Mate is woven into the very fabric of the region's culture. Pope Francis sips his mate as he arrives for his general audience at St. So how did this ancient drink go from prohibited brew to beloved South American pastime? Thank the Jesuits. The moon was so grateful, she gave the Guarani people the gift of mate. She went exploring, and was almost attacked by a yaguareté (a jaguar), but a Guarani hunter saved her. She got very curious, and one day came down to earth in the form of a young woman.
I've heard variations on this Guaraní legend of how mate came to be: The moon had been told by the sun about all the joys of the jungle that she could not see in the darkness of the night - the birds, the leaves, the flowers. "They also chewed on it to have more energy on their walks, a tradition which has disappeared." "The Guaraní people put mate in small calabashes and drank it as a cold infusion, through hollow straws," historian Lucía Gálvez recounts in her book De La Tierra Sin Mal Al Paraíso: Jesuitas Y Guaranies. (Left) A bombilla, the metal drinking straw with a strainer at one end that's used to sip yerba mate. The brew is now a common sight in health stores and specialized coffee shops in the U.S. Paraguay has a National Tereré Day ( tereré is a drink made with yerba mate, but it's drunk cold). Indeed, in 2013, mate was officially declared a "national infusion" of Argentina, where an estimated 250,000 tons of herb are consumed every year. That passion for mate (unlike the governor) is still very much alive and well today in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and southern Brazil, where it is known as chimarrão (pronounced she-ma-how). When they stop drinking it they fade away and say they cannot live." "All Spaniards, men and women, and all Indians, drink these dusts in hot water," one dismayed Jesuit priest wrote, lamenting, "And when they don't have with what to buy it, they give away their underpants and their blankets. And it was spreading like wildfire among the Spanish colonists - as far away as what is now Bolivia, Chile and Peru. It was a filthy vice, the Spanish had decided. The governor had seen the region's indigenous Guaraní people carrying this drink with them everywhere they went. In 1616, Hernando Arias de Saavedra, the governor of the Spanish province that included Buenos Aires, banned the population from drinking a green herbal drink called yerba mate. Legend has it that the moon gifted this infusion to the Guaraní people of South America.
0 kommentar(er)
