The Best Tasting Fish
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory Project
Speaking of the coastal cuisine of Colombia] "The best tasting is the King fish and after that anchovies which are available in abundance. . . You can also harvest a sort of prawn which is two or three inches in length” and “akin to crayfish." (George Juan and Antonio De Ulloa, “A Voyage to South America,” in Pinkerton, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages, volume 14, published in 1813)
Food preferences in colonial Colombia cannot be explained without a discussion of the transformation in Old World foodways during the Colombian exchange and in the Americas where creole culture emerged from below not from above. Spanish Colonial elites influenced but did control the development of Columbia's foodways. After 1492 Native Americans, European settlers, and enslaved as well as free Africans immediately set about in the words of Historian Alfred Crosby to “transform as much of the New World as possible into the Old World.”
