Food is always an important part of all traditional festivals in Ecuador. In November, the memory of the Day of the Dead becomes the special date to taste the famous colada morada, which is accompanied with buses of bread.
The base of the colada morada is corn, a plant cultivated in America and the basis of the diet of many of the pre-Hispanic peoples, which takes on special relevance for the remembrance of the dead on November 2 in Ecuador. What is different and special is that purple corn flour is used to prepare the colada morada, the drink that is traditionally linked to the homage to the deceased. The color purple is associated with mourning.
The scientific name of Purple corn is Zea mays L. which belongs to the Poaceae family. According to scholars in Latin America there are about 220 types of corn and the purple type derives from the same ancestral line called “Kculli” that has been cultivated since before the Inca empire.
Purple corn, whose color is given by the amount of anthocyanins is a pigment that also gives it antioxidant properties similar to those of blueberries and grapes, it is more common to see it in regions of Central and South America, mainly in countries like Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico. In these regions it is known as black corn or purple corn.
Tribute to the deceased
In most indigenous communities, its inhabitants go to cemeteries to visit their dead and are offered many of the foods that were preferred by the deceased when they were alive. Many of these visitors eat in the same place as the graves, a ritual that is carried out with the belief that death is only a passage to another life.
The colada morada had its appearance in pre-Hispanic times by the ancestral peoples who saw death as a phase of the existence of the human being when transcending to another world or towards a new life.
Purple colada recipe
According to chef Miguel Burneo, a research professor at the School of Gastronomy of the University of the Americas (UDLA), he explained that in addition to the worldview that the drink contains, it also allows the integration of ingredients from three regions of Ecuador such as mortiño. from the páramo, the pineapple from the coast and the ishpingo from the Amazon.
About the bread buses, the cultural manager Carlos Sandoval explained in an article published in The Gazette that the bus used to be made with squash, which after cooking was shaped into a tortilla. With wheat, it arrived in America “began to replicate the tradition of raising the wrapped dead, (mummies) in the form of bread.” (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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