A history of… guacamole

No it isn't named after testicles, but it is an aphrodisiac!

Last December, escaping from the dank, dark English winter, I spent a week in Tenerife during which time I made a fairly sophisticated attempt to eat my body weight in guacamole made from fresh local avocados. This week I will explore the history of this delicious foodstuff, forever, it seems, the byword for spendthrift millennials.

Let me start by dispelling a myth around the name. You may find online that the word guacamole means ‘ground testicles’. The rationale for this is that the word ‘avocado’ comes from the Nahuatl word meaning ‘testicle’ and in combination with the Spanish word moler ‘to grind’ you get guacamole, or ground testicles. Sounds convincing, right? It is, however, wrong on both points. The Nahuatl word for the avocado (which is variously spelled ahuacatl, aguacatl and auacatl) comes from a proto-Nahuan word *pawata, that means, unsurprisingly, ‘avocado’. But was this originally the word for ‘testicles’ and avocados were so-named because of their similarity in appearance? No, it was the other way around. Ahuacatl became a slang word for testicles because they looked like avocados (in a similar manner to the use of the word ‘balls’). As for the mole part, that doesn’t come from the Spanish moler, rather from another Nahuatl word, mo:lli, meaning ‘sauce’. So the word guacamole means ‘avocado sauce’ which, I think we can all agree, is preferable to the alternative!

Archaeological evidence from the Tehuacan Valley (located in modern-day Mexico) proves that avocados have been eaten by humans for as long as 10,000 years. Initially harvested from wild trees, they have been purposefully cultivated for perhaps 7,000 years. Starting in central America the farming of avocados soon spread widely, with the Caral civilization in the Supe Valley in modern-day Peru growing them for more than 3,000 years. The significance of avocados to these cultures can be seen in the Mayan Haab calendar which was developed between 800 and 300 BCE. Each month had a name based upon what was going on seasonally, and the 14th month was represented by the glyph Uniw (or Uniiw) meaning ‘avocado’.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas they took an immediate delight in this flavourful fruit. Their earliest known European reference to them dates from 1519’s Suma de Geografia written by Fernandez de Enciso:

Before reaching Santa Marta is Yaharo, which lies at the foot of the snow mountains. Yaharo is a good port, with good lands and here are groves of many different sorts of edible fruits, among others is one which looks like an orange, and when it is ready for eating it turns yellowish; that which it contains is like butter and is of marvelous flavor, so good and pleasing to the palate that it is a marvelous thing.

It wasn’t long before they began to spread the trees to other colonies, with them well established in Jamaica by 1657 when A Book of the Continuation of Foreign Passages noted in its section on that island ‘Avocatas, a wholesome, pleasant fruit; in season in August, and sold for eight pence per piece’.

Now if you think that avocados are expensive today then let me put those eight pence in context. At the time an unskilled labourer would have earned between 6 and 18 pence a day, so that works out at roughly £40 (or $50USD) per fruit in today’s prices! It is worth noting though that avocados being considered an expensive, or even luxury, delicacy is very much a modern thing, as can be seen by the nickname given to the residents of Antigua Guatemala:¹

Panza Verde (green belly) is what generations of Antigüeños have called themselves. No one is quite certain of the true story, but it is said the people who remained here after the Capital was moved to Guatemala City were so poor they had to subsist on avocados. Being a Panza Verde is mentioned with great pride.

(The same is, interestingly, also true of those other luxury foods, oysters and lobsters. For generations they were sources of cheap protein for the poor, before overconsumption led to scarcity and price inflation.)

The earliest detailed description of the avocado in English dates from 1672, in William Hughes’s The American physitian.²

This is a reasonable high and well-spread tree, whose leaves are smooth, and of a pale green colour; the Fruit is of the fashion of a Fig, but very smooth on the outside, and as big in bulk as a Slipper-Pear; of a brown colour, having a stone in the middle as big as an Apricock, but round, hard and smooth; the outer paring or rinde is, as it were, a kind of a shell, almost like an Acorn-shell, but not altogether so tough; yet the middle substance (I mean between the stone and the pairing, or outer crusty rinde) is very soft and tender, almost as soft as the pulp of a Pippin nut over-roasted....

I think it to be one of the most rare and most pleasant Fruits of that Island; it nourisheth and strengtheneth the body, corroborating the vital spirits, and procuring lust exceedingly; the Pulp being taken out and macerated in some convenient thing, and eaten with a little Vinegar and Pepper or several other ways, is very delicious meat.

A number of older accounts of the fruit make comments along the lines of it ‘procuring lust exceedingly’ (a Spanish description from 1629 says that ‘it awakens greatly the venereal appetite, and increases the seed’). You could be forgiven for thinking that this is an example of that common olden-days assumption – things that look like genitals are obviously aphrodisiacs. In this case, however, they were right – it does procure lust, as this 2024 paper from the National Library of Medicine explains:

The sexual-enhancing attributes of avocados are associated with several factors. Avocados are recognized as aphrodisiacs due to their high phytonutrient content, which can boost sexual pleasure, desire, and attraction. Furthermore, avocados contain omega-3 and other fatty acids that promote mental clarity and enhance imagination abilities. In addition, avocados are rich in Vitamin E and zinc, which are crucial for sperm quality and male fertility.

