Supplied by Edible Insects from Mexico and Their Nutritional and Ecological Importance.” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 47 (3): 280–97. doi:10.1080/03670240701805074.

Rubial García, Antonio. "La crónica religiosa: historia sagrada y conciencia colectiva en el siglo XVII," Enciclopedia de la Literatura en México (ELEM) (2002). Translated from Spanish. https://www.elem.mx/estgrp/datos/160.

Books

Brading, D. A. (1991). The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cortés, Hernán. The Letters of Cortés to Charles V, Vol. 1. Translated and edited by Francis Augustus MacNutt. 1908. Project Gutenberg. Accessed November 24, 2025. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28001/28001-h/28001-h.htm.

León Portilla, Miguel. Bernardino de Sahagún, First Anthropologist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Torquemada, Juan de. Monarquia Indiana. Vol. 2. Madrid: Nicolas Rodriguez Franco, 1723. Internet Archive. Accessed November 26, 2025. https://archive.org/details/monarquia-indiana.-vol-i_202109/Monarquia%20Indiana.%20Vol%20II/page/556/mode/2up.