Consider the pounded corpses of those cochineals, parasitic insects of the nopal, which the Aztecs called “nochetzli“and the Spaniards”money“. They were found on the high plateaus of Mexico, especially in the region of Oaxaca, where the Amerindian populations had domesticated them for a long time in order to produce, by crushing the dead cochineals, a red powder then used for paints and dyes.
In the followingmath of the Conquest, the Spaniards appropriated this crop before tightly controlling its production and circulation (even maintaining the mystery of its origin for quite a long time: seed or insect?) At a time when, associated with blood and power, red was a luxurious color, the matter was important. To put it like the French chemist Réaumur in the middle of the 18th century: “By giving us this product, the New World has perhaps given us a more useful present than by sending us its silver and its gold..»
Specialists in economic and social history, working for fifty years on the subject, Danielle Trichaud-Buti and Gilbert Buti take us on the long journey of cochineal powder, from the heights of Oaxaca to the ports of Veracruz, Cadiz and Marseilles. We are witnessing the astonishing attempts of those who, defying the Spanish ban, tried to acclimatize the cochineals of the nopal elsewhere than in Mexico (in French Santo Domingo at the end of the 18th century, in particular). We see how the small corpses of insects from the Mexican highlands ended up providing the red color of the sheets and velvets that adorn the Palace of Versailles – but also how they were used in cooking, to restore color to foods that had lost following cooking, from jams to meat juices. In 1847, when the German chemist Liebig developed his meat extracts, they still contained cochineal.
At that time, Mexico had been independent since 1821. The new colonial empires appeared as the future of the ancient Native American culture. The Dutch do it in Indonesia, the French in Algeria, the Spaniards in the Canary Islands. In the gardens of acclimatization and the trial gardens, care is taken of the nopals and their small parasites.
But, from the 1850s, synthetic dyes, derived from coal and petroleum, abruptly put an end to the long history of cochineal uses. Period ? Not sure: raised today especially in Peru, the cochineals still provide the food coloring E-120, less toxic than the chemical red E-124 – and as such may be promising for the future. A beautiful book, usefully illustrated, which proves in its own way that, to tell the story of the world, there are no small objects.