There has been a lot so far about avocados, but what about guacamole? At its simplest guac is pulped avocado mixed with lime juice, herbs and spices. We can find an early reference to something like it in Phillip Miller’s 1740 book The Gardeners Dictionary:³

The Fruit of itself is very insipid; for which reason they generally eat it with the Juice of Lemons and Sugar, to give it a Piquancy. It is very nourishing, and is reckoned a great Incentive to Venery.⁴ Some People eat this Fruit with Vinegar and Pepper.

We get closer in 1866’s The Treasury of Botany; a Popular Dictionary of the Vegetable Kingdom; with which is Incorporated a Glossary of Botanical Terms:

These fruits are highly esteemed in the West Indies and tropical America, though strangers at first do not relish them. They contain a large quantity of firm pulp possessing a buttery or marrow-like taste, and are hence frequently called Vegetable Marrow or Midshipman’s Butter. It is usually eaten with spice, lime-juice, or pepper and salt.

As late as 1891 people needed to have the consumption of avocados explained to them. Fortunately Anna M. Paris, writing in The American Magazine, was on hand. In a piece entitled ‘The Avocado, or Alligator Pear’⁵ she makes the case for eating it with bread and butter, and, err, sherry:

But how is it to be eaten? … A few simple rules are so necessary for the proper enjoyment of this delicacy… In the first place, it is a rich article, and should be eaten with meals in preference to any other time, and always with bread and butter or delicate crackers… Eat it with a spoon or fork, using salt and pepper, and sometimes lime-juice is thought to be an agreeable addition. The avocádo is most frequently eaten in the above way, and when served with thin slices of bread and butter makes a delicious supplementary course for either breakfast or dinner. To try another method, pour over the pulp, just before eating, a spoonful of sherry wine; add a little sugar, a slight grating of nutmeg, if desired; serve with the invariable accompaniments of bread and butter or crackers.

It is at this time, on the 25th September 1891 to be exact, that we find the first reference to guacamole, mentioned in a piece in the Springfield Reporter:

The famous aguacate, known here as the alligator pear, is really no fruit,⁶ but a vegetable, eatable only as a salad “guacamole”

The notion that avocados were sufficiently unpleasant that they could only be consumed as guac was continued in Mary Jacques’s 1894 book Texan Ranch Life:

The portales of the fruit market were very fine and we enjoyed the prickly pears — when they had been peeled for us. One evening in the dusk we bought some chirimollas and aguacate, mistaking the latter for figs. They were anything but pleasant, but after being dressed according to Mr. Barrow’s orders, made a nice dish known as “huacamole.”

Today the global guacamole market is worth $1.5 billion dollars but somewhat astonishingly the vast majority of it is produced by the descendants of a single tree, the Hass avocado.

In 1926 the most popular variety of avocado was the Fuerte, a smooth-skinned variety that can still be purchased today but which is somewhat hard to find. The year before, a mail-carrier named Rudolph Hass making just 25 cents an hour in his day job, scrambled together the funds to buy a 1.5 acre (0.6 hectare) plot of land – persuaded to do so by an article in a magazine showing avocado trees with dollar bills hanging from their branches. He acquired some avocado seeds and hired a professional grafter, Mr Caulkins, to graft Fuerte shoots onto the saplings that grew. Then, as now, this is how varieties of avocados are maintained: shoots from existing plants are grafted onto new trees, ensuring that the mature trees are genetically identical to the original, and hence the quality of the fruit unchanged.

One of the trees that grew rejected every graft put on it. Hass was ready to chop the thing down, but Caulkins told him that it was a strong tree and that he should “just leave it alone and see what happens”. What happened was that it grew into a tree that produced fruit two years sooner than the Fuerte, and furthermore grew tall and straight, allowing for a higher planting density. And the fruit produced tasted great –before long Hass was selling them at $1 per avocado, at a time when the same sum could be expected to feed a family of four for a day.

In 1935, very unusually at the time, Hass patented his tree and signed a deal with horticulturist Harold Broker to grow and sell them. Unfortunately for Hass the patent wasn’t hugely successful – having purchased a single tree farmers would cut off the buds and graft them onto multiple rootstocks. While Hass the man was not a great success, Hass the avocado had a meteoric rise – today 80% of the world’s avocados (and 95% of those grown in the USA) are Hass. All of the trees producing them are genetically identical to the original (which died of root rot in 2002) grown from cuttings passed from tree to tree for nearly 100 years…

1. The best guacamole I have ever eaten was in a restaurant in Antigua Guatemala, prepared fresh at the table in a mortar made from volcanic rock.

2. Or to give it its full title: The American physitian, or, A treatise of the roots, plants, trees, shrubs, fruit, herbs, &c. growing in the English plantations in America describing the place, time, names, kindes, temperature, vertues and uses of them, either for diet, physick, &c. : whereunto is added a discourse of the cacao-nut-tree and the use of its fruit, with all the ways of making of chocolate … Which is a bit of a mouthful.

3. Or to give it its full title: The Gardeners Dictionary; containing the methods of cultivating the kitchen, fruit and flower garden, as also, the physick garden, wilderness, conservatory and vineyard; interspersed with the history of the plants, the name of the species in Latin and English; together with accounts of the nature and use of barometers, thermometers, and hygrometers, and of the origin of meteors, etc. Which is a bit of a mouthful.

4. More lust!

5. Avocados were often called ‘alligator pears’ in part due to confusion as to their actual name and in part due to their skin resembling that of crocodilia.

6. It is a fruit.