Coloring and Cooking with Nopal

Color Me Cochineal | The legend of Mexico Tenochtitlan | Nopalitos cooking ideas

Post 2 of 4 on ingredients from Houston’s less known (more local?) Tex-Mex sides: Xoconostle, Nopales, Guajes, Culantro. All of which grow in India as well, in some form or other, thanks to centuries of botanical theft, trade, and other exchange, and now have local stories to tell from all ends of this wide world.

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At the other end of the Xoconostle, literally speaking, are nopales, nopalitos, Cactus pads, prickly pear cladodes–which are the tender stems-turned-“leaves” or paddles of the nopal cactus, from which the prickly pears grow.

Nopal or Opuntia is native to Mexico, where it has profound cultural significance, but has come to be so thoroughly naturalized in the Mediterranean basin that it was long taken for being native to that region and botanically identified as Cactus opuntia L., a “spiny plant from near Opus, Greece.” Thanks also to that one famous 1492 misidentification, it carries Indian names: Figo da india, Opuntia ficus-indica. Both these facts are legacies of the Spanish colonization of the central and southern Americas; both names hide the truth about nopal.

Color me Cochineal

Beyond 1492, the story of these misnomers starts with cochineal insects, Dactylopius coccus, these barely-visible, aphid-like parasitic [?] scale insects which thrive exclusively on nopal, and which the Aztecs and Maya had known to produce a red dye that was so much finer and brilliant than all the mineral colors (hematite, cinnabar) and natural pigments from scale insects (such as Kerria Lacca in India, the source of natural lac dye and shellac) known in the Old World–they became, right alongside cinchona, a focal point of colonial economic monopoly and control. In dried and dyed (died?) form, billions of these insects went around the globe, and became the red of many a Phoencian garment and painter’s colorant signature [cf. 1]

A Frenchman by the name of Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville journeyed to Oaxaca disguised as a Catalan and stole nopal plants with the insects in 1777, even more daringly than Charles Marie de la Condamine of the French Geodesic Mission who had led a clandestine search for the fever tree in 1735. Thiéry brought the plant and insects back to the French colony of Saint Domingue, which is of course modern Haiti. But he died soon after the mission and the plants with him; only his posthumously published notes survive to tell his story: Traité de la culture du nopal, et de l’éducation de la cochenille dans les colonies françaises de l’Amérique: précédé d’un voyage a Guaxaca, 1787.

The Spanish had meanwhile brought both insects and nopal to Europe, where they thrived in the arid areas of the Mediterranean basin and started to make histories of their own. In the early 20th c., “sabres” (or sabra from the Arabic) referred pejoratively to any Jew born in Palestine: thorny, rough, unpleasant, wild. In the 1930s the term was reclaimed (as “tzabra“) to now imply that Jews born in the state of Israel have spines outside but sweet juicy insides, just like the Cactus opuntia and its fruits. By the ubiquity of the cactus plants and such metaphors was the nativization of the Opuntia in the Mediterranean rendered complete, and in fact obscured its origins in southern and central Mexico, which was the center of its domestication 8000 years ago, replete with indigenous American knowledge of its culinary and colorant use [2].

Tracking the story of nopal back to its roots is a reclamation of history, and the formidable skills and knowledge systems of Nahua communities that first extracted the “deep red chilli color” of the cochineal: nocheztli in Nahuatl, the ‘blood of the prickly pear,’ from nochtli (nopal, Opuntia) + eztli (blood). The Florentine Codex of 1577, perhaps the earliest encyclopedic documentation of Nahua ethnobotanical knowledge, tells not only the intricacies of native production, but also of additives (seeds, stones) to modulate color and improve profitability. All this, centuries of prior knowledge and practice was, however, reduced to “labor” and divorced from (of-course European) “science.” The result was that native communities, informants, caciques [notables] and others, not unlike the Andean cascarilleros [quina bark collectors] and curanderos [healers] whose knowledge of cinchona bark’s febrifugal properties long predated any Jesuit understanding of it, were summarily written out of stories of the evolution of science through the rapacious mercantilism of empire [3].

The legend of Mexico Tenochtitlan

Back in time, the Aztec legend of the nopal and the emergence of Mexicas is told a hundred different ways, but broadly runs something like this.

As the Aztecs migrated from Aztlán to Tenochtitlan, there was Malinalxóchitl [the moon] who was a sorceress, goddess of scorpions, snakes and desert insects; wife to Chimalcuauhtil, the ruler of Malinalco, with whom she had a son named Copil. She was sister to Huitzilopochtli [the sun], whom the Nahua tribes were following. When night came, the tribes moved again with Huitzilopochtli, fearing Malinalxóchitl’s sorcery, abandoning her, and thus causing her great distress. Now Malinalxóchitl taught her son Copil the arts of sorcery so that he might avenge his mother’s abandonment and shame, but it was Huitzilopochtli who was victorious in the end, tearing out Copil’s heart and throwing it into a place with rocks and weeds. From that torn-out heart grew the first nopal, with the thorns of a warrior and the flowers of a son who had died avenging his mother, persistent and beautiful both.

