Mother Earthenware
December 1, 2014
The ancient Aztec account of the creation of the earth begins with an eternally hungry woman spirit, who was constantly groaning for food with the multitudes of mouths in all parts of her body from her elbows to her knees. This was very awkward for the other spirits, who felt like they just couldn’t eat anything while listening to this kvetching. So they came up with what they thought was a logical solution. The world hadn’t been created yet so while all around there was nothing, below there was water. Two spirits decided they’d dump her in the water, but she just wouldn’t sink and instead floated. The spirits tried to push her down into the water, but in the process stretched her to the point of breaking into two. Some other spirit decided that half of her would become the sky and the other half the earth. From her body grew forests and lakes and mountains, and this they thought would appease her.
But, lo and behold, it didn't, and she continued to cry for food. As plants wither and people die, she aborbs them into her many mouths and nourishes herself on them. THus, before each meal Aztecs would pour one out for mother earth, and drop a few morsels on the ground out of respect and recognition of her insatiable hunger.
My experience of learning to make a mud stove at el Pedregal was as if this Aztec earth account meets that episode of I Love Lucy where the Ricardos travel to Italy and Lucy finds herself stomping grapes at a vineyard. Like Lucy, my eagerness and lack of language skills got me into some messing mixing with my feet. But there was still a poetic experience as together we mixed and stretched and molded earth, all for the sake of enabling eating.
El Pedregal is a project of the Instituto de la Naturaleza y la Sociedad de Oaxaca (INSO). INSO is a non-profit organization that aims to support concerted and independent initiatives of social welfare and ecological conservation in Oaxaca. El Pedregal is located just outside of the city of Oaxaca, and is meant to showcase sustainable agricultural practices to local farmers. After expressing an interest in the project, my friend Sebastian invited me to accompany him with others from the organization to participate in building an energy-saving mud stove in the kitchen of el Pedregal.
Most rural families cook their food over an open wood fire, which is an inefficient use of energy as much of the heat is lost and not concentrated on the cookware. This results in the consumption of more firewood, and trees are a relative scarcity in the region. A mud stove contains the wood burning fire and concentrates the heat on the cookware, as well as channels smoke through a chimney and out of the kitchen, thereby creating a healthier cooking environment.
Like lovable Lucy, through limited words, some gesticulations and lots of smiles, I was able to get my hands dirty learning how to make this remarkable stove. Here is the process:
The materials for the stove are very economical, and much of it can be found around your typical farm. The clay we used was a mixture of earth, sand, straw, donkey poop, and water, and we kicked off the day by kicking off our shoes and mixing it with our feet, Lucy-style.
That morning, many of us began as strangers, but evidently dancing in the mud is a great icebreaker. We kept adding more straw and water to the mixture until it passed two tests: a handful of mud mixture is pliable and doesn’t crack when handled, and it sticks to the wall in a nice pancake when thrown.
Once we had thrown mud to our heart’s content, we set out patting down a ~2in base layer over a moistened brick counter that had been made a few days before. We laid out the cookware that had been acquired specifically for the stove, as ultimately the stove would only accommodate this cookware, as it would be molded around it specifically. These were earthenware pots and a comal, a piece of cookware typical to Oaxaca that functions like a flat top and is ideal for making tortillas (and therefore quesadillas, empanadas, memelas, mmmmmmm). This design also accommodated a boiler that would use the heat from the smoke moving towards the chimney to heat water.
Next we laid out a pre-moistened brick skeleton that would support the mud as well as the pieces of cookware. We left space for strategically placed galvanized doors that would control the flow of smoke and heat, to be opened only when more firewood was needed. We then proceeded to coat the skeleton with a thick layer of mud mixture. It was as if we were all cooking the meal to cook all meals, preparing the preparation of all meals to come. We worked the skeleton and the mud, together creating something that would be an accomplishment of all of us in the end, with all of our 14 hands having touched nearly every corner of it.
There is something profound and quite satisfying about cooperatively creating something for nourishment with your own hands out of pretty much nothing but earth. It might be cheesy, but it reminds me of a Chief Seattle quote that was painted on the wall above a mud bath I took recently in Calistoga: “We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us.” This harkens back to the cycle described in the Aztec earth origin story, as we humans are all a part of this cycle of eating, decay, and earth. It encourages me to ponder over where we come from, and our relationship to the earth and decay. After all, what was it that scientists named the remains of our earliest discovered ancestor? “Lucy.”