Aura’s

Foods native to the Americas that nobody else had ever tasted before 1492 included not just corn, potato, tomato, and various cacti, but also chili and bell peppers; limas, pole, navy and kidney beans; pumpkin, manioc, wild rice, avocado; peanuts, pecans and cashews; vanilla, chocolate, pineapples, blueberries, and sunflowers. The Park Service has a list of plants and animals found at Grand Canyon. Copy and paste any item you wonder about into Wikipedia to check it out.

Desert Southwest
Dessert - Prickly pear and other cactus berries

Peeled, sectioned and served cool, the berries of the Prickly Pear cactus include tiny edible seeds similar to kiwi. Their native range covers much of the Americas. The Indians who saved De Vaca helped him survive on what he called “tunas” (Spanish for “fruits”) in his memoire of nine years in Terra Incognita. Barrel, Saguaro and other cactus berries supplement or supplant this dessert as available.

Other foods from around the world that nobody in the Americas had ever tasted before sailors brought them here starting in 1492 include beef, pork, chicken, wheat, white rice and brown rice, soy, barley, oats, onion, lettuce, okra, peaches and pears, watermelon, bananas, olives, and one that might be left out except that I like it sooo: dandelion (wine).

If you have any 500 year old recipes, I’d like to try them out. Seriously. Email’s good. If I use them, I’ll make you and your ancestors famous.

Italy

Beverage – Lemonade

It may seem incredible to us today with soft drinks lining whole aisles of grocery stores and whole U.S. states seemingly dedicated to growing oranges and the like, but until Columbus - the Italian sailing with Spanish backing (globalization already) – arrived in the Americas, there was no citrus, and no sugarcane. Lemonade is our salute to the “Old World.” If we were here in 1491, we wouldn’t have had lemonade, ever, even if we knew what it was, which we wouldn’t have.