On the order of Huitzilopochtli, the tribes continued to wander, and they arrived at the moon´s lake, where in the middle of the water was the island whose name would be México, from Metztli, moon; Xictli, navel; and co, place: “In the navel of the moon” [4]. When they found the place, says the Mexicáyotl Chronicle, the priest Cuauhtlequetzqui spoke words which I’ve taken liberties in somewhat imaginatively re-stringing here:

Go and see a wild nopal,
There you will see an eagle that is upright,
There he eats, there he combs his feathers,
There your heart will be content, for
There is the heart of Copil you went to throw
where the water twists and turns
There it came to fall
There grows the wild nopal
There we will reign
There were the eagle spreads its wings
There where she eats
There where the fish fly
There where the snakes roll and hiss
That will be Mexico Tenochtitlan
There we shall endure.

The arrival of synthetic dyes and synthetic quinine of course reduced human reliance on natural substances for coloprants and malarial treatments alike, but images such as the ones above are not to be taken as quaint historical curiosities. On the left is an engraving from scientist and scholar José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez’s Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo, y beneficio de la grana, a 1777 report on the nature, industry and cultivation of cochineal: a patriotic reclamation in its own right in its depiction of an Indian using a deer tail to harvest cochineal from a nopal cactus plant [2]. On the right, a detail from a mural “Oaxaca en la historia y en el mito/Oaxaca in history and myth,” by Arturo García Bustos created between May 1978 and November 1980 at the Museo del Palacio Universum/Palacio de Gobierno in Oaxaca city depicting the colonial contexts of cochineal and red-dye extraction.

Cooking with Nopalitos

In all these tales of myth and legend and colonial plunder, precious little gets said about nopal as a source of food, fodder, or even raw material beyond cochineal-based red dye. Nor about Opuntia’s value in reclaiming arid wastelands as productive ones, which is a lot of the reason Opuntia exchanges brought them to India. Prickly pear fruits are perhaps easier to adopt in foreign lands, but the cactus paddles themselves far less so. This is a shame, all the more because nopalitos are widely eaten and loved in Mexico–which is clearly the reason they’ve always been available at Houston’s Feista locations–and have some hypoglycemic/positive effect on regulating the body’s blood sugar levels, so these are good diabetic foods or just good regulatory ones. [This is also knowledge that comes to us first from Mexican traditional medicine!]

If you’re still thinking these are much-too-weird as ingredients to work with, remember that this is about diversifying your diet, being open to new tastes and textures, so important in an age of global unpredictability and climate change, and claiming more of the varied benefits of this wide world’s botanical offerings.

And then here’s how to process and cook nopalitos:

1. Clean the cactus pads. Nopalitos are not difficult to work with once you get past the spines, which you can simply scrape off with a knife, trimming edges, or buy the packets with pre-prepped cactus pads.
2. Deal with the mucilage. We had friends who would grow various Opuntia varieties [they’re easy to propagate from pads] and had their favorites, but all have mucilage which is a bit more bothersome than the slime from okra, but which also disappears on cooking. Some use tomatillo [Physalis philadelphica] husks in the water used to boil nopalitos to hasten the slime-break-down–but we grilled all ours, so I can’t speak to the efficacy of that process.
3. Grilling them or griddle-frying the cactus pads is easy as pie. Smear them with oil, let the hot griddle do the rest. All you have to do is turn them once in a while to cook on both sides. Let this process go slowly to cook the nopalitos through and cut through all the mucilage.
4. Chop them up, keep ’em whole. Once grilled we chopped them up and mixed them with queso and corn for a salad and had them with refried beans and xoconostle salsa, left them whole and ate them with bits of salty queso (feta would work, too) and a smoky red salsa, but loved them with eggs most of all.

It’s customary to scramble eggs with chopped up nopalitos, but then where would the poetry of the whole cactus pads withered grilled appearance go? We set them atop instead and left the nopalitos as a meaty vegetable base below. You could well cook them and add them to scrambling eggs along with onions and other usual suspects. Finish with a good sprinkling of a mixed pepper powder or just chipotle.

And all the sweetness not just of the fruits but also the pads will then be yours.

Notes

[1] Phipps, Elena. Cochineal: The Art History of a Color. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art & New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

[2] Griffith MP. “The origins of an important cactus crop, Opuntia ficus-indica (Cactaceae): new molecular evidence.” American Journal of Botany 2004 Nov; 91(11):1915-21. doi: 10.3732/ajb.91.11.1915. PMID: 21652337.

[3] Bleichmar, Daniela. “The history of cochineal and the changing value of Mexican indigenous environmental knowledge, ca. 1500–1800,” 2021.

[4] Tena-Colunga, Arturo. “The meaning of the word México.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.