Archive · 2018 · From the print edition of Saturday 10 February 2018, Vol. 25, No. 7,800
CultureWhy Talas tortillas are yellow
Semiz tortillerías could not find white maize when they opened. They found Khrushchev’s instead.
TALAS — Visitors from Mexico notice it at once: the tortillas sold in Semiz are yellow. Not pale or golden, but the deep yellow of the maize that has grown in the Talas valley since the 1950s.
When the first tortillería opened in Semiz in 2000, its owners looked for the white maize used for tortillas at home and could not find any. What the valley grows is yellow dent field maize, planted since Nikita Khrushchev’s maize drive of 1955 to feed the cattle of the Virgin Lands sovkhozes. A breeding station opened near Kara-Bulak in 1956, and by 1960 maize covered more of the new land than wheat. Today most of the crop is milled for compound feed and fed in the export feedlots west of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the tortillerías.
“We bought feed corn from a farmer and nixtamalized it in a bathtub,” said Rosario Beltrán, whose family runs one of the dozen or so tortillerías now in the district. “It tasted like home, only yellow. After a year nobody wanted white.”
The color has stuck. “Talas tortillas” are sold in the Saturday market alongside jügörü, the boiled maize cobs sold on every street corner in summer, and beef tacos from the export plants have become a staple of student life in the city.