Guacamole

History

The avocado had a long head start. Seeds turn up in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, and Mesoamerican peoples had domesticated the tree by about 5000 BCE ¹. Avocados were growing in Peru's Supe Valley by 3100 BCE ¹.

Spanish dictionaries let us glimpse the sauce itself. Alonso de Molina's 1571 Nahuatl-Spanish vocabulary records ahuacamolli as a sauce of avocado and dried ground chilli, according to historian Kristen Jancuk ³. By 1554 Spanish speakers already said aguacate, their best shot at the Nahuatl sound ³. The friar Bernardino de Sahagún described three kinds of avocado and listed medicinal uses for the leaves, seeds and oil, including remedies for coughs, dandruff and period pain ³.

Here the stories split. Avocados From Mexico, the industry marketing body, says the Aztecs mashed avocado with tomato, green chilli and salt, and that the Spanish who arrived in 1519 added onion, lime and coriander from Europe and renamed it guacamole ⁴. Treat that as the industry's version; the tidy before-and-after is hard to pin down in older sources. What we can say: in 1697 the English privateer William Dampier described locals in Central America beating avocado with sugar and lime juice on a plate, the first known recipe in English ¹³. Sugar. In guacamole. The past really is another country.

You may have heard āhuacatl also meant "testicle". Jancuk calls that a myth: the word was more likely a food-inspired euphemism, and Nahuatl had its own anatomical term, atetl ³.

The modern boom is a trade story. The United States banned Mexican avocado imports in 1914 over fears of seed weevils, and only began lifting the ban in 1997 once inspectors found the fruit posed no pest risk ⁵⁶. US avocado eating then climbed more than 600 per cent between 1989 and 2020 ⁶. Most of it comes from a single Mexican state, Michoacán, the only one fully cleared to export to the US ⁵